Because every player has a special hearthstone that enables them to teleport to their own garrison, and yours is in the same place, this makes it easy for players to pop into your town of one and take advantage of what you’ve built there.
Maybe they need to craft an item and don’t have that profession building in their own garrison. Maybe they need to catch a particular type of fish, and their garrison isn’t set up for them to catch all of the varieties in the little pool that’s located there.
Maybe you’re in a large group, about to tackle a raid boss, and want to give everyone the ability to teleport to a point nearby. Your garrison offers the key.
“We’ve tried to do that with everything in the garrison,” Stockton said. “You could bring your whole guild to the garrison and all go to the raid zone right away. We’ve tried to do that as much as possible.”
Above: The Spirit Lodge is the large Horde garrison building where you can create portals to other places. (The Alliance equivalent is the Mage Tower.) Creating the building opens up the quests that allow you to earn the portals you want.
You can get large-group raid boss-quality gear and character experience
Speaking of raids, the garrison will give you the access to some items of the quality that drops from those large group dungeons — without having to visit them.
As you build your garrison and quest in the rest of the game world, you’ll recruit followers: nonplayer characters that come to live in your garrison and help you out. Some can occupy the buildings you construct, adding capabilities to your town. Those you don’t station in buildings can run missions of their own.
These missions offer experience points to level up those followers, gold, garrison building materials, some unique toys (including one that lets you pull out a Hearthstone card-game board inside in World of Warcraft), sometimes tokens that will increase your standing with other NPC groups in Draenor, and in very limited amounts, extra experience points for your own characters as they level.
Above: This follower mission takes three followers to complete. With the followers I’ve chosen, I have a 60 percent chance it will be successful, based on the abilities of the enemies and of my followers. My followers will receive experience points and I will receive an item equivalent to one from a max-level dungeon if it’s successful.
Stockton said missions that offer player character experience will be rare, so they’re mostly bonus experience and not a primary way to level up your character. But “it works great for alts,” he said, referring to those additional characters you play after the first.
Follower missions can also give you items that are specifically designed to benefit your class — Warlock, Warrior, Druid, etc. — and specialization: tank, different types of damage, heals, and so on. The gear you receive from follower quests builds in power as you level your own character from 90 to 100 in Warlords.
When you reach the cap, your garrison followers who are at level 100 with you are able to complete missions that will bring your character gear equal to that which drops in 25-player raid dungeons (specifically, the type of items you’d see if you used the game’s Raid Finder tool).
“Every time you log in, you’ll get a pretty wide variety of missions,” Stockton said. “Every time you go to the mission structure, it should feel very random and very different. There’s a ton. And the missions can randomize different aspects.”
Above: The key to creating your mini-city: the Architect Table, inside your garrison’s Town Hall, allows you to decide where to put your buildings and read up on the hordes of perks they provide.
You can get the best recipes for your main professions
Every profession building has three levels. You find or quest for the plans to build the building and upgrade it to higher levels, and each time you do, it adds to the bonuses that building can give you and the gear or materials it can produce.
At the second level, buildings offer a unique perk. The tailoring building gives players the ability to buy battle standards, for example, which can add damage or heal you.
You must construct Tier 3 buildings to craft the best items from each profession, and they offer additional perks. Getting tier 3 plans requires some questing, but the building plans, once you learn them, can be used by any of your characters.
“Those are pretty hard achievements,” Stockton said, warning that players will find it takes a minimum of two weeks to grind the tier 3 plans for a particular building. You can earn 23 different blueprints.
Granted, professions aren’t as important to WOW’s hardcore raiding players in Draenor, since they don’t offer the special bonuses to character statistics they do now. In the Mists of Pandaria expansion, a jewelcrafter can put two gems in their gear that have more character-boosting statistics than non-jewelcrafters; an alchemist receives extra stats from flasks they use themselves; and so on. Those bonuses are gone in Draenor.
But the high-end, raid-quality gear that most professions can craft today will still be there in Draenor, and will only be available to players with fully upgraded garrison buildings.
All professions have a one-day wait in real time to make certain items or materials, Stockton said, much as they do now. In Draenor, if your garrison has the matching profession building, you’ll get a second chance to make that item each day.
Above: Lillian Voss, a familiar character to Warcraft’s Horde faction players, gives a quest inside the Frostwall Tavern medium-sized garrison building. This quest rewards a toy that lets you plant a custom warning sign on the ground where other players can see it.
Dailies, dailies, dailies: Once-a-day and other quests will start at the garrison
Your garrison will be the headquarters for much of your daily quest efforts in Draenor at max level. The garrisons themselves have quests that send you out into the world in different zones. (If you’ve done the Golden Lotus daily quests in the Mists of Pandaria expansion, you’ll recognize the feel right away.)
If you’re working on getting your character from level 90 to 100, the command/bounty boards — the quest bulletin boards that send you to the proper zone — are now located in the garrison.
The new legendary quest line for Warlords of Draenor, which eventually rewards you with a legendary-quality ring, starts in your garrison.
Quests upgrade some of your buildings, and daily quests from the buildings themselves reward you with materials or other goodies.
The Menagerie building for pet battles has a daily quest to defeat a rotating cast of pet trainers, for example. It awards a new type of currency you use to buy new pet-leveling stones or other rewards.
Like the Fishing Shack, the herb garden, and the mine, the Menagerie comes with your garrison and does not count against the plots you can build on.
See the next page for a quick summary of what garrison buildings can do for you.