Players of the massively multiplayer online game World of Warcraft, get ready to build up your garrisons.
The new personal towns, which are a mix of player housing, quest hub, and crafting center, will launch with the Warlords of Draenor expansion pack Nov. 13. But they’re not just a new toy to play with or another grind to suffer through, WOW lead game designer Cory Stockton said in an interview with GamesBeat.
Blizzard Entertainment expects Garrisons to change nearly every part of the game for players: leveling up characters, crafting items with professions, how you gather a large group to tackle a dungeon boss, and more.
“People will come to it for a large feature they heard was cool,” he said. “But week after week, you’ll continue to find new things that will introduce you to new gameplay.”
Players may set up a garrison almost immediately at the start of Warlords.
“Within the first hour, you’ve created your garrison and are doing quests,” Stockton said.
Above: You can choose which buildings to put in your garrison, making it something like a personal town. You can build a maximum of two large structures, two medium and three small. Each offers different benefits.
Horde players create their personal towns in Frostfire Ridge, with Alliance players set for Shadowmoon Valley. All players locate their garrisons in the same place in the game world, but when you enter, you see only your own town (unless you’ve been invited to visit someone else’s). Each character you play has its own garrison, and they develop with you as you level up.
In addition to the main garrison, every Draenor region/zone has outposts. You choose from one of two buildings to put in each zone (each of which offers specific bonuses). You can change your selection once you reach level 100 if you’ve completed the zone’s quests.
“It should feel like an essential piece of your gameplay, both at leveling and max level,” he said. For example, “the biggest change to professions that I can remember is here, in the garrison.”
The last page of this story has all the bonuses players get for all garrison buildings. Stockton said these are the five reasons why you should care:
Above: During the Warlords of Draenor beta test, players could instantly increase the level of their garrison and its buildings by talking with Garrison Ford, a beta-only NPC. “You want a garrison,” he’d say. “I know.”
You get the benefits of a third profession without having to learn it
“We have talked for a number of years about having people have more than two professions,” Stockton said. Currently, Warcraft players must choose two main professions — such as tailoring, mining, or enchanting – and have access to all the minor professions: fishing, cooking, first aid, and archaeology.
Players have complained over the years that some other MMO games permit them two primary crafting professions plus a gathering profession (such as collecting herbs or mining for ore) that would support those roles. In Warcraft, mining and herbalism are primary professions.
The garrison offers Blizzard’s compromise: Garrisons have three small-sized plots for profession buildings, and each has its own structure. If the player has that profession, it offers them some perks (more on that in a bit).
But even if they don’t, it’ll still offer them the capability to make that gear or those items. Take a nonengineer who chooses to construct the engineering building, for example.
Above: This is the Engineering Works, the small Horde professions building for engineering. It can be built on a small plot in your garrison.
“The non-crafter now can choose to build the engineering building on that third slot and would be granted access to almost everything that engineering does, but not the very best recipes,” Stockton said. You’ll provide the parts, and the NPC running the building will make you the item. So you might be able to craft some of the toys the engineering profession is famous for in Warcraft, but they might not last as long or have top-shelf statistics, he said.
Consumable supplies that characters use in game will continue to only be crafted by players whose characters actually hold that profession, Stockton said.
In addition, the mine and the herb garden are available in all garrisons after you open them up with a quest, and these do not require a profession to harvest. They will offer your character a small amount of ore and herbs daily — it’s not as much as you would get if you had mining or herbalism as a primary profession, but it’s a significant amount.
For example, “with minimal work, you’d be able to do about a third of what a typical miner could do in the same time,” Stockton said. It’s probably not enough for you to easily raise your skill in a crafting profession, but it’s enough to handle the daily quests that most crafting professions have (for those familiar with the current expansion, it’s similar to how the Halfhill Farm area operates.)
Above: You can invite group members to come visit your garrison. Horde players have their garrisons in Frostfire Ridge, like this one.
You can offer garrison benefits, including portals, to your groups
The truly high-level perks of your garrison — portals that let you instantly teleport all over the Draenor game world, for example — require some serious farming of materials or long-term quest lines. So it makes sense that, at least to start, everyone won’t have everything in their personal towns.
The good news is that not everyone in your group or your guild of players needs to build up these capabilities right away. As a small or large group leader, you can invite everyone in the group to your garrison, and they can travel there by right-clicking their portrait and choosing the option from the drop-down menu.
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.
Above: The barracks building in your Warcraft garrison offers you perks including a bodyguard that will protect you while doing quests. It can be built on a large plot.
Warcraft garrison buildings: a brief summary
This information is from the current beta-server build. Those buildings that have two names are identified differently for Horde and Alliance players. Horde names are listed first.*
Large buildings (five available, you may build two)
Barracks: At level 1, this unlocks patrol missions for your followers, which give better-than-average rewards. At level 2, you to take a follower out into the outdoor game world to act as your bodyguard. (You can do favors for Followers you use in this way, eventually prompting them to offer you perks, such as immediate access to a mailbox.) At level 3, you to have more followers at once, and gives you access to racial guards and banners in your garrison.
Spirit Lodge/Mage Tower: At level 1, this allows you to collect the bajillion ogre mage stones (Stockton estimates it’s 1,500 but isn’t sure) it takes to earn one portal you can use to transport your character to another place in the game world. At level 2, you can open a second portal; at level 3, a third.
Goblin Workshop/Gnomish Gearworks: At level 1, it creates an invention a day. At level 2, it adds five new (better) plans from which the item is selected. At level 3, it creates a siege vehicle once a day that you can use in the game world.
Stables: At level 1, it enables the capture and training of special mounts. At level 2, it allows you to remain on your mount when you click on items in the game world. At level 3, it increases your riding speed while mounted by 20 percent.
War Mill/Dwarven Bunker: At level 1, it increases the chance you’ll get a rare or epic-quality random Bonus Upgrade to a quest reward — a new feature in Warlords of Draenor — by 20 percent. It also enables you to collect armor scraps, which can be used to transform (transmogrify) the armor your character is wearing. Level 2 opens up the ability to make follower weapons and armor, and to unlock more visual transformations for your own armor. Level 3 gives you a bonus roll for gear in large-group raid dungeons at no cost once a week.
Above: The Warcraft Gladiator’s Sanctum is a medium-sized garrison building that offers bonuses that might be appealing to those who enjoy player-versus-player combat.
Medium buildings (five available, and you may build two)
Frostwall Tavern/Lunarfall Inn: At level 1, it offers a daily quest in a dungeon with “generous rewards.” At level 2, it grants you random followers each week. At level 3, it unlocks treasure hunter missions for your followers, which award high amounts of gold.
Gladiator’s Sanctum: At level 1, it increases the speed by which you recover from combat outdoors and allows the collection of broken bones from defeated players in player-versus-player combat for use as currency. At level 2, gives you the ability to fall from heights unharmed and breathe underwater, as well as opening up specific PvP quests. At level 3, it reduces the damage you take outdoors by half when you’re below 35 percent health, and allows access to the Highmaul Coliseum gladiator tournament.
Barn: At level 1, allows you to capture game animals for leather and fur used in leatherworking and tailoring profession recipes. At level 2, allows you to capture animals that give rare meats to create powerful food (which increases character stats). Level 3 allows you to capture elite beasts that provide savage blood, a crafting material for high-level armor and weapons.
Lumber Mill: At level 1, allows you to mark small trees in the game world to be turned into garrison supplies, which are used for crafting, creating buildings and running some follower missions. Level 2 allows you to mark medium trees for more supplies. Level 3 allows you to mark large trees.
Trading Post: At level 1, a merchant shows up daily selling trade goods, and you can trade crafting reagents for garrison resources. At level 2, it allows you to trade with different vendors and put an auctioneer in your garrison. At level 3, it increases the reputation you gain with NPC groups in Draenor by doing quests or killing creatures by 20 percent.
Above: The Enchanter’s Study offers players the ability to disenchant items into the materials it takes to add enchanting enhancements to their gear, even if their character doesn’t know the profession. It’s a small-plot garrison building.
Small buildings (10 available, and you may build three)
Almost all small buildings are profession buildings, and offer the same bonuses. At level 1, you may create items from that profession and place work orders for profession supplies by trading in raw materials. At level 2, you can place a follower that is proficient in that profession in the building, giving a related bonus, and create three work orders instead of one. At level 3, you can create five work orders at once.
These bonuses apply to the following buildings: the Engineering Works (engineering); Gem Boutique (jewelcrafting); Alchemy Lab (alchemy); Scribe’s Quarters (inscription); Tailoring Emporium (tailoring); The Forge (blacksmithing); The Tannery (leatherworking).
The three with different bonuses are:
At level 1, the Enchanter’s Study (enchanting profession building) gives players the ability to disenchant items into materials that can be used to put enchanting enhancements on other gear, even if they don’t have enchanting as a skill. (Other bonuses remain the same.)
The Salvage Yard isn’t a profession building. It offers players the ability to recover salvage from follower missions at level 1; to recover follower items in the salvage at level 2; and greatly increases the chance of getting salvage at level 3, also adding the chance to get player character items.
The Storehouse: Level 1 gives you bank access inside your garrison and increases the work orders your other buildings do by 1 a day. Level 2 gives you access to the bank run by the guild of players you belong to, if any. Level 3 gives you access to large-scale Void Storage (Warcraft’s “deep freeze” for items you don’t need for a long time) and transmogrification from within your garrison, and increases work orders in all your buildings by 2.
*Because Horde.