WoD Garrison and Profession Guide
WoD Garrisons and Profession Production Overview
The purpose of this guide will be to try to give a full analysis of the Garrisons in WoD focusing on the impacts that they will have on your professions, building choices, and the followers and mission system. I chose to do this analysis after a personal over-appreciation of the Sunsong Ranch/Nomi Bell and the few profession daily cooldowns that existed in MoP turned me into a ravenous tradeskill-related-production altoholic. Professions in MoP were really more about their respective combat bonuses than they were the actual production of the profession itself, moreso for the gear creation professions than the always-relevant JCs/Enchanters. Daily profession cooldowns in MoP were not present in every profession at launch and what was there had some strong variation in market value. More were added over time, though, with the final barrage in 5.4 being gathered around the theme of “powerful final products gated heavily by time.” The WoD iteration on this theme is further amplified by completely removing all combat related buffs to professions and dramatically increasing both the potential value of their products and the time-gating.
Important Random Notes
- Before going further I think it’s important to highlight some of the thematic major changes with these systems:
- Enchants and gems will be far less emphasized in WoD than they are today – the presence of gem slots will be rare and usually only via a “warforged”-esque random bonus and enchants are now focused only on a few slots. Other profession equivalents (shoulder inscriptions/leg armors) have all been removed.
- Crafted gear now has the potential to be upgraded to raid-level ilevels and is available for all slots across all professions for all slots. The catch is that you can only equip 3 pieces of “Draenor Crafted” no matter what their upgrade levels or source profession are. The affluent or driven min-maxers will most likely choose 3 pieces as both their first 3 pieces and their last 3 pieces of Normal gear as we progress start to fill out our Heroic gear sets.
- The stats on this crafted gear is random but can be re-rolled via a consumable item until they match your preferred stats, further increasing their cost/value potential. I do not know if this also includes any potential for the presence of tertiary stats or gem slots.
- Anyone will be able to select Profession oriented garrison buildings of any type to gain access to certain recipes and functions but the most significant products (ie the items that upgrade gear, top level enchants/gems/flasks) are only producible by a player holding the profession. This is good for the casual player and is basically a non-change for most raiders who would die before being caught with green gems etc. Players will be required to select profession buildings that match their professions at least at the start as it’s the only way to gain the related recipes.
- 100% of the final products made by professions with the exception of engineering helms (only equip-able by engineers but count against the 3 pieces limit) are sellable so in this regard you will not be required to participate in the garrison system if you don’t want to. There is a strong possibility, though, that a portion of the legendary quest line will be gated through garrison missions.
Benefits
Using the Garrison system is pretty fun from a game-play perspective on its own, particularly if you enjoy similar “sim” type activities. Beyond that, though, the highest level Garrison missions can yield raid gear of the tier that you are “commonly” interacting with, ilevel 645 gear tokens (pre-raid ilevel that’s great for alts that you do not actively play but have a functioning garrison with), and potentially Legendary Quest Line items. Other rewards include player experience, honor/conquest, toys etc. Specific building choices will also give you combat bonuses in the open world in the form of extra action button abilities.
Professions
So now that you no longer need to feel shackled to a particular profession to gain specific combat bonuses or effects – it might be worth considering a new one! This includes the previously-scoffed-upon gathering professions which might suddenly be an appealing option. Below is a high level overview of what each profession can produce that their related garrison building cannot. All professions now have daily cooldowns which can be produced both through the player’s profession and also from profession related garrison buildings at a higher cost. These daily cooldowns are used in all the most valuable products and will cause time to be a significant factor in production. The crafted equipment starts at ilevel 630 and can be upgraded twice to a maximum of ilevel 665 (655 for weapons for some reason). To put this in prospective, Highmaul gear is 655/670/685 and Blackrock Foundary Gear is 665/680/695.
The table below indicates which materials are gated via these BOP items and can only be made via a player with the profession
No code has to be inserted here.
Each profession will have a daily cooldown that can be used to produce specific BOP materials that will ultimately gate your creation of the most powerful products. An associated garrison building can basically do the same thing with a work order that will use similar materials and produce the same product. Between these two sources there is a maximum that can be produced by any 1 character.
As an example, a max level jewelcrafter can produce 10 Taladite Crystals each day with their daily cooldown and their Garrison JC building will produce 1 (or more with a follower helping) every 4 hours so long as they’ve got work orders queued up. A taladite crystal is used for each gem they cut and many crystals are used to create a ring or neck piece or related upgrade item.
Garrisons
Almost immediately in the first levelling zone (Frostfire Ridge) you will be given a phased Garrison space just like Sunsong Ranch that you can develop through the expansion. The Garrison features two major mechanics:
- Choosing buildings that you wish to build and level in limited spaces
- Collecting/levelling/gearing followers that are sent on missions for you.
The only requirements to interact with these are Time and Garrison Resources which is a new and very obviously named currency. Time is a huge factor in Garrisons and almost everything has an active time duration that must elapse before being complete. This happens whether or not you’re online and feels very similar to mobile games. In general, a fully upgrade garrison can be interacted with at least once every 3 days obtain the majority of benefits but complete benefits will require daily interaction just like the Sunsong Ranch.
Garrison Resources
Garrison Resources themselves represent an additional form of time gating and are used for sending followers on missions and building/upgrading garrison buildings. By default your garrison will produce 144 of them a day (1 for every 10 minutes) and the Garrison Cache which stores them can hold up to 500. They can be additionally gathered from a few other sources:
- One-time events, rare mobs, and chests in Draenor similar to the Timeless Isle
- Increased base production from the Lumber Mill and Lumber Mill Work Orders (basically a new gathering profession for Garrison Resources)
- Missions that reward them instead of costing them
The vast majority of your Garrison Resources will be used in building development which can be gated if you spend them on missions too heavily at the start. Once building are fully developed, missions will continue to be a recurring resource drain and excess resources can be converted to gold, trade skill materials via a Trading Post building, or items that can be used to improve your results in Garrison Invasion activities similar to the items that could be purchased with Greater Charms of Good Fortune from the Troves of the Thunder King. Without Garrison Resource income from these other sources and spending 0 on missions it will take 74 days (54 days with a lumber mill) to gather the resources needed to fully build and upgrade all buildings the first time. Buildings can also be demolished and different buildings can be built and subsequently upgraded.
This is primarily why I’ve decided to do some upfront planning in this guide as opposed to just winging it.
Buildings
Garrisons have a set number of plots of 3 sizes on which you can build from a selection of buildings as well as some fixed buildings that all garrisons receive. Your building selections will be the most defining characteristic of your garrison. You can find full guides which go into detail about all building choices and for individuals chasing certain in-game goals such as mounts or achievements you will very likely need to have different building configurations across characters on your account or “complete” the attainable items for a specific building, demolish it, and then build the next building. An example of this is the Stables which provides several mount related effects (faster speeds, interacting with objects while mounted etc) but also provides quests to obtain new mounts. After you have those mounts you can move on to the next building if you aren’t attached to the other perks.
Since the focus on this guide is on the mechanics of play that will maximize your professions as well as “Followers and Missions” game I wanted to highlight the buildings that I view as “required” to maximize those results. There are no other buildings which directly impact your ability to produce results on either front:
No code has to be inserted here.
You will also have a Garrison Outpost in other zones that will feature a similar building choice. When you make these choices you are given an overview of the impact, but there’s not great data yet available about their true effect. As an example, the Gorgorond outpost is between an outpost Lumber Mill that functions differently than the primary building and a Sparring Arena. The Lumber Mill description only lists that you’ll be able to collect Garrison Resources from Gorgorond Vines and the Sparring Arena description mentions new types of missions being available. Those missions are “Training” missions, of which there are only a tiny number currently. The impact is small but I’d always choose the Sparring Arena.
Followers
Followers are collected in a number of different ways. They can be gained from quests, finding them in the open world, missions, as well as recruiting them at the Inn building (Medium). You can collect an infinite number of followers but by default only 20 can be “active” at any given time, 25 with the Barracks building (Large). Inactive followers can be activated with gold, much like putting gear into void storage. Followers have a number of different parameters that determine their effectiveness at tasks. Within your Garrison followers will ultimately fall into one of two roles: Profession Booster or Mission Completer. Before digging into these, though, first a little bit of information about how followers develop.
Follower Stats
Levels from 90-100: Followers gain experience from missions and level up just like a player doing quests. Level differences between a follower and a mission increases the % chance to attain the mission prize, but mission prizes below level 100 are pretty mundane. Experience gains at level 100 contribute to follower rarity increases which are discussed below. It has no benefit after a follower is max level and rarity.
Abilities: Each follower has two ability slots which can be used to directly counter the abilities of the enemies they will meet on missions. There are hundreds of abilities which are mostly flavored to the spec/class of the follower but they all boil down to the following 9 counters: Danger Zones, Deadly Minions, Group Damage, Magic Debuff, Massive Strike, Minion Swarms, Powerful Spell, Timed Battle, Wild Aggression. As an example, a shaman follower might have “Bloodlust” and a mage follower might have “Time Warp” but they both counter “Timed Battle” enemies. Having a follower on a mission that provides a correct counter increases the % chance to attain the mission prize. Counters do not stack (so sending two “Timed Battle” followers into a mission with “Timed Battle” and “Powerful Spell” doesn’t provide two increases. Getting your pool of followers to have the right mix of abilities to allow you to typically respond to the most important missions with the best mission prize chances is very important.
Traits: Each follower has three trait slots which have a wide variety of effects, some of which impact mission success in a variety of ways, some of which impact reward gains (more experience, more resources), and some of which impact other factors such as mission length or profession gains when assigned to work in a building. Trait mission success additions provide less value than abilities, but every little bit counts. As a result, getting your pool of followers to have the right mix of traits that allow you to typically respond to the most important missions with the best mission prize chances is ideal. Focusing only on the “increases mission success” traits there are a few different types:
- Race “lover” traits which provide a success increase when one of the other mission members is of a certain race. Obviously this has no effect on solo missions but is very important for team missions because we have absolute control over party composition. There is only a “lover” trait for the 11 playable races but there are followers which are not playable races (like robots or ethereals etc). It will be possible to have followers of races from the Alliance but due to the mechanics of gathering followers from missions at first, your initial set will be very Horde centric.
- Terrain or Monster “mechanic” traits which provide a success increase for each correct combination. Each mission has either a terrain mechanic (like snow, swamp, forest) or a monster mechanic (orcs, ogres, furies etc). There are 20 total mission “mechanics”
- Other mission condition traits which provides a success increase based on the nature of the mission (number of teammates, duration of mission etc). The most critical of these are ones which provide their increase when a mission’s duration is over a certain amount because ALL of the highest rewarding missions will fall into this category.
Rarity: Uncommon, Rare, or Epic. Determines when final Traits and Abilities become visible. All followers will level up their rarity to epic as they gain experience after they achieve level 100, ultimately revealing their final ability/trait mix. The benefit to having higher rarity followers at lower levels is that they’ll more likely be a better fit for more missions as you level them and you’ll also be able to determine whether or not they’re worth keeping in your final roster sooner rather than later. Don’t be blinded by rarity – you should ignore an epic level 90 follower that has a bad ability and trait combinations just like one you levelled yourself unless you have tons of excess resources to throw them at missions.
Item Level: Just like players, followers can improve their output via ilevel after they reach level 100. Additional ilevels above the required level for a mission will contribute to increasing the success chance. Follower gear is obtained from the War Mill (Large) and Salvage Yard (Small) buildings primarily but some is also available from default mission rewards. This gear comes in two forms with uncommon/rare/epic versions for both a weapon and armor slot. A complete piece of gear will upgrade the follower’s ilevel to a specific threshold based on the quality and upgrade pieces will add small increments based on the quality. As a result you will need to be choosey about how you gear a follower with these limited resources.
Follower Roles
Profession Booster
Some buildings have the ability to have a follower assigned to them to help them produce more and/or add new functionality. This feature is only available once they are upgraded to level 2. The most common version of this is in the form of a follower with a specific profession trait being assigned to your two small profession buildings as well as the fixed Mine and Herb Garden as well as a Barn (Medium) if you have one. The other version is the Barracks which will allow you to assign special followers with the “Bodyguard” trait that will allow them to join you in the open world to fight and provide unique benefits. There are a finite number of Bodyguard followers. If you develop your Garrison as I’ve described above you will need to devote 5 total followers (6 if choosing to keep a bodyguard active) to your buildings as a result.
These building assigned followers cannot bet sent on missions without being taken out of the assignment and do not require ilevel or levels to produce their maximum output. Additional followers with the same profession trait or for profession traits that you do not have open building slots for are basically “wasted” traits from a mission success % standpoint. This is the first instance of a “less than optimal” follower and I would not recommend developing these followers too much unless you have no other options and are well below the active follower threshold, and have lots of excess resources. On the flipside of this, though, your first priority after getting each impacted building to level 2 will be filling the Profession Booster needed and forgetting about them. Blizzard did a fine job with presenting guaranteed access to most profession boosts needed at a very early level, though, and if your experience is anything like mine you’ll find that far more of your followers than you would otherwise prefer will pick up random Profession traits.
The table below shows you where each of the guaranteed profession followers can be gained so you can appropriately adjust your levelling strategy if they happen to be in different zones:
No code has to be inserted here.
The only really challenging issue presented by this is the Mining profession which is extremely helpful and also one of the first buildings that you can actually assign a follower to. Due to his location in Nagrand quests, Lantresor can only be gathered once you are level 98. Depending on your levelling strategy, particularly on alts, this might mean that your first Inn-based follower selection is a miner. Inscription will be the next-most impacted since Spires of Arak is a level 96 zone and you will be able to upgrade your small buildings at level 94. Skinning isn’t quite so much an issue as the second Medium buildings become upgradable at level 96 and you won’t be able to use the Barn to its full effect until you can kill the appropriately sized monsters in Nagrand (which will vary based on class/skill/gear). Everything else should be accessible as soon as it’s needed assuming you moved to the zone as soon as it was available.
Mission Completers
Our remaining 19 or 20 followers (again assuming a Barracks) become our mission completion team. As we discussed above we want this team to be successful to assist us with completing the highest level missions to assist with gaining gear, even potentially mythic level raid gear and legendary quest items for our mains. It’s also helpful as to use this to gear our alts that we are not actively developing. Our ideal Mission Completion team is max level/rarity, is equipped with the best possible gear, has a breakout of abilities that will statistically allow us to respond to any mission counters to give the best increase in success % chance, and has a breakout of traits that will most strongly increase our success % chance. Determining what this “Dream Team” looks like required some statistical analysis that I completed with some much needed data gathering assistance from Kull (thanks, boss!). Before diving into the “Dream Team” though, I wanted to look at a specific member of our Mission Completion Team: The Scavenger.
The Scavenger
Some missions will reward Garrison Resources instead of costing them and taking advantage of these opportunities can be a great way to increase our available Resources, particularly for alts that we’re not actively playing to gain additional resources via other methods. One specific follower trait that we’ll want to make sure we have a copy of fairly early on in our Garrison development is “Scavenging” which increases the amount of resources gained as a reward. This means that it will likely be our 1st or 2nd Inn-Headhunting selection depending on whether or not we value the ore from the Garrison Mine that I discussed above and whether or not we gained one randomly in our basic handful of followers. Like profession traits, this doesn’t help with success chance and is otherwise wasted except when Resources are a reward. I don’t believe that this stacks for multi-follower missions but I could be wrong there. Only plan on having 1 or 2 active scavengers depending on the frequency of these missions. This follower should be the most aggressively levelled/geared to always make sure they can complete missions successfully even when their abilities/traits are otherwise not a good fit. There are 20 reward missions total and of those only 6 are level 100 reward missions. Of those, 2 are ilevel 600, 2 are ilevel 615, and 2 are ilevel 630 so the majority of the missions will be easily handled by a well geared scavenger. The top level reward missions are 3 player missions so the ability mix of the scavenger is not so important. The top occurring counters for these missions, though, are Timed Battle (3), Massive Strike (3), Danger Zones (2), and Group Damage (2). Only Deadly Minions is not present at all in these missions so having 1 or 2 of these “big 4” on your scavenger and then something other than Deadly Minions is optimal. I don’t believe there are any followers which start with this trait as a default currently.
The Dream Team - Abilities
The rest of my mission analysis focuses on only the top level missions (level 100, ilevel greater than 600) because the rewards for lower level missions are rarely compelling and once a set of appropriately levelled/geared followers are available we can always choose to just overpower any low level missions that have rewards that we’re really excited about but may not have the perfect counters for. Part of developing a dream team will be making choices about which followers to develop for the long term and choosing to replace followers that don’t fit that mold once they’ve shown their final abilities/traits and before we’ve started to gear them. Once our basic needs are met from a profession/scavenging, we’ll be using our weekly Inn cooldown for follower recruitment based on either missing abilities from our lineup or based on the selection of a single “optimal” trait in the hopes that the remaining traits and abilities coalesce into a “perfect” follower. Looking at the top level mission counters, we see the occurrences ranked like this:
No code has to be inserted here.
Our dream team then needs to have an approximate ability breakout that would look like the table below for a team of 16 followers. I chose 16 because this leaves space for 6 profession slots, 1 or 2 scavengers, and remaining slots for levelling new followers for the potential of being more perfect than existing team members.
No code has to be inserted here.
Dream Team – Traits
As mentioned above, Traits are not as important as Abilities in terms of their impact on mission success and since there are 3 slots and a huge variety of options you’re very likely to end up with garbage in at least 1 slot. Your initial dream team that you start gearing will likely have several members who are sub-standard in the trait department. Refining that team over time will very likely be in the realm of gambling on traits by headhunting for them specifically and then seeing how the rest of the abilities/traits turned out.
High Stamina
One specific trait stands out amongst the options for the top level missions though, as being universally applicable: High Stamina which increases success chance on missions longer than 7 hours. Currently all top level missions meet this criteria so it’s will likely be something that you’ll want to start out with as an Inn selection for a shot at a “perfect” follower.
Lovers
The next best success increaser is the “lover” traits which you have full control over from a mission composition perspective. In an absolutely ideal state, all of your followers are of a single race and all of them are lovers of that same race (3rd Reich anyone?). The individuals won’t gain this benefit on solo missions, but any group missions would get several stacks of this buff. This is most likely impossible to obtain but given enough time and inn cooldowns it certainly could be attempted. I’m unaware if it’s possible for a follower to be a lover of two different races but you could theoretically take advantage of that on 3 follower missions.
Haters (Mechanics)
Finally are the “mechanic” based traits. These are less optimal by definition because there are so many possibilities (20) and only 1 per mission. As always, something is better than nothing so there are worse options. Looking again at our top level missions we find that the most common mechanics are found in the table below. These are ranked solely on their occurrence within top level missions as any lower level missions can be overpowered with levels or gear if success was required for any reason. I’m unaware if it’s possible for a follower to have multiple mechanics traits but since only 1 can be used at any given time it’s not as desired as the Stamina + Lover + Mechanic combination and even with that you won’t have a fully matching combination MOST of the time.
No code has to be inserted here.
Account/Production Planning
Okay! We’ve got all the data – assuming you’re still reading it’s time to make some practical decisions about how to use this information. As a reminder, the theme here is “time gated” so the sooner we cross specific thresholds on our mains and alts the sooner we’ll begin to reap the rewards.
Question 1: Do I want to have alts and do I want to do garrison production on them?
If the answer to this is “No” then you should just use the relevant data above to get your Follower/Missions team in order to at least have a chance at raid gear and collect the legendary items. There’s no “real” requirement to interact with Garrisons otherwise
If the answer to this question is “Yes” then you might consider some of the following planning items
Question 2: How many alts do I want to focus on?
Either for production or play reasons (as gear can be obtained from missions), it’s a good idea to get your garrisons going full swing as early as possible to start taking advantage of these time limited resources. This will mean that future patches that add more Garrison content won’t require the initial start-up. Garrisons require about the same amount of time as the Sunsong Ranch to maintain each day per character assuming you want to maximize this output. This includes the following tasks:
- Collecting Garrison Cache (At least every 3 days)
- Collecting completed work orders and placing new ones (at least every 3 days at max building level)
- Cleaning out the materials available in the mine and herb garden (daily)
- Sending out followers to complete any open missions. Missions vary greatly on both respawn and completion time but checking this daily should be fine.
From a production standpoint you’ll want to consider what materials you want to be able to produce yourself and realign alt professions to match that. As mentioned before if you have no interest in participating in Garrisons directly you can buy anything you want from other players.
Question 3: What thresholds should I consider for levelling alts?
While it’s pretty obvious that we’d want to get our mains to 100 and geared to the extent possible ahead of our first raid, any downtime available to level alts is most “efficiently” done based on the following thresholds that will allow you to begin production. Obviously how you choose to do all this is up to you, but this is where I’d recommend consider starting and stopping:
- Complete the Frostfire intro and start your garrison to begin collecting Garrison Resources daily.
- Complete Frostfire quests until you can build your profession buildings so you can being placing work orders
- Level via your preferred method to reach level 92 and unlock your mine to being gathering ore daily.
- Complete your Garrison Outpost quest line in Gorgorond (starts from Garrison) to upgrade your first profession building and assign a related follower
- Level via your preferred method to reach level 94. Upgrade your second profession building and assign a related follower. Complete the Garrison Outpost quest line Talador (starts from Garrison) to upgrade a medium building (recommended: Inn first).
- Level via your preferred method to reach level 96 and unlock your Herb Garden to being gathering herbs daily. Complete the Garrison Outpost in Spires of Arak and the quest line to unlock the Salvage Yard.
- Once your Salvage Yard is completed (either following the final Garrison expansion or from demolishing one of the two profession buildings) being levelling followers more heavily via missions. As mentioned earlier in the guide Garrison Resources may be a barrier before this point but the Salvage Yard makes all mission completions much more valuable if follower gear is obtained via Salvage.
***Note: This is a critical threshold. If you can reach this threshold as soon as possible your returns will be strongly maximized. I’d really recommend this as a primary goal threshold for maximizing daily gains until you have the time to finish levelling alts to 100.- Level via your preferred method to reach level 98. Complete the Garrison Outpost in Nagrand (starts from Garrison) to upgrade a large building (recommended: Barracks first).
- Level via your preferred method to 100. Complete all remaining building upgrades.
Question 4: How many barns do I want?
Barns will unquestionably be THE “hottest” building from a gold value perspective just because it will be the only method by which the epic blood needed to make crafted gear upgrades can be obtained. You can only really benefit from barns, though, if they are level 3 and your characters are strong enough to kill and trap elite monsters in Nagrand. I’m expecting that these monsters will behave like Timeless Isle elites in that they can be killed by anyone solo with the proper attention to mechanics. Just like any other buildings, Barns can only process X amount of work orders (up to 3 days worth at max level) so the only way to increase production once maxed is to have another character with a barn. Thanks to this work order system, though, you can take an individual character on a murderous trapping spree once every 3 days to keep it efficient.
Consider ahead of time how many barns this should be for your production appetite and then plan other medium buildings that synergize well with a character or related game goal (a stable, for example, on a herb/mining character to increase speed and allow gathering without dismounting).
Question 5: Help! Garrison Resources are gating me! Shouldn’t I have built a lumber mill?!
One really important resource is the world treasures map vendor in Ashran. Once you’ve completed all of the main storyline quests in a zone you can purchase an item from this vendor (the archaeology vendor) to reveal all outdoor treasures on your map for an easy swing around to collect them all. From there, completing the X Zone Monster Hunter achievement will guarantee that you’ve killed all the vignette mobs in each zone and collected all of their related Garrison Resources. Note that these only drop a reward like resources the first time you kill them. These spawn rapidly on Beta currently and shouldn’t be thought of as “rares” like we found in Pandaria. I don’t recommend a lumber mill because I don’t think they’ll be necessary for maximum production. You will need at least one on your account at some point, though, as there are achievements and toys associated with them just like other buildings.
As long as you didn’t frivolously waste resources on missions before completing the required buildings/upgrades you shouldn’t have too much of a problem. In the worst case you can always choose the Gorgorond Outpost Lumbermill as an emergency stop-gap… or just wait a few days and relax.
Question 6: When you said “My preferred method of levelling” did you mean it?
Nope! If you’re serious about this at all you will only want to level via questing because it will give you the most opportunities to gain Followers and Garrison Resources. If levelling via PVP or dungeons is the difference between levelling and not levelling, though, you should go for it!
Conclusion
So there you have it! I’ll make updates to this guide as things change or as I gain new information. What else, if anything, do you want to learn about? If you have any new or conflicting data that I’ve not considered please let me know here. Hopefully this information is helpful!
Reply With Quote
Originally Posted by Kulldam
