96 is an exciting level (or, Garrisons, pt 2!)

Oh man, so much stuff happened last night, I'm not even sure what to talk about! I guess since we had been talking about garrisons previously I'll update you on that.

Two things happened last night that had a big impact on my garrison:

1) I hit level 96

2) I finished a quest in Gorgrond that gave me a free building upgrade

Hitting level 96 unlocks all sorts of upgrades. First, it unlocks the Herb garden, allowing you to collect from 6 random herbs each day. This, in turn, gave me the ability to start filling the daily work orders at my Scribe's quarters. Second, once you hit level 96 you can upgrade your small buildings and gathering sites.

Level 2 buildings are great because you can assign a follower (if they happen to have that Trait) and get extra benefits (these vary depending on which building and can be seen in the garrison infographic I linked above). I was fortunate to have a mining and leatherworking follower already, though my leatherworker was already out on a quest so I couldn't assign him (woops!). The benefit for assigning a follower to the mine was the addition of Mining Carts - they basically have extra ore and a random green item. My mine today had two carts and the first one provided Miner's Coffee which increases your run speed inside the mine (woot!) and the second one had a special pickaxe that decreases the time it takes to mine a node. The blueprints for the Small crafting huts cost 750 gold each and then upgrading the building itself costs 300 gold and 100 garrison resources. The blueprints for the Mine/Herb plots cost 1,000 gold each and they cost 300 gold and 50 garrison resources to upgrade. The gold wasn't an issue at all, as I have made about ~5k since getting to Draenor just through questing and vendoring items. Garrison resources haven't been an issue yet, but I did spend about half of what I had just upgrading buildings. Looking through wowhead (to verify the costs, my memory is terrible), it seems as though I may have been able to upgrade my mine at an earlier level. Woops!

What I did with my free building upgrade was grab the blueprints for the Frostwall Tavern. At level 1, the Tavern is filled with a couple of ragtag explorers (or sometimes, a very "leet" explorer) who offer up daily dungeon quests. Completing the quests gives you a fair amount of gold, garrison resources, Apexis Crystals (still not sure what these are used for), and a piece of blue gear that is usually a decent upgrade:

Gloves upgraded!

However, once you upgrade your Tavern to level 2, you gain the ability to recruit a new follower each week with a specific quality. Since I didn't have any followers with the Inscription trait, I opted for that. I was able to pick from three different followers, each of whom had different other abilities (and I'm assuming the quality of the followers that you get to pick from is random? I ended up with 2 rare and one uncommon, but I can't imagine why anyone would pick the uncommon follower if you are always given the choice of a rare one). After I made my choice, I was immediately given that follower, who I then assigned to my Inscription hut.

I still don't have a follower with the Herbalism trait, so that's next on my list if I don't find one randomly before the recruitment quest refreshes. You can apparently find random NPCs throughout the zones that you can have join you, too. I stumbled across a guide on Reddit that gives a breakdown of some of the ones you can get and went and picked up two of them last night that were in my level range. I got really lucky with one of them, as you have a chance to randomly upgrade a follower's quality, similar to how items work. My first epic follower, Blook (yes, I did a bad job with the screenshots, here's what he looks like):

Blook!