Garrisons, part 1

Before I talk about Garrisons, I wanted to show this picture:

If you open the picture up all the way, you should see the text of the scroll says, "The Joy of Draenor Cooking. Use: Teaches you Draenor Master Cooking and a number of recipes." These scrolls exist for, I think, every profession. I touched on this yesterday, but these drop randomly and do two things:

1) They bump your profession max up to 700 which is the Draenor max (I think)
2) They teach you several recipes that use reagents found in Draenor and can be crafted regardless of what your current skill is (i.e. you can level up from 1 to 700 in Draenor itself).

This is important because it means you don't have to spend any time grinding in old content just to be able to enjoy the new content! And that means you have more time for your garrisons. I thought they introduced this in a really cool way. You get a quest to mark a bunch of trees for your peons to cut down and build you a garrison. For those of you who played any of the Warcraft editions, this might be a familiar scene:

Once your garrison has been built, you get a follower and are able to start sending him on quests. I wish I had taken a screenshot of the interface because I think it's pretty cool how they did it [editor's note: pictures added!], but essentially all followers have randomly assigned Abilities and Traits Similar to how gear works, there are varying levels of follower quality - uncommon, rare, and epic. Uncommon followers have just one Trait and one Ability; Rare have one Trait and two Abilities; Epic followers have two Traits and three Abilities.

The Abilities are important for the quests that you have access to. Every so often (I'm not sure what the time frame is yet) you get access to a new quest in your Garrison. These have various rewards (gold, bonus exp, garrison resources - required to upgrade buildings in garrison, send followers on missions, and I'm sure other things that I'm not yet aware of) and have a randomly assigned "strength" that can be countered by a particular ability. If you send a follower on a quest that has an Ability that counters that quest, the likelihood of completing that quest is much higher.

Additionally, with the level 1 Garrison you will be able to build a small building. I found (or it was a quest reward? I can't remember) the blueprint for the leatherworking hut. I believe you will always find the blueprint for your own profession first, and then once the second tier of Garrison is unlocked (at level 93) you are given the blueprints for all the rest. At first glance, the profession small buildings don't seem to be of huge value at lower levels. They require Draenor ingredients to process a work order which then rewards you with actual materials you can use for professions. The problem is that the original ingredients are so few and far between (at this point) that I barely have enough to process one work order a day (the max you can have going at once is 7! and that number can be increased once the huts are upgraded). I imagine this won't be much of an issue as I become higher level and my skinning increases, as I'll be getting more leather scraps from each mob I skin.

Of course, that's just for my own profession hut. For my second small hut, I went with the Scribe's Quarters and I have yet to acquire any of the necessary ingredients so far. As I don't have Herbalism, I can't gather any of the flowers I find out in the wild ... however! At level 96, the Herb Garden in your Garrison becomes unlocked and I will be able to gather everything I need (I hope) from there. My mine is already unlocked and allows me to harvest minerals from 8 nodes a day. There is also a fishing shack that I unlocked at level 94 and finally a Pet Menagerie at 98 that helps out with a variety of Pet Battle stuff. An interesting option is selecting your second small hut as the Enchanter's Study as this gives you the ability to disenchant all those soulbound green items. I imagine the price varies depending on your server so this might not actually be a profit for some people.

There are bonuses to be had from the small huts by placing followers there, but they require level 2 of the huts and I haven't gotten there yet. Hopefully when I do I'll be able to talk a bit about how that works.