Feeling lazy ...

So let's do picture book style!

First, one of the wins we had from our Sunday night arena! This was against a double dps team - note their matchmaking rating!

too lazy to crop, too!

I joined a group to do one of the Garrison raid mobs - recommended 10-40 people; I had never done one before, had no idea what it dropped. It ended up dropping garrison resources and apexis crystals, but also had a chance to drop lower iLvl raid gear (645-655 range maybe?). It doesn't seem worth doing much going forward, but trying it out once? Sure. Plus, I saw this guy, who looks like a total bad ass! The armor is from a previous expansion (MoP, I believe?) and no longer obtainable. The weapon is from Gold level Challenges, something I'd like to try at some point!

omg he looks SO COOL!

My mage's garrison followers are really starting to get up to speed - I've finally hit the cap of 25 and am now starting to replace the ones without the bonus gold trait (one a week). For a while I was pretty short on upgrades for them, but I've passed that point now. It's fun getting a 500 gold quest and being able to bump it up to 2k!

Speaking of gold, I bought my second token a week or so ago. I thought it would be interesting to see how much gold I actually make in a month, so I took screenshots of everyone's gold before I bought one. This is mostly for informational purposes. It's probably worth noting that one of the new additions in 6.2 is a vendor in your garrison that sells a variety of pets/toys/mounts. I bought most of them, and the two pets were 30k gold! So uhhh, we'll be sure to add that into the equation for next time:

Crescendo - so poor! Most of that was from Laktose

Piffle

Laktose

So roughly 461,000 gold. The token was 24k and the mounts were 30 ... so the starting point is about 407,000.

My newest garrison follower

Harrison Jones!

One of the additions in 6.1 was 6 daily quests that allow you to add a new follower - Harrison Jones. As you might have guessed from the name, the follower is a play on Indiana Jones and all the quests have that sort of treasure-hunting-mythical feel to them.

Jones is guaranteed to come with the Treasure Hunter trait, which doubles the amount of gold you can get from missions. He also has the Mentor trait, which essentially allows followers less than level 100 to function as though they were level 100. This is big for a couple of reasons:

1) Obviously this allows you to use lower level followers on higher level missions that they would otherwise not be able to help with
2) More importantly, it allows them to receive all of the experience from the higher level missions, as opposed to the normal 10% if they are below level.

#2 makes leveling new followers up to level 100 really fast. On Laktose, where all my followers are already 100, epic, most have maxed armor/weapon upgrades, and I don't have the inn, this isn't a big deal. On Piffle (my mage), where I just got the Inn to level 3 and am now recruiting a new follower every week (they start at 90), this is a big deal! I now have 3 new followers from the Inn on Piffle and this will allow me to get them up to speed in a fraction of the time, allowing them to do the worthwhile missions quicker. You can see this quest is level 100 and normally rewards 60 gold:

Jones alone bumps the reward to 120 ... but he also allows me to use Ruthia, who is only level 95, as if she were level 100. I ended up getting 180 gold from this quest!

The only slow / annoying part about these daily quests is that they are random - so despite trying to finish up Harrison Jones for over a week, it wasn't until Sunday that the quest I needed was selected. You can use the LFG tool to search for people who have the Jones quests in their garrison to speed the process along (the daily quest is the same for all servers, so there's no need to check multiple servers for a different quest).

The Barn is amazing and Horde PvP is not

I finally got around to dumping my Lumber Mill for a Barn and let me tell you ... wow. The amount of leather it produces makes me feel like it's not even worth having Skinning anymore. Basically the way it works is you go out and fight a specific type of mob, get them low enough health and then drop a trap. They disappear after they are trapped, which means you cannot both trap and skin the same mob. You turn the "trapped mob box" into the Barn as a work order and 3 hours later you get more leather than you would have gotten simply from skinning it. I have been averaging just 1 piece of leather from a single mob, though sometimes on level 100 creatures I'll get a second.

With a level 100 follower working in the Barn, I got 168 leather from 14 work orders. That's twelve leathers from each mob!! Needless to say, I am seriously considering dropping Skinning.

Something else you might have picked up on from the previous paragraph is that I specifically mentioned the follower's level in the Barn. I just learned this last week, but apparently the chance that they actually affect the output of a work order is based on their level. 50% at 90, gaining 5% every level, up to 100% at level 100.

Lastly, I have an absolutely dismal record in Battlegrounds so far. Part of this might just be me. My gear isn't exactly the bee's knees yet, I don't have any enchants on my gear, I'm playing a DPS off-spec rather than a potentially more useful healing spec, I'm out of practice, and I don't quite know all of the BGs that well yet (some of them are brand new to me).

And yet, having said all that, I cannot be the only one in that situation. It is highly unlikely that only the Horde is getting stuck with the noobs like me; surely Alliance must be getting their share of new players, too, right? So what's going on here? Is it simply a matter of the Battlegroup I'm on (battlegroups refer to what servers are linked together to play in Battlegrounds and the 'quality' of the various servers CAN cause a difference)? Does Alliance have some sort of map advantage in most of the Battlegrounds (similar to AV?)? I have read that they have an advantage in terms of racial skills and this shows up in the Arena teams (the vast majority of top teams are Alliance); does that carry over to BGs, too? Are different types of players drawn to Alliance and Horde and the Allies have an advantage from that?

I honestly have no idea. I did manage to win my first couple of BGs in WoD the other night, which was awesome. Two Isle of Conquest in a row AND the 15 minute WSG (I should really learn the name of this one). In the WSG, I managed to get the only flag cap and returned two other flags. It was a lot of fun.

Pee vee pee.

So it turns out that the +15 follower enhancements do not stack on top of each other which is a pretty big disappointment. That means they're basically only useful when your followers first hit 100 to get them over the 615 hump. The +3 enhancements seem to stack as much as you want though, which is nice because you get an awful lot of them.

Over the weekend I finally dipped my toe back in the PvP water. My gear isn't great, but oh man, so much fun! It seems like there are a dozen battlegrounds now, half of which I had never tried before. You can queue for a specific battleground or for a random one; doing a random battleground gives you a reward of a strongbox for completing the battleground (or at least, it's supposed to. sometimes I did not get a strongbox, but I'm unclear as to why that was). You're even able to remove up to two battlegrounds from the list so you don't get stuck in Alterac Valley every single time.

The strongboxes vary in quality and can have extra honor points or even gear in them! I think the lowest level gear I got from one of these boxes was iLvl 600, but that gets bumped up to 660 in PvP so that's better than the iLvl 645 PvE epics I have.

I think I ended up in ~4 new battlegrounds that I had never tried before. One was essentially Warsong Gulch with a 15 minute time limit. One was like a combination of Warsong Gulch and Arathi Basin but also with mining carts added in (?!?). One required you to 'control' mine carts as they moved from the center of the map to their end stop (this one had a lot of fun fighting). And the last was kind of weird - there are four orbs in each corner. Once you pick one up, you earn points but become easier to kill (I think; there's a buff that details the changes that you get, but I died almost immediately upon picking it up so I didn't have a chance to read it too closely).

I'm pretty sure we lost every battleground I was in. We may have one once. Still, I had a lot of fun! I also tried out Ashran which is the new "open world" battleground. It's not quite a battleground, as you can be queued for Ashran and still queue/run the normal battlegrounds. I know this because Ashran takes forever to get into. The queues are awful and to top it all off, it doesn't even give you an estimate until you'll get in. This is probably because Ashran doesn't really finish. Think back to when Alterac Valley first came out and matches were weeks long, and all the fun was in killing the Alliance and their NPCs, handing in upgrades and summoning new NPCs ... it reminded me a lot of that. We were "winning" at the time I was in there in that sense that we had the Alliance pushed back and they were unable to reach the side events. Every so often, there's an announcement that there will be an Event in one of the side areas. The winner of the Event gets a Strongbox. There are also rare NPCs that spawn, giving you a large amount of Artifacts. Artifacts can also be stolen from any Alliance you kill and can be turned in for Honor points (can't remember if you get Conquest points as well).

You also get a ton of Broken Bones from Ashran. Broken Bones are gotten from killing the opposing faction in World PvP and are used to process work orders at the Gladiator's Sanctum. These work orders then provide you with honor and conquest points! So, doing random battlegrounds and hitting up Ashran seems like the way to go if you want to gear up quickly. Coming into the weekend I had just the PvP cloak and Belt ... I now have an Amulet, Shoulders, Chest, Bracers, and two trinkets. The two trinkets give a set bonus of 10% less damage taken and the Shoulders/Chest give a 2 piece bonus of resetting the spell interrupt on a successful attempt (usually a 6 second cooldown).

The next step, outside of continuing the gearing process, is taking a close look at the talents I selected while leveling up. I was looking at them last night and there are definitely some that need to be changed.

Revisiting Garrison Follower Enchancements

Once your followers hit level 100, you can equip them with gear, essentially. There are only two pieces - armor and weapons, both of which start off at iLvl 600. You can acquire the gear for your followers from Garrison Missions, Salvage Crates, and from the work orders at the War Mill.

I believe there are two levels of upgrades. Each level has an Uncommon (green), Rare (blue), and Epic (purple) enhancement. The lower level of upgrades is 3, 6, 9 and the higher level is 15, 30, 45.

The current max for followers' iLvl is 655. How do you get there? Well, certain enhancements stack. Generally, the worse enhancements tend to stack on top of the better ones (or, the more common ones tend to stack on the rarer ones). As an example, let's pretend that we have three upgrades: 3, 6, 9.

Using the 3 first and then the 6 will cause the 6 to overwrite the 3, giving us an iLvl of 606. However, if we use the 9 first, then the 6, then the 3 we will end up with an iLvl of 618. It should also be noted that the 3 stacks upon itself at least 3 times (haven't tried more). I haven't tried stacking anything other than the 3s, but thinking about it now it kind of makes sense that it would work. I'll try it out tonight and report back!

The higher level of upgrades does not work the same way. If you use a 30 first and then a 15, you're given a message that you can't add them together. So in order to reach max (or close enough) starting with a 30, you need to add a 9, 6, and then three 3s. I've only seen one 45 so far, but have begun getting 30s from Garrison Missions. I believe this is related to the iLvl of your follower.

Once your followers hit level 100, you get the level 100 quests. Once you have at least one follower with an average iLvl of 615, you start getting 615 quests. It works the same way with iLvl 630 and 630 quests, so I assume there are also 645 quests. Followers that do not have at least 615 iLvl cannot help contribute to 615 quests so it is sometimes hard to find the right combination.

The War Mill

The War Mill is a Large Garrison building that has several perks:

1) It doubles the chance for quest items to get an epic upgrade.
2) It allows you to turn in garrison resources in exchange for follower improvements.
3) It allows you to turn in Iron Horde scraps for Transmog items. (Iron Horde scraps are lootable items found on some mobs)
4) It provides you with one free Raid Bonus Roll each week. Otherwise these can be purchased with gold, honor, or apexis crystals. I'm not entirely clear how the Bonus Rolls work!

The way #2 works is that you turn in 20 resources per work order. Those work orders provide Iron Horde scraps, Follower Enhancement items (I don't remember the best that I've seen, but I know that you can get up to +15), and Apexis Crystals.

The transmog items require you to turn in a certain amount of Scraps and some of them also require an additional item that drops less frequently.They have sets for all types of armor:

One of the Mail or Plate sets (I think it was Mail)

Cloth?

Leather

Plate

Looking like an Orgrimmar guard!