Garrison

“

Plant Your Flag on Draenor! Your Garrison will be woven deeply into the storyline of Warlords of Draenor, beginning when your faction leader commissions you to establish a beachhead on this alien world—but the ultimate fate of your personal fortress on Draenor is entirely up to you. - Warlords of Draenor: Take Charge of Your Garrison

”

Garrison Interface

A garrison is a new feature to to be introduced with the World of Warcraft: Warlords of Draenor expansion. They are Blizzard's response to player housing. Players build a base that can be located in any zone on Draenor. Followers of the base can go on missions and earn epic gear and get limited access to professions via followers. The facilities are customizable and may include gathering areas. Garrisons can be moved after being created. There will be an sub-area to show off monuments and trophies.

Facilities of garrisons

• Gathering areas.
  • Primarily Town Hall?^{[citation needed]}
• Monuments and trophies area.
  • Storehouse or Town Hall?^{[citation needed]}
• Buildings in garrison give bonuses and can be upgradeable (3 total with specialization at level 3).
  • Some upgrades can be done via blueprints which can be found out in the world (TBD).
• Limited access to professions that you don't have.
• Followers completing missions may reward Chuck Norris with such things as epic gear.

Buildings

Garrisons Buildings

Main article: Building

Building functions

Buildings are the individual “pieces” of your Garrison—Stables, Farms, Mines, Armories, and more. They improve your ability to recruit, use, and train followers; to craft; to complete missions; and to run missions more quickly by reducing your followers’ downtime. Each building in your garrison can be upgraded, which amplifies its mechanical effect and visuals. For example, an upgraded Barracks will grow bigger and more impressive, but it’ll also increase the number of followers you can send on missions at one time (for example, 5 followers at once for a level 1 Barracks, then 7 followers, then 12—though the exact numbers are still in flux).

Building arrangement

Buildings in your Garrison can be placed in a number of configurations. You can only place small-sized buildings (primarily crafting-related) on small plots; a larger building, like a Barracks, won’t fit. Bigger buildings can be constructed early on—even a “starting” Garrison has room for a large structure. As your Garrison increases in level, you’ll get access to more and larger building space, and increase the versatility and power of your holdings.

The amount of plots available to a player appears to depend upon how many tiers they have advanced all their buildings:

• Tier 1: 6 plots
• Tier 2: 11 plots
• Tier 3: 15 plots

Garrisons are visually distinct depending on whether you’re a Horde or Alliance player, and you’ll be able to place your Garrison in one of several zones on Draenor. You’ll also specify your Garrison’s layout (the physical location of buildings within your Garrison’s walls), and select the buildings you’d like to include. Choosing to “spec” your buildings (more on that below) will also change cosmetic aspects of those buildings, like furniture types and decorations, in addition to imparting different gameplay effects.

Garrisons can be shown off to same-faction players in your party, who can walk around your base, converse with your NPCs, and appraise your layout. You’ll have a reason to show your Garrison off, too: trading resources. For example, if you have extra building resources, you’ll be able to bring them to a friend’s Garrison and exchange them for materials that you need.

Building specialization

When specializing your Garrison’s buildings, you’ll choose a variant on the bonuses and abilities the building provides. For example, one Mine specialization might make your miners gather ore faster by the hour, while another will increase the chance that your workers strike a rare mining node. Several buildings can provide you with access to professions that your character hasn’t mastered—though you won’t have enough plots to put one down for every profession.

As you begin building up your Garrison, we expect that you’ll interact with it quite a bit. However, over time, it’s expected that your interaction will become more casual. At lower levels, your missions are on shorter time cycles (minutes, hours or days); once your followers have reached high levels, it’s likely that you’ll send some of them off on longer raid missions for a week at a time. We want garrisons to be important, but our goal is a system that’s easy to enjoy without being extremely intensive.

Sizes

Buildings come in a starting set and three groups of sizes:

Starting

• Town HallFile:WoWInsider-BlizzCon2013-Garrisons-Slide1-Starting_Buildings.jpg - main area of interaction, automatically placed
• ? Farm
• Mine
• Fishing Shack

Small buildings

R1 indicates starting rank.

Allow access to professions the player may not have.

• Alchemy Lab (R1)
• Tinkerer's Garage (R1)/Engineering Works (R??)
• Smithy (R1)/Blacksmithing Foundry (R??) - Assign qualified followers to discover plans and craft Blacksmithing recipes
• Enchanting Tent (R1)/Enchanter's Study (R??)
• Jewelcrafting Shack (R1)/Jewelcrafting Gallery (R??)
• Leatherworking Shop (R1)^{[citation needed]}
• The Tannery (R??)
• Tailoring Tent (R1)/Tailoring Studio (R??)
• Scribe's Office (R??)
• Salvage Yard (R1)
• Storehouse (R1)

Medium buildings

• Pet Stable - for companions, battle pets, and hunter pets?; will have a pet trainer to battle
• Trading Post
• Lumber Mill
• Barn
• Inn - where you can pick up new followers

Large buildings

Each has a bonus

• Barracks - allows more followers
• Infirmary
• Infirmary
• Stables
• Academy
• Mage Tower

Others

This section concerns content that is potentially inaccurate.

• Dance Studio (R?? on UI screenshots)

Followers

Main article: Follower

Followers are NPCs (non-player characters) that you recruit to join your Garrison. You’ll send them on missions to improve your Garrison and earn loot for your character. You can also allocate them to complete tasks—things like crafting or gathering resources, which they’ll do whether you’re online or offline.

Followers have a character level, an item level, and traits that affect missions and tasks. For example, if they have the Mining trait, you’ll be able to assign them to a Mine in your Garrison to gather resources for you. There are common, uncommon, rare, and epic followers, and their rarity affects the number of traits they can have.

Recruiting followers

To run an effective Garrison, you’ll first need to recruit followers. Some will make their own way to your base, but you can also upgrade your Inn to attract more followers. You can also win followers to your cause as you progress through the game’s story, when completing quests, or simply by coughing up the right sum of gold to hire mercenaries.

When they’re not away on missions, your followers hold down posts at your Garrison, where you can visit them at any time. A major goal for the Garrison system is for followers to be dynamic and interesting—for example, if a follower fails a mission that takes place in a local dungeon, they might be taken prisoner; the next time you adventure in that dungeon, you’ll be able to rescue them.

Follower progression

Followers grow in power in a way that mirrors players’ progression. From levels 90–100, followers will gain character levels, which have a significant impact on their abilities and mission success chance. They’ll also increase their item level as you equip them with follower-specific gear; once they’ve reached level 100, equipment will have a larger role to play in their overall effectiveness.

Missions

Main article: Mission

Mission objectives

You’ll send your followers on missions for varied purposes. Successful missions will give you the resources you need to keep developing your Garrison, but you’ll also have the chance to acquire powerful loot for your character, and your followers will gain experience for each mission they run.

The length of mission depends on the type of mission chosen, ranging from a few hours to a week. Missions can also be run while the player is offline.

The resources you’ll acquire during missions include both existing crafting reagents and Garrison-specific materials. For example, if you assign a follower to a mining mission, you could receive ore, but you might also unearth stone, a new kind of resource used to construct and upgrade buildings.

Though followers are great for solo play, the system also has multiplayer elements. When you dispatch a party of your followers on certain missions, you’ll also be able to join forces with your guildmates’ followers, even if your guildmate is offline.

Blizzcon 2013 Q + A

This section contains questions and answers from the Q&A session (About Almost Everything) at BlizzCon 2013.

Alts as followers

Fan says: For people with many alts can they have them as followers for their garrisons?

CS: We haven't thought about this, but it sounds cool! We need a solution to deal with the fact that garrisons are unique and not account wide, we need something to help you make a garrison on your alt. We're not far enough along the development stage to talk about that yet. However we could include something like their name and gear, it could be awesome.

Available via mobile app?

Fan says: Will Garrisons be in the wow armoury app?

Tom Chilton (TC): No current plans, it's not ruled out though.

Garrison player limit

Fan says: How many people can be in your Garrison, are there any plans for friends to access your Garrison whilst your offline?

Tom Chilton: No mechanics for friends to be their whilst offline. No plans right now, it's a nice idea. We are planning for co operative gameplay.

Fan says: How many friends can be there?

Tom Chilton: Raids, 40 or whatever (sorry server programmers!)

Locations limited

Fan says: So I was wondering about the garrisons, will they be in pre determined locations? In one slide I noticed the dance studio.

Developers: (Denying it while smirking and laughing.) That's ridiculous!

CS: The garrisons will be in pre determined locations. Within the pre determined area you can move the buildings to how you want them. We have the positions in really awesome locations. If we allowed players to choose any position players would put it say at the entrance to Blackrock Foundry.

Pet battles

Fan says: Are there going to be any major pet battles system?

Cory Stockton (CS): Adding more new pets in Draenor, new trainers to battle against, pet stables in garrisons (unique trainers there with epic pet battles?)

Profession follower limits

Fan says: The garrisons kind of satisfy to secondary production profession, however what are the limits of that? I build a black smith shop, can he make me epic weapons?

CS: We're planning on letting you find recipes through the missions. You can send your Blacksmith on black smithing weapons. It's just a matter of trying to balance that out, we need to make sure that the Blacksmith still feels valued outside your Garrison.

Media

Images

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WoW Insider gallery or slideshow of World of Warcraft Raids, Gameplay, Questing, and More panel

From BlizzCon 2013 World of Warcraft Raids, Gameplay, Questing, and More panel:v

From BlizzCon 2013 World of Warcraft Raids, Gameplay, Questing, and More panel:v

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Video

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Notes

• At this point, there are no plans to develop additional race-specific structures beyond human and orc.

See also

• Building
• Follower
• Mission

External links

WoW Official Game Site (US) Warlords of Draenor: Take Charge of Your Garrison by Blizzard Entertainment, Nov 8, 2013 1:29 PM PST

WoW Official Game Site (EU) Take Charge of Your Garrison by Blizzard Entertainment, 08 Nov 2013 21:29 GMT

News

WoW Insider Warlords of Draenor: Everything we know about Garrisons by Robin Torres Nov 9th 2013 8:00PM