What is it?
If you loved your farm in Pandaria, you’re going to love the garrison in Warlords of Draenor. It’s like the land you get from the Tillers but on steroids. You get a bigger piece of land that will grow as you level it up.
Not only do you get land, but you can build different structures and see them improve as you upgrade your buildings when your garrison levels up.
You also get followers. These are characters that fall into the tank, healer, and DPS archetype that you can hire to go out on missions to get you some loot while you kick back in the inn and have a drink at the bar.
Build it and They Will Come
In your Warlords of Draenor garrison, you can build structures that range from stables, farms, and mines to infirmaries and mages’ towers, and more. Each structure performs its own special function: infirmaries deal with healers, mines will allow you to gather mining resources and ores, etc.
Resources are needed to build and to upgrade. You will earn resources by sending your followers on missions (see below).
Players from the same faction can visit your garrison. You can have up to an entire 40 man raid group on one garrison at a time.
More Followers than Takei on Twitter
One of the most unique aspects of this player housing system is the ability to collect followers. These are NPCs that will do things for you like craft items, gather resources, and run PvE content to get you loot.
Followers fall along the class archetype system and have their own level and item levels. They have different traits and types; some followers are common, others are rare and of better quality, like pets. Their quality will have an effect on the number of traits that your follower has.
You can gain followers in multiple ways in Warlords of Draenor. You can allow them to come to you over time on their own or you can speed up the process by having an inn and upgrading it. This will increase the number of followers you can recruit. You will be able to hire mercenaries as followers with gold in-game. You earn some followers through questing.
Followers can run a variety of missions for you and succeed, bringing you back items. They can also fail, however. Sometimes they will get caught and held prisoner, only being freed when you run the dungeon they’re trapped in to rescue them.
You can interact with your followers even when they’re not working in your town. Not only that, but when you have friends over, they can interact with them, too.
Mission More Likely Than Not Possible
In Warlords of Draenor, followers will go out on missions, level up, and group up either with your own followers or with followers that belong to guildmates.
Missions range from mining in your garrison to going out in a party and doing quests, dungeons, and raids. When they are out, they will most likely come back with the kind of items you would expect, like gear from raids and ore from mining, but they can also come back with special items to upgrade your garrison.
Your followers will give you access to professions you do not have. Are you a tailor/engineer and sick of paying outrageous AH prices for ores? Send out a miner to gather your ores.
While they are more than willing to get you gear, you will also want to give your followers gear. They will level up from level 90 to 100; when they hit level cap, their gear will become more and more important. The better suited up they are, the easier it is for them to come back with better loot for you.
Some missions, like mining, only last a few hours. Other missions, like raiding, can go for about a week.
Leveling Up Your Garrison
As you gather more resources and upgrade your garrison, it will level up. You can also increase the level of your buildings by upgrading them with resources.
When your garrison levels up in Warlords of Draenor, you get a larger plot of land. This allows you to plant more buildings. Want to plant a larger building but only have small plots of land left? Level up your garrison and you can fit it in there.
Your buildings will change aesthetically to reflect the improvements and upgrades you’ve made. They even change depending on the specializations available to you when you fully upgrade a building, like decreasing the time it takes to mine or increasing the chance of getting special kinds of ores in Warlords of Draenor when you send your miner out.
