[WoD] Garrison Optimization Launch Thread

Yeah I was worried about gold since I boosted and accumulated maybe 1000 while leveling to 60. But I didn't sell anything on the AH while leveling to 100 and was still able to upgrade to level 3 garrison right when I hit 100 and had almost 5,000 left over. I also DE'd most greens leveling up so I probably lost out on around 1,000 gold from not selling those.

Right now my biggest money generators are darkmoon cards via the scribe hut and random reagents I don't use. It's been enough to keep me above water when it comes to garrison costs. There are two things I would change though:

1 - Have alts be able to contribute to the main garrison. It's a management job enough to deal with on a main, I cannot imagine doing it for 2-3 alts as well.
2 - If you replace a building that's lvl 3, it really sucks that the building goes back down to 1 if you replace it then decide to place it again down the road. At least discount the gold/GR costs for something you already built.

I dont even sell things on the AH much and still had plenty of cash for the building upgrades, rare followers from faction quartermasters etc.

I'm at the same cash value now as I was at the start of the expansion so the combination of questing, follower missions, and tossing the occasional stack of fish for sale must have balanced all those expenditures

Vitality_sl said:

Correct, I'll upgrade my salvage yard when all my followers are 645 ilvl

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You guys go ahead and do that, I upgraded to lvl 3 and got a 665 leather belt out of a crate today. Ca-ching.

Vorph_sl said:

You have to spend 5000G on the rank 3 garrison upgrade alone, so I find that very hard to believe.

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I started the expansion with 1k gold baring the freak selling of a purple item on my alt I have had no problems keeping up with garrison purchases as well as some random fun stuff like the hearthstone board toy out of cash I get for quests/dungeons. I thought the 5k garrison thing was going to be a problem but really if you do all the story line stuff to 100 you should have more than enough cash. GR have been a limiting factor for me but cash really has not been. My windfall from the sales of the purple is my fun stuff fund for random mounts or toys now but I have not had to dip into it for building upgrades.

Vandyn_sl said:

Right now my biggest money generators are darkmoon cards via the scribe hut and random reagents I don't use. It's been enough to keep me above water when it comes to garrison costs. There are two things I would change though:

1 - Have alts be able to contribute to the main garrison. It's a management job enough to deal with on a main, I cannot imagine doing it for 2-3 alts as well.
2 - If you replace a building that's lvl 3, it really sucks that the building goes back down to 1 if you replace it then decide to place it again down the road. At least discount the gold/GR costs for something you already built.

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Regarding #1, that seems to be a two-edged sword. Your concern is echoed here, but others might be happy that they can double up or quadruple up on their garrison gameplay and reap four times the rewards as well. Making the garrison accountwide would change that. Giving each player the individual choice would just change the complaint to "while I can use my alts on the main garrison, I feel forced to have them run their own garrison in order to min/max my rewards". I agree that account-wide garrison would've been better if they had designed it that way, but that ship sailed and imo they should stick with what they have now.

Regarding #2, that just sounds like a problem that'll be gone in a few months - unless they add GR sinks you'll eventually develop a surplus. And not being able to flip buildings 5 times within the first few weeks feels ok with me, at least there is some weight to your choice through that. Personally I flipped away two lvl2 buildings so far so nothing too costly, but I felt the change was worth the cost in each case. If anything I made the mistake of blindly trusting the general BAAARN suggestion instead of researching it properly (barn was good for gold through furs though).

Researching it properly wouldn't have done you any good, because I know I researched that shit as much as was humanly possible. Either the pool of people in beta was a gigantic bunch of retards unable to do the most basic analysis of probability, or Blizzard massively decreased the spawn rate of blood as a bonus material on elite meaty beast work orders in the launch day patch.

I ended up knocking down the two barns on my alts yesterday before calling it a night. It was just too much hassle to go out and trap shit for such miniscule rewards, plus I still had never seen a single scavenger across all three garrisons. I also knocked down the lumber mill on my main, which was a mistake to ever build in the first place when it could have been a trading post instead. All three characters got a rank 2 inn in the newly opened slot so that I could pick up a pair of scavengers for each along with (hopefully) Millhouse from the quest sometime in the coming week. Not sure how long the inn is worth keeping beyond that point. My alts have trading posts so there's not much reason to knock it down ever, but the DK might need the post eventually.

Basically I have a main with:
Barracks / Bunker (will take this to rank 3 and experiment with the rumors that work orders actually generate a decent amount of follower gear, as opposed to rank 2 which is 90+% scraps only)
Barn / Inn
Engr / BS / Salvage

And alts that are:
Barracks / Stables
Trading Post / Inn
Alch / LW / Salvage and LW / BS / Salvage

The LW and BS buildings are there on the character that doesn't actually have the profession to make the armors, freeing up the character with the prof to only make upgrade items (with my non-existent blood, of course). I feel this is currently about as ideal a set up as I could have. It just sucks that it cost me close to ten thousand additional gold to get there, along with a ton of wasted GR.

Salvage level 3 and War mill level 3 seem to have made big crates of salvage quite amazing. I have gained 2 665 boe epics from crates and 3 645 follower items in just under a week with both at level 3. I also recommend getting 3 followers to 645 asap so you can get the 665 high maul raid gear mission.

Going to spend the next 20 weeks replacing my entire garrison with Epic Mount followers.

Hah epic mount is awesome, I got lucky and got it on 4 followers to start with and I have been using my inn to try to get more every week and picking them if I get a blue or epic roll, tho my favorite follower now is blook who rolled burst of power and his unique combat exp thing, he is awesome at boosting missions up into reasonable success rates.

I feel that an Inn at least for a few weeks is a no-brainer for anyone that finds the missions sub-game fun (I do, wish it had an app though). I used the first two weeks with the Inn to get me some scavengers and I'm actually unsure if I should go for a third or start plugging the holes in my line-up. Many followers you collect from quests come with pointless profession perks or bodyguard, neither of which are any good for missions (nor is an xp bonus, beyond maxing them out faster). Unless you get an Inn you'll need alot of dancers to replace that stuff with worthwhile traits (which doesnt even work for bodyguard). I do need to look at the list of missions, particularly the high ones, to start dropping the crappy traits - because I'm sure Blizzard is not going to take notice and fix any imbalance regarding that before 6.3 in 2016.

I have yet to get the Inn to lvl3 because you need all those quests done, but are the missions you get from that upgrade worth it?

For actual player gear it might differ but I feel I get enough follower gear out of salvage yard 2 that I wont bother with bunker 3. I'm gonna keep my lumber mill until I have those 2 followers and then probably tear it down once I have a comfy surplus of GR.

And I wouldnt want to do that on 5 alts for sure, but it's no different then other stuff in the game that you have to redo with alts, it all gets tedious. I've never been one to play more then 1-2 characters to the level cap though, Only ever maxed priest and hunter in WoW while at best dabbling in the rest.

Mr Creed_sl said:

I have yet to get the Inn to lvl3 because you need all those quests done, but are the missions you get from that upgrade worth it?

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If they add new missions to the existing pool, diluting the mix with shit that gives 100-150G at L100 (there are none for i615+ currently), then I would say to never build a rank 3 inn.

If the missions have their own pool and expand the number of missions available in the list at any given time, then it should be good for having an extra source of xp to level newly recruited followers with. Even though they only give gold instead of bonus xp, you can use them to level any follower by not caring whether you succeed or fail.

I believe that barracks patrol missions are the latter, so treasure huntersshouldbe the same.

Full list of the missions:Treasure - Garrison Missions - World of Warcraft

Missions never seem to take from the existing pool, when I had no followers who weren't lvl 100 I had like 6 open a day, go back to having some lvl99 tho and its back to like 20 missions a day. Spawn rate of lvl 100 missions actually seems to be an issue when you are still trying to lvl followers to epic, I need to be able to send my lvl 100s on lvl 99 xp missions to lvl them because they give you so few lvl 100 xp missions.

I just started looking at my followers a little more closely last week. A was willy-nilly upgrading anyone/everyones gear as they hit 100 then I started to notice that literally all of my followers suck so much ass. I saw on these forums people were getting these traits, scavenger/dancer/mount whatever. Literally all of mine have stupid worthless traits that will take me longer to fix than it will to gear myself through the expansion.

Edit

And most of them are green quality

Yeah, L100 missions really need work, and it still seems like the person who designed them didn't have a fucking clue what he was doing. There's too few missions given, they all take 4-10 hours, it's often impossible to do the bonus xp missions with followers that actually need the xp which in turn vastly slows down the process of getting followers to epic, missions without bonus xp and missions you fail give far too little xp, some plain L100 missions without an ilvl req have too-strict requirements for counters, and the list goes on and on. The higher ilvl missions aren't as bad--aside from the bonus xp ones--though you're still basically at the mercy of RNG when it comes to being able to successfully complete 5-6 counter missions.

Having to always keep at least one 90-94 and one 95-99 follower around if you want any hope at getting a decent amount of salvage boxes is very annoying too.

I think keeping one follower at 99 is good enough, 99 seems to be its own tier so you will only get lvl 99 missions from that follower and nothing lower. It gives lots of missions that give 3k or so xp for like 2hr missions, so really the same xp rate as a lvl 100 mission for 12k xp that takes 8 hours, you do end up spending more resources tho. All of my followers are blue now tho, so I just another solid week of missions and most will be epic.