Build your own base on Draenor, WoW version of Housing.
Your friends can come and see it, trade resources.
Collect followers and send them on missions. Name them!
Customize your base. Pick the zone and buildings
Offline progression (days to weeks)
Integrated into the world, no loading screens.
Allows you to get epic gear, your own land, limited access to professions you don't have.
You can build a mine in your base and go and mine, or send followers to go mine for you.
Your garrison can be expanded over three tiers. Each expansion gives you more plots of land.
You can move your garrison later.
Collect trophies and build monuments. Access them by completing achievements. Mount a rare spawn's head in your Town Hall.
Buildings have unique bonuses, such as reducing the recovery time for your followers after a mission or a free resurrection in the world once a day. These can be upgraded and customized with specializations after three tiers of upgrades. This is like talents for your building.
The Inn lets you find new followers every day. It comes with a kitchen that has a cooking NPC. The specializations let you pick Tank, DPS, or Healer followers.
There are three tiers of art for every building, inside and outside change with each upgrade.
Alliance and Horde get unique art for buildings.
Many ways to collect followers, bribe or recruit them.
Followers level up by doing missions. Even after the level cap, followers can increase their item level.
Followers have quality or rarity and can be customized and named.
Send them on Raids, Dungeons, and Quests. Matching up followers and their traits with missions is almost a minigame.
There are also specialized missions, which are unlocked by owning certain buildings. These have bonuses that are unique.
The Garrison sounds like the next iteration of the farm. Basically you do a little something there, come back after a period of time, and then you get stuff. I always thought the farm was Blizz’s first take on player housing, something they could build on. Well they built on it, and this is going to be their housing system.
I don’t believe anything formal has been announced. Blizz seems to have gotten a little faster with the expansion releases, but I can’t imagine this will be any earlier than July/September. I think the best indicator is usually the closed beta start date, as closed beta usually takes roughly the same amount of time.
I’m not sure. What they’re showing seems to be a lot, lot more developed than what they’ve shown at previous launches. Most of the terrain’s in, they have real maps not the top-down blockouts, etc.
Looks pretty cool. I haven’t played WoW in about 4-5 years and I know it has changed tremendously. Tried it for about a week after the Panda expansion came out, but it was just no longer the game for me. This might make me look at it again…
Personally, I wish they would remove flying mounts for the expansion. Keep it where you currently have it, but get rid of it in the expansion zone. Can use any RP excuse you want; legion air patrols would work. Just some way to keep people on the ground.
I know I’m of the minority, but I think flying ruined most of the immersion for WoW. You jet from place to place with no thought of what is in between. Hard to feel like part of the world when you have no reason to interact with it anymore.
Most expansions limit flying until you hit max level. In this case 100. After running around leveling, you want to be able to fly. It’s not a detriment after leveling through the entire expansion.
I think it’s one of the weaknesses of “max level”. You aren’t in the world anymore. You’re flying everywhere, doing some dailies, and logging out. It’s like you spend 5 - 10 levels working through an expansion, being immersed in it, and once you max level it’s done. You aren’t in the expansion anymore, you’re in the air, just touching down now and then to pick up something or kill something for a daily. For me, there is no longer a sense of place once I can fly over the terrain.
I’m cautiously looking forward to the garrison mechanic. Interested to see how it fits into the game. If it’s just another mini-game, it will keepme occupied for a bit before I give up on it. If it truly can impact your character, I’ll be all over it.
Are the garrisons in instanced areas? They have to be, right? So it’s your own little private instance that you can invite people into or can anyone wander in?
They interest me but I’m not all that interested in building something just to build it. Is there a competitive aspect to garrisons? I’d like it to be almost like a tower defense game where I can set my defenses up and spawn an attack and see how my little garrison does.
Yes, if you treat these expansions as $40 games where you play through max level then run a couple dungeons and quit, you avoid the MMO grind entirely and find that they’re actually still a great value.
Are there any people here still actively playing? Even casually? I get the sense that World of Warcraft is a fine choice for My First MMO, but that so many recent MMOs have gone so far beyond WoW’s model that us core gamer types can never go back. Who can play WoW after Guild Wars, DC Universe, Secret World, Star Wars Old Republic, or pretty much any other MMO from the last three or four years?
I’d point out that SWTOR in particular feels in UI terms a massive step back from WoW, Tom. It’s far less responsive, and people can’t use addons. I know a number of people who went back to WoW on that basis.
(It was one reason I left SWTOR after max lvl, although it was some time after that I went back to WoW)
Very easily. I’ve max leveled all those games you mentioned, but they really leave me flat once I’ve leveled. WoW feels like it has so much more to offer in terms of content and end game stuff that doesn’t include scheduled raiding. It also is so very easy to jump back in after a long absence and not be overwhelmed by the game. (important for people who leave and come back)
For reference, I quit MOP after I maxed a character and was away from WoW for probably 8 months after that. I recently redubbed and played through a ton of new content that had been released including the most recent patch. Content that was not just new stories, but totally new mechanics as well. I stayed subbed for about 2 months, devoured all the content and unsubbed again. I will most likely do the same thing with WoD.
The game is 9 years old and still has 7 million subscribers. I’d say it’s more than just My First MMO.
Indeed. My first “real” MMO was Eve, and I can’t see going back…I got so bored.
WoW? I’ll jump on occasionally. Although I do wonder what the heck they’re thinking with WoD…but I also thought that with Mists, so. (And yes, the 5.4 zone is boring…)
