Home Sweet Home – The Garrisons are coming

Given that I won’t be leveling straight away due to Mr Harpy’s work schedule, the first thing I’m probably going to do when I wake up on Thursday morning is start establishing Garrisons for the many Alts. This naturally has required some planning and whilst I’m still torn about a couple of buildings on some characters, I thought I’d share my rough Garrison master plan.

Snowflower – Holy Priest and mostly main

My ultimate goal for Snowflower will be as follows:

Building Name	Size of Plot	Rational behind choice
Dwarven Bunker	Large	Given that I haven’t raided at all in Cataclysm, a slightly higher chance to get decent upgrades whilst questing would be useful.I like the transmogrification sets, especially the cloth one which can be gathered through the Bunker.Making my seals of tempered fate go further will be useful given how much I hate farming.
Stables	Large	Show me a list and I’m hooked. Collecting whether mounts, pets or toys is a massive draw to me so being able to get mounts through the Stables is a big part of the attraction.As a Holy Priest being able to gather quest items on the go rather than necessarily having to dismount and fight suits me when solo.Being dazed is up there with the suppression rooms in terms of my pet WoW hates. Riding 20 percent faster on Draenor means getting places faster and could be handy for that odd bit of world PvP.
Lunarfall Inn	Medium	Ignoring the RP aspect, i.e. how can you have a Garrison without an Inn.. this appeals again to the collector in me. There are two pets, the adorable Everbloom Peachick and the Sentinel’s Companion available from questing through the Inn as well as toys like Gamon’s Braid and the Void Totem.
Trading Post	Medium	Whilst reputations are perhaps less important in this expansion than they have been in the past, i.e. not providing much in the way of gear upgrades, they do give toys and pets.  I’m also particularly interested in both Wrynn’s Vanguard as they allow you to acquire some PvP gear and also the Sha’tari Defense whose goodies are only available through the Trading Post.
Engineering Works	Small	One of Snowflower’s primary professions
Alchemy Lab	Small	One of Snowflower’s primary professions plus I’ll already have a herb gatherer in Draenor before Snow due to leveling constraints.
Enchanter’s Study	Small	Because disenchanting always comes in useful.

 

I chose to leave out the Barracks because I’m not hugely interested in the whole follower side, I know not having it will slow down my efforts to get 20 followers to 100 in order to upgrade my Dwarven Bunker but I can live with that. I also don’t like the idea of having a “body guard” whilst out and about given that I already have one in the shape of Mr Harpy and our experiences with NPCs has been lacklustre to say the least, i.e. pulling extra mobs, keeping them in combat with you whilst you’re trying to shadowmeld to avoid dying etc. In fact I’m not particularly keen on this building on any character but Mentzelia will probably draw the short straight mostly because I’m not that good at being a Boomkin.

Whilst I love the look of the Mage Tower, I didn’t feel that it brought enough to the table other than looking pretty. My Mage however will obviously have one because … well you can hardly call yourself a Mage without a Tower now can you! My Warlock will also probably have one because she wants everything that Mages have.

Sproutling will definitely be picking up the Barn, both because it’s useful for tailoring and also because being a Gnome she wants to get herself a pygmy cow.

Saying no to the Gladiator’s Sanctum was hard on my main but I suspect my Mage will be picking up and blowing the ashes off the bones. Plus out of combat regen isn’t particularly important to a healer.

Needless to say that by Friday, this table could be completely obsolete.

For proper Garrison suggestions, driven by something other than what in my personal option looks good, check out the Godmother’s wonderfully awesome Garrison guide complete with everything you need to know about Garrisons.

Grumbles about Garrisons

Don’t get me wrong, Blizzard most definitely had me at “Mage Tower” but there is a distinct hum of rebellion in the air.

If Garrisons are going to be such a part of our new lives on Draenor, then we need to love the aesthetics. My first character was a Human, a Warlock with a temper which belied her innocent bovine smile but she’s been the only Human I’ve managed to get anywhere near the level cap. My last attempt, a Paladin languishes in the Redridge Inn picking flowers and wondering what she did wrong. I play Gnomes, Elves, Dead Humans, Orcs, Aliens with hooves, anything in fact apart from Humans and yet, it’s Human architecture being forced upon me even on a brave new world.

We knew we wanted the Garrison to feel like a big new feature, but we also wanted to keep it familiar, like bringing a piece of home to Draenor. There is just something about running into Stormwind or Orgrimmar that evokes that sense of faction pride

(From here).

Yes I have an idea of just how unreasonable it would be ask the development teams to create unique artwork for every building but then why couldn’t certain buildings reflect different races? For example the Jewelcrafting one could be based on something Draenic and for the Alliance, your flower garden could take on a Night Elfish feel. You’d still have the same number of buildings to design but it would allow those of us who aren’t particularly keen on granite, stone and wood (or spikes and red banners for the Horde) to have a tiny place to call home in this savage world.

We (or at least I) already have a clear idea of where my characters reside and whilst I know that the Garrisons are meant to be front line encampments on dangerous and foreign soil, so that things like Mentzelia’s home from home as shown below really wouldn’t work, it’s hard to shake free from those ideas.

My second and perhaps more serious concern stems from beginning to realise just how important these Garrisons are going to be. I hate being told what to do. The second someone strongly suggests I should carry out a specific course of action my hackles come up and the pig-tailed brat masquerading as a devil on my shoulder sticks out her tongue. I must admit it surprises most people that I manage to work for an organisation very much into hierarchy but what I don’t think they (including my boss) actually realize is that 99 percent of the time I do what I want. Luckily this currently mirrors official policy fairly closely so my inability to follow anything which sounds like an order isn’t particularly obvious. Show me a line and my automatic response is to cross it so yes, perhaps a chunk of this is motivated by the fact it’s not going to be optional like the farms.

I’m also not a great fan of single player content in WoW and I can’t quite shake the concern that if questing and leveling is linked so thoroughly to your Garrison then this will play a part. I really didn’t enjoy the single person scenarios leading the story line on the Isle of Thunder for example, primarily because doing them as a undergeared healer hurt. Of course the obvious response to that would be “spec damage” but at the end of the day, being forced into a spec you don’t enjoy playing takes the fun out of something just as much as struggling to do it because you hit like a wet kitten. I rarely play alone and certainly when it comes to leveling up through an expansion, that’s definitely something me and Mr Harpy do together. However we’re both interested in different things, he’d like his Alliance garrison to be covered in spikes and dripping with the blood of people silly enough to come around to borrow the sugar. I want gardens and a little bridge over the river. I want a wreath on the door and somewhere to reflex, whereas he’s more likely to spend the minimum amount of time he can there because unless you can grow your own Horde to kill… he’d rather be out in the “real” world.

Am I being negative? Sure I am. I have a chest infection and a tendency to think the worse at all times, it’s part of my coping mechanism. I want to love the Garrisons because they have Mage Towers full of books and a garden but that’s also tainted by doubt. Perhaps it will be just like that other game with a Mage Tower in it, I start out determined to do one thing whether that’s not date Alistair or not love Garrisons and the opposite happens… who knows.

This is definitely not a portent of things to come!

One thing likely to win me over is customisation. The devil is in the details. Give me a tiny Hearthstone board and NPCs playing it in my Inn because I play Hearthstone sometimes. Let me grow some plants for artistic value rather than their ability to be grinded into potions. Give us the chance to reflect a tiny part of our character’s personality, not just in things like the mounts in the stables and what battle pets we have lying around in the shade but in the books, trinkets and followers we have.