Friday, November 8, 2013

Garrisons: Warlords of Draenor Gold Making

In case you live under a rock in terms of Blizzard news, Blizzcon is going on and they announced the new expansion: Warlords of Draenor.  Here's the cinematic teaser, the Warlords of Draenor Official Website as well as some info if you need to catch up.  The first major thing that I see that will have a major impact on gold making is Garrisons, for which Blizzard has already released a Garrison Mini-Guide.


"the Garrison will play a major role in your character’s Professions in this expansion—similar to how your farm was key... only on a much more epic scale." -Blizzard




Garrisons
Yes Garrisons, Blizzard's answer to player houses.  Not only do you get to build just a house, you build an entire Garrison!  While there's not a whole lot of information out there yet, and we probably won't know much until the Beta PTR is out (or perhaps later in Blizzcon), but there's info out already that's interesting and relevant.

First of all, some highlights of the articles explaining Garrisons from the above sources, emphasis by me:
Your Garrison will expand and you’ll be able to choose which upgrades you’d like to construct from a variety of options. You’ll also meet and recruit NPC allies and followers who will join you at the Garrison, each providing different benefits.
For example, a miner rescued from a dungeon might take up residence and help gather Mining resources.     ...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.

...You may instead decide to build a Smithy and recruit a Blacksmith to research new plans and craft valuable resources (such as those with daily cooldowns)...

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.

Profession Buildings
So lots of interesting tidbids there I'd say.  You build your own city (on Rock 'n' Roll), and you are going to have customization abilities that include buildings such as mines that allow you to have NPCs gather nodes for you, and other buildings that can give you access to professions your toon doesn't have.  Of course how they implement that latter part will be interesting.  They already mentioned that they did not want to give you enough plots for access to every profession, which is good for gold makers, but the fact that they will give you access to say Jewelcrafting if you don't have it, could potentially hurt our bottom lines.  On the other hand, normal players may not choose profession buildings based on the other options, but only time will tell.  I do look forward to min/maxing, and learning about the rates of the different abilites of the buildings though.  For example you can choose between faster mining rate and higher proc rate of rare ores on a mine.  It will be fun to do the analysis and data gathering to see how they impact your gold making!

What I really like though is the ability to have NPCs go out and farm for you.  This could end up being a double edged sword because of the whole "the mats are free so it's 100% profit" crowd, but I think in the long term it will be nice to have some supplemental side materials.  Assuming Garrisons aren't "one per account" having a lot of these at "max level" could mean a substantial amount materials coming your way.  Perhaps the new way to farm?

Research
As mentioned above, you will also be able to recruit NPCs with professions to research new plans and craft valuable cooldowns for you.  This is interesting.  So instead of having an item take say 28 days of cooldowns to make, your NPC might be able to make 3-4 in that time, getting your epics on the AH faster not to mention having the NPCs do pattern research for you.  Now it has not been specified if this will be the only way of research (I doubt it will), but again these are quite the interesting developments, and I'm looking forward to more information being released, and testing all this out on the PTR Soon™.

Casual
This part I like.  Running a farm on 11 different alts ( I did not, but some did) could be a huge time sink, and hopefully once your Garrison is max level, you don't have to worry about that anymore.  Since there's no actual farming involved and Blizzard has mentioned that the NPCs will continue to do tasks while you're offline, it's a cool new feature that I can say I'm fully behind.

I'll be releasing some more relevant posts in the next few days and with Garrisons as the info comes out.

Cheers,

Phat Lewts

5 comments:

  1. I love this and i hate this! Much like Marmite (ask an English person what it is). This is going to be the death of professions, now although that puts me out of a job, im really excited! Goldmaking is becoming farm more passive in wow and this is the first step, the Tillers farm basically providing free mats was just there test. I have been hearing rumors for about 6 months now that there are going to be MASSIVE changes to how the professions work in wow and i think this is confirmation of it. I still have my money on Jewelcrafting either being removed completely or drastically changed as gems just dont work as intended anymore.
    Some shocking changes, but some exciting ones!

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  2. It seems like a swipe at botters to me, as well as perhaps a dig at gold makers too. I think it may push a lot of casual gold makers out of the market as the effort required to make money will increase as profits fall. I got four maxed tiller farms, and I've not gone near one of them for month so it will be interesting to see how much of a take up this gets fully, though as you say if its always working in the background it won't be such a grind.

    I think its cool that they've introduced this - its going back to the beginnings of RTS Warcraft and bringing it into the MMROPG world - a test of ideas for Universe of Starcraft - or what ever project Titan really is.

    The only real downer to the Blizzcon announcement was that no one was in game and my Friday night profit stunk :(

    Bones

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  3. One thing that isn't mentioned here but was mentioned at Blizzcon was that yes we will have access to professions you haven't learned BUT it will be limited. From this we can probably assume that you will have rudimentary access to professions you haven't leveled. Which will probably limit what you are able to craft, gather, etc.

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  4. As long as you can disenchant from Garrison, that will be the building everyone has.

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  5. Really looking forward to what Blizzard have in store for this and for professions as a whole. It's nigh on impossible to tell with the info we have what impact this will have on the economy. I severely doubt that a follower will be able to do enough to push a real-player crafter out of the market.
    I'd say we'll also have to factor in that your limited number of followers will have to choose between crafting and Missions/Dungeons/Raids. Perhaps the time required for them to complete a craft will not be competitive with the rewards that they could be getting for the above.
    Also, we don't know how difficult it will be to obtain recipes for the followers. Maybe the blacksmithing cooldown recipe will be rare enough that it won't have a major impact on the time-to-market for more than a handful of people.
    I'll be happy if it lets me afk prospect and disenchant :)

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