World of Warcraft: Warlords of Draenor

[eldargal]

All the things we know about the next WoW expansion (http://www.wowhead.com/news=223446/warlords-of-draenor-what-we-know-so-far).

I stopped playing WoW in a big way years ago but I check out the new expansions just to see what's what. This one though, oh god. It includes player housing. Upgradeable player housing with multiple buildings wit hdifferent functions and trophies from kills and the like. In short, everything this Gal looks for in MMO player housing.>< Just when I got clean.:( It's like someone at Blizzard said 'You know what? **** it, we are going to drag EldarGal back to this game kicking and screaming'.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYueIdI_2L0

[eldargal]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OMzeih7_7Hc

[eldargal]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=obT445jFX2E

In Warlords of Draenor, you’ll make a permanent impact on the world with a Garrison: your own personal fortress that you build, staff, and manage. You’ll customize your Garrison’s layout, appearance, and gameplay effects, and attract followers to operate it. The Garrison allows World of Warcraft players to own a larger part of the world than ever before, and opens up a wide variety of interesting gameplay decisions—with as much or as little micromanagement as you wish.

Your Garrison exists seamlessly in the world, but you won’t need to go into an instance portal to visit your home base—as you travel through Draenor, you’ll see your Garrison looming on the horizon.

Read on for more details.
Followers
Followers are NPCs (non-player characters) that you recruit to join your Garrison. You’ll send them on missions to improve your Garrison and earn loot for your character. You can also allocate them to complete tasks—things like crafting or gathering resources, which they’ll do whether you’re online or offline.

Followers have a character level, an item level, and traits that affect missions and tasks. For example, if they have the Mining trait, you’ll be able to assign them to a Mine in your Garrison to gather resources for you. There are common, uncommon, rare, and epic followers, and their rarity affects the number of traits they can have.

Recruiting Followers

To run an effective Garrison, you’ll first need to recruit followers. Some will make their own way to your base, but you can also upgrade your Inn to attract more followers. You can also win followers to your cause as you progress through the game’s story, when completing quests, or simply by coughing up the right sum of gold to hire mercenaries.

When they’re not away on missions, your followers hold down posts at your Garrison, where you can visit them at any time. A major goal for the Garrison system is for followers to be dynamic and interesting—for example, if a follower fails a mission that takes place in a local dungeon, they might be taken prisoner; the next time you adventure in that dungeon, you’ll be able to rescue them.
Missions
Mission Objectives

You’ll send your followers on missions for varied purposes. Successful missions will give you the resources you need to keep developing your Garrison, but you’ll also have the chance to acquire powerful loot for your character, and your followers will gain experience for each mission they run.

The resources you’ll acquire during missions include both existing crafting reagents and Garrison-specific materials. For example, if you assign a follower to a mining mission, you could receive ore, but you might also unearth stone, a new kind of resource used to construct and upgrade buildings.

Though followers are great for solo play, the system also has multiplayer elements. When you dispatch a party of your followers on certain missions, you’ll also be able to join forces with your guildmates’ followers, even if your guildmate is offline.

Follower Progression

Followers grow in power in a way that mirrors players’ progression. From levels 90–100, followers will gain character levels, which have a significant impact on their abilities and mission success chance. They’ll also increase their item level as you equip them with follower-specific gear; once they’ve reached level 100, equipment will have a larger role to play in their overall effectiveness.
Garrisons & Buildings
Building Functions

Buildings are the individual “pieces” of your Garrison—Stables, Farms, Mines, Armories, and more. They improve your ability to recruit, use, and train followers; to craft; to complete missions; and to run missions more quickly by reducing your followers’ downtime.

Each building in your garrison can be upgraded, which amplifies its mechanical effect and visuals. For example, an upgraded Barracks will grow bigger and more impressive, but it’ll also increase the number of followers you can send on missions at one time (for example, 5 followers at once for a level 1 Barracks, then 7 followers, then 12—though the exact numbers are still in flux).

Customizing Your Garrison’s Look

Buildings in your Garrison can be placed in a number of configurations. You can only place small-sized buildings (primarily crafting-related) on small plots; a larger building, like a Barracks, won’t fit. Bigger buildings can be constructed early on—even a “starting” Garrison has room for a large structure. As your Garrison increases in level, you’ll get access to more and larger building space, and increase the versatility and power of your holdings.

Garrisons are visually distinct depending on whether you’re a Horde or Alliance player, and you’ll be able to place your Garrison in one of several zones on Draenor. You’ll also specify your Garrison’s layout (the physical location of buildings within your Garrison’s walls), and select the buildings you’d like to include. Choosing to “spec” your buildings (more on that below) will also change cosmetic aspects of those buildings, like furniture types and decorations, in addition to imparting different gameplay effects.

Garrisons can be shown off to same-faction players in your party, who can walk around your base, converse with your NPCs, and appraise your layout. You’ll have a reason to show your Garrison off, too: trading resources. For example, if you have extra building resources, you’ll be able to bring them to a friend’s Garrison and exchange them for materials that you need.

Specializing Buildings

When specializing your Garrison’s buildings, you’ll choose a variant on the bonuses and abilities the building provides. 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.

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.

Plant Your Flag on Draenor!

Your Garrison will be woven deeply into the storyline of Warlords of Draenor, beginning when your faction leader commissions you to establish a beachhead on this alien world—but the ultimate fate of your personal fortress on Draenor is entirely up to you.
*whimper*

[Deadlift]

I haven't really played WoW for 3-4 years. I pop back into it every now and then to play the latest expansion and then get bored. But this may well be a good excuse to dive back in on a more regular basis. Anything more on being able to start at level 90 as opposed to having to grind for months ?

[eldargal]

Yep, you get a free level 90 character with the expansion, it seems to be an upgrade you can use on a character. My main is level 90 already but it will be great to boost one of my other characters to 90 without grinding. Particularly through Outlands, that's where I struggle.

[Deadlift]

I'm the same, I have a lvl 90 Paladin (holydin - retridin) and a lvl 90 DeathKnight (blood - frost) but I fancy maybe trying a rogue or monk but after having grinded though outlands, north end and the great seas god knows how many times it gets old very quick.

Do you play horde or alliance Eldargal ? Thinking if we get enough interest a social guild of BoLsters could be good.

[eldargal]

Alliance, have a 90 mage.:) I want to play Horde as well but that whole grinding thing... Might use the 90 boost on my Blood Elf rogue but then I have a warrior I'd like to boost to 90 as well.:rolleyes:

[Wolfshade]

I saw this and thought WoW can't be bothered to create a thread.

[Kirsten]

I enjoyed playing WoW but never obsessed. I keep thinking of getting back into it but there are so many expansions I have no idea how it works any more. do you need all the expansions or can you just buy the latest one?

[eldargal]

I'm not sure actually, I've always bought the expansions one after the other. *googles*

There is a digital starter edition you can play for free but it looks like you only have to buy the latest expansion, Mists of Pandaria and not the previous ones. If you already have an old copy of WoW then I've no idea but it looks like it would patch in the previous expansions for free as you can't buy them in the Battle.net store.

[Kirsten]

I have the original game, and the first two expansions, but not the others, cataclysm, wrath of the panda people etc.

[eldargal]

I think you'd just have to buy Pandaria as Cataclysm isn't on the store

Aha, found it! Yes the basic edition includes Cataclysm as of a month ago (http://www.shacknews.com/article/81601/world-of-warcraft-adds-cataclysm-to-basic-edition) so if you resub you should have it automatically.

[Kirsten]

cool I shall have to reinstall the games and buy pandas

[Kirsten]

4.4gb to go...

the downloader is really slow.

[Overlordgaz]

I haven't played for a few years either, but this expansion interests me and may drag me back in..

[Chronowraith]

Despite being widely criticized as "Kung Fu Panda"... I really enjoyed Mists of Pandaria. So far my least favorite was Cataclysm although I admit I loved the new zones, the story, and the restructuring of the old world was sorely needed after so many years of no change in standard azeroth.

I really hate timetravel and alternate dimensions and stuff though (usually lazy writing in my opinion) so the idea of a draenor based game after the first expansion baffles me(outland is draenor after it was destroyed). There are so many other avenues I feel they could have explored. So I may opt out of this expansion. Of course, I say that every expansion and end up playing. That's why I have too many max level characters.

That being said... I'm glad to see them deliver on player housing. Admittedly it's only 9 years after it was originally promised.. but hey... who's counting?

[eldargal]

I don't care for the time travel element either, especially when Outland needs a Cataclysm style revamp as the 60-70 leveling grind is the worst in the game now. But the garrison thing makes up for it considerably, it looks like a brilliant form of player housing based on what info we have so far. Time travel isn't new to Warcraft either so I can give it a pass though I do agree it's usually used fairly lazily.

[Gotthammer]

I don't care for the time travel element either...

Wait, what? But it's... ohhhhh, not the Dr Who thread. I blame too many tabs >.<

[lurcy]

I just can't help trying every new expansion of WoW and quit it when my time card (http://www.live4mmo.com/wow-game-time-card) run out of time