I know that I’m really, really late to this discussion, but after playing Warlords of Draenor for almost a week now I’m curious why the Garrison management system hasn’t been implemented on iOS. The auction house can be fully managed from the WoW App, so we know it’s not too much to ask.
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[/su_lightbox]For some reason I see a lot of people saying they hate Garrisons. Am I missing something entirely here? Sure, they take lots of upkeep if you want to utilize them to their fullest, but they aren’t mandatory once you’re at 100, right? I could be way wrong there.
I like knowing I can earn tons of cash by maintaining my Garrison. I prefer Garrison work orders over the daily quest hub B.S. in every way. I like sending my companions out on missions to level them up, and I’m not even getting rewards from them yet. I like mining my ore, finding wood, using my profession buildings, etc.
Back on topic, I think the interface lends itself to an app. Simply log in to the Armory app or whatever, choose Garrison, and manage sending your troops on missions. You could even see the timers left on your missions and receive push notifications. Â To me this would make managing your Garrison even easier, and might even alleviate some of what people dislike.
Sadly, I guess Garrisons might be going away in Legion. I think the “Class Hall” will be public, and not a private Garrison-like feature. I think providing the Garrison feature in Legion would be great for those of us who enjoy the carrot it provides.
Anyone else really enjoy Garrisons and wish they would stick around in Legion?
Garrisons are so great at first. Give it month though, once your followers are maxed and the only quests rewards left you want from them are reroll stones and gold… it – sadly – get pretty stale.
Gold continues to pay for your subscription, though. I might be one of those weird people who loves to accumulate wealth even if I do nothing with it.
I can see that once you run out of stuff it runs a bit stale, albeit still plenty useful. That’s not the major complaint I’m seeing. People seem to hate it simply based on what it is, and not what it does.
I’ve had a lot of fun recruiting followers around the world and in my Tavern (with lots of Epic Mount followers, most of my missions can be finished in a fraction of the time 8hours -> 1hour? Yes please). They’ve helped me with my epic ring quest, do catch up gearing on my lesser played alts, even sent them on raid missions that gives 655 gear (not as relevant today with Tanaan sadly). Having a bodyguard either tank my elites, or pitch in extra DPS, and if you grind enough rep with them give you perks like popping down a mission table out in the field. It can help me make money, get garrison resources for my shipyard… well you get the point.
At some point you may get sick of it. At which point you can stop. But its a very versatile thing. And its a great way to keep busy while queuing for your next dungeon or LFR (which might have a garrison given quest for it). I’ve enjoyed it more than I realized, and I’ve certainly utilized them for more than a month (getting 25 followers to 675 gear takes a while)
See that sounds fun to me. That’s exactly how I see Garrisons playing out for me until Legion.
Yeah it gets stale but its not even that much of an effort to log in twice a day and redo the missions. At this point I’ve basically turned it into a game of how much gold can my minions bring me each day.
I think most people’s complaints about garrisons is that they took people out of the world and cities. If the garrison had been the same exact thing but within or attached to a main city it would have made a huge difference.
That’s one of the main reasons I actually like the Garrison. I hated having to sit in a city full of other people just spamming or jumping around. The cities became nothing but staging grounds with little purpose beyond an auction house and a mailbox.
Cities lots the “social” and “in the world” feeling for me long ago in WoW.
Garrisons are great while you’re leveling. The issue comes later when you have 2-3+ max-level characters and are cycling through each Garrison while spamming an addon button to collect all your resources. That’s… the entire endgame. There is zero reason to ever leave. Unless you raid, I guess, in which case you teleport from one instance to another one, raiding for a few hours each week inbetween the iOS minigame that Garrisons turn into. Or you could do what I did, and collect a full suit of raid-level epics just from the Garrison.
I mean, imagine if there was iOS/Android control of your Garrison: half the population would have no reason to actually log on at all.
The entire thing reminds me of the Argent Tournament experiment, when Blizzard created a raid without trash. By the time ICC rolled around, everyone was practically cheering for the return of raid trash. Same thing here – I have never missed daily quests so much until Warlords.
Those “fill the bar up” dailies are the devil. I don’t even want to do Tanaan anymore after getting the pathfinder achievement.
I haven’t played WoW with Garrisons but lord knows I’ve read enough people complaining about them. If you still like them in 2-3 months from now you’ll be in a very select group. Everyone liked them at the beginning though.
@Azuriel: To me all the reasons people hate Garrisons are the reason I would actually like them.
As for the iOS app, are Garrisons really the only reason people log in? They still log in to actually do all the things they think Garrisons stand in their way of accomplishing. People don’t want to tend their Garrison but feel they have to, so they get stuck there.
I LOVED the lack of trash. Absolutely adored every second of it. Best raid they ever made and how every raid boss should be. Just like Onyxia. Maybe that’s why I sorta like the cities. Lets me focus on actually doing something that isn’t running around the world completing the horrible dailies.
get a salvage yard when you can, more gold and follower upgrades.
i love the garrisons. i just wish they did more with them since the xpack come out. i guess they gave us the shipyards, same idea but a step back if you ask me.
“I have never missed daily quests so much until Warlords.”
Yikes!
At the end of my days in WoW I found myself “playing” (by that I mean logging on) out of guilt over the amount of gold I would lose if I didn’t for that day.
It started to feel like a second job, only one like back in high school when I worked mindless retail.
Basically showing up to collect a paycheck.
The minute it feels like a job and not like I’m playing a game, or the minute I think it will feel that way, I quit. Happens in every game.
Have you been keeping up with Tobold’s posts? He seems to be in a similar position to you and has been back for quite a bit longer. He apparently enjoys the garrison gold making game in a way similar to how you say you do, so it seems to reason that there is room for people to like them even months and months into being back. Although I don’t want to put words into his mouth, that’s just the impression I got from his posts.
I enjoyed the garrison missions, but it got tiresome on alts quickly. I don’t think I would have ever minded them had I stuck to one character. Did they ever make it so garrison progress on mains carries over to alts? There was talk of that before I quit.
@SineNomine: Nope, I haven’t. Sounds like there are plenty of people sharing my point of view. Once again though it’s that “I want to raid and get phat epics and I want it to be hard for everyone else to” crowd being the loudest.
@Jenks: I can see how if one was to have multiple alts and try to manage the Garrison on all of them it could quickly become a multi-hour ordeal. Not for me. To my knowledge they are all independent. I hear having a gemcutter on alts is a good way to make money (300g per alt per day or something just from 20 seconds of gemcutter time).
I think many people burned out of garrisons because they felt they had to do the mission table, work orders, mine, herb garden and fishing daily on not just one character, but also their 6-9 alts.
Yes, doing garrison work on 8 characters everyday would feel extreme. But these same people are the ones who complained when the 25 daily quests per day limit was removed because ‘Augh, now I HAVE to do ALL THE DAILIES’.
People need to learn self restraint, it’s ok not to be optimal and to fall behind a bit on progression if it means the game can remain a game for you.
The only time I log onto alts everyday for things is during the Halloween event because I REALLY want horseman’s mount.
I still really like the garrisons for having a place of my own in the world and for the Follower and Shipyard missions. I pretty much ignore the Mine, the Herb Garden and the quote/unquote crafting.
@McJigg
I know there are people who probably do that on 8 characters a day, but for me it was 3 and I felt that was tedious.
How is the shipyard? I haven’t seen that in action, any improvement from the regular garrison or more of the same?
@Jenks I built it to get to Tannan and then ignored it completely. It’s a follower system where missions are even longer, and if the mission fails they die.
@McJigg : What ? Self-Restraint in online gaming ? That’s crazy talk ! 😉
Jokes aside, you’re right. Too many MMORPG players confues the NEED and WANT aspects and cannot use self-restraint. As long as spending more time gives more power, this behavior will be seen, there’s a need to include diminishing returns at some point to induce players toward healthier game play. Sure, there are some in the fun factor, but too many players are aren’t including this factor in their gameplay analysis… just like an addict can’t see he’s damaging himself.
Garrisons become a little self sufficient circle that removes need for interaction and becomes just a little chore to do daily. It of course is fun to begin with, with all your options in front of you,but this quickly falls away. Now people can of course fall for this skinners box and keep doing it and say its interesting cause they enjoy the rewards, wheras for someone like me who gets no satisfaction from a daily for gold and prefers to make their own fun, a garrison is interesting only as long as I can do new or interesting things with it.
Many games give you a daily chore, it’s a different KIND of daily chore but the limits of what you can do with your garrison make it very stale. It’s not the same as building your own town or house or improving it or anything else and it will largely be the same as everyone else’s garrisons. And again, it removes the need for interaction with other people, which has been a common joke about garrisons. You’re coming in late and experiencing the content at it’s height, and saying you don’t understand the complaints. Give it time.
Hasn’t the need to interact with other people been gone from WoW since like 2006?
@Keen, Yes, and I miss it. It’s part of why I’m on an RP server in the first place. Everything I miss could be biased from the rose tinted glasses of nostalgia though. Waiting for dungeon groups is not something I miss.
Keen you seem like a tourist to wow…if you had to play the game for years and then you come back, and while still leveling have an opinion on a feature, it cant be valid…
Try to play the game as your regular mmo, not your 1 month tour, have 3+ characters you care about and spent years on them and then we can talk how fun garrisons are.
@ Johm: Keens playstyle is as valid as any
Personally, I’ve not been unsubbed since tbc, and I like the garrisons a lot. Thing is though, I only do em on my main, and not on any other characters (even though I have a few maxed out garrisons as I’ve switched mains during wod). It takes little time, gets me decent enough rewards for the time invested, and it is a nice central location with all amenities nearby.
@caldazar you admitt that the reason you like them is because you “force” yourself to use them as less as possible (only on main), while you lose a lot of things for not using them on alts…
Besides, if the feature is fun, why not use it on alts too? The things i find fun in the game (dungeons, transmog runs, leveling) i am doing them with pleasure in all my characters..
There is no force, I just don’t feel the need to do it on every character.
I don’t play my alts that actively, so per that reasoning I also force myself not to raid on alts, force myself not to do dailies on alts, force myself not to grind rep on alts…
I never felt the need to massively binge consume same content on many different characters, fun or no fun.
So actually you just play 1 character…fine, no problem with that. As said ,the problem is for people who play alts too. Also the problem is that even for a main character, followers have much more stuff to do than the player himself.
If you don’t like them, don’t do them. Correct me if I’m wrong here, but nothing from the Garrisons is mandatory or the only way to do something. Earn cash another way. Earn materials another way.
If Garrisons had something that could only be obtained via Garrisons, then I see the issue. That’s the issue I have with many previous implementations of WoW dailies. The only way to earn some of this stuff back in the day was daily quest rep grinds.
My main issue with Garrisons and a lot of the WoW recent content (admittedly I max lvled and gave up after a few weeks) is its very solo based now.
I know we all look at older versions of wow with rose tinted glasses but these days it doesnt seem very guild/friend based. Apart from a 2 hour session running a raid with a guild once or twice a week you pritty much just playing with randoms most of the time with LFG/LFR.
It feels like like its lost a lot of its social aspects these days and turned into a massive grid for the ever better loot just constantly porting to new instances with a random players that at best will call you a noob when you mess up and at worst will quit out at the first sign of issues.
@Keen you found out is not mandatory from the whole 10 hours you played the expansion? I will agree only that is not mandatory for people playing 1 month every 2-3 years.