Further Garrison Impressions

It's still very early in the Beta. It's been out, what, a week? As a result, there are a lot of incomplete pieces to the Warlords puzzle. The quests in Shadowmoon and Frostfire seem to be mostly implemented (if a bit buggy,) but we can't progress out of those zones yet.

Obviously, one of the most exciting aspects of the expansion is the garrison. But for now, the garrison is gated - not so much because of bugs, but because of items and quests that have yet to be implemented.

Right now, you basically need an Alliance character with Alchemy to see much progress. After one of the early quests, you will get an item that begins a quest. A few short tasks and you'll have the plans for an alchemy lab. For now, this appears to be for alchemists only, but I believe the plan is that when the game is live, people of all professions will have access to the professional buildings. The professional buildings take up the "small" plots on your garrison.

The alchemy lab takes an hour to complete, but as soon as construction starts, you can place work orders, and these will take one day to produce a long-cooldown reagent for the profession, akin to Living Steel.

After the hour of construction, you will be able to finalize the building (this is why you need an Alliance toon, because currently the Horde side is bugged and will not let you finalize.) With the Barracks (which come with the opening quest chain) and your first small building completed, you can upgrade your town hall, which effectively upgrades the entire garrison. Thus, the little wooden-walled outpost becomes a formidable walled fort. I believe that there are three levels to the garrison's size, so I am very eager to see the massive fortress that the garrison will presumably become when fully upgraded.

Returning to profession buildings: it appears that certain followers have professions and can be assigned to work at these buildings. What benefit this has is still unknown to me, but I get the impression that they will continually produce material for the profession, which seems quite useful.

As a system, garrisons are clearly still being worked on, and I suspect that we'll have to wait for a few more beta builds before we get the real sense of them in all their glory.

Given that there are so many limits on buildings right now, the customization aspects of the garrison are basically nonexistent. Still, there is something very exciting about not only seeing a town grow, but also having the sense that you are the commanding officer of your faction's forces in Draenor. Many quests make reference to this, and I suspect that the garrison will feel almost like the true capital city on Draenor, rather than the Ashran Hubs.

I will certainly keep updating my impressions as the system evolves.