Garrisons and Professions

Garrisons are a lot larger than the professional buildings, but the new feature does revolutionize the way that professions are handled.

Gathering Made Easy:

There are tons of plants out there in the world, and two kinds of ore to mine. But you'll be able to gather a bit of material very easily without leaving your Garrison. As you level up, you'll get a couple of very simple quests to unlock the Excavation and Herb Garden. These do not take up Garrison Plots, and every character will have access to them.

These will each have special nodes that can be harvested regardless of your professions, which means that you'll have a relatively simple time getting materials you need for things made by other professions.

Mind you, there's a limited amount of stuff here, and you'll only be able to harvest once a day, so I wouldn't get rid of my gathering professions just yet. While you can only gather from these buildings once a day, you will, over the course of harvesting these materials, pick up Draenor Seeds and Draenor Stone. Giving 25 of the appropriate item to the NPC running that building will allow you to make a work order, which will grant you additional resources.

Skinning is the odd man out in all of this. You can build the Barn as a source for additional leather, but this takes up a medium plot. The Barn does serve other purposes, though, granting meat and blood used in cooking and other recipes.

The Enchanting building has a special facility within it that allows non-enchanters to disenchant items.

Like the Mine and Garden, there is also a Fishing Shack that will make things easier when fishing in Draenor, allowing you to catch bigger fish and buy lures for specific fish you want. Again, this does not take up a plot, so everyone can have it.

Work Orders:

Every profession has a daily-cooldown reagent that you need to make. Smelting is no longer needed on Draenor, because Blacksmiths will be able to make their own Truesteel bars, and Engineers will simply make their Gearspring Parts from raw ore.

While this daily-cooldown would be a real pain on its own, the good news is that if you have the building for your profession (and you'll get it very early on,) you can instead put in work orders. Each profession building has a Professional and an Assistant. The Assistant will take your raw materials and turn it into what you need. This takes about a minute, but it appears (at least so far) that when done through the building, there is no real cool down. As you upgrade your building, you can place more work orders, which will pretty much just allow you to set them to work for a while and then you can go do other stuff (though right now, it's so fast that you might as well just stick around to let them finish.)

Additionally, followers can be useful for these buildings. If you assign a follower who has the appropriate profession, they will assist with the orders, increasing the yield on reagents.

Professional Access:

The Professional (so if it's the Engineering Works, it's the "Engineer,") will sell recipes to those who have the profession, allowing them to make stuff themselves, but for those who do not have the profession, the professional will be able to make things for you. They seem to have a limited number of recipes for themselves, but you can get a lot of the relevant items from them.

A New Take on Professions:

Professions have become very user-friendly. Players can get their professional scrolls from an early quest line, and you only need to have Skill 1 with a profession to learn the basic recipes. As you quest through Draenor, you'll also often find pieces dropping off of enemies that can be repaired and turned in for Garrison Resources. Repairing these items with the appropriate reagents will grant you additional skill-ups up until you catch up with Mists at 600.

I suspect this will make switching professions far less of a pain than it used to be.

Many items created by professions have an upgrade system built in. For example, the Engineering Goggles (which are actually accessible very early, with an absurdly high item level compared to where you start in Draenor,) can be upgraded using special items built by engineers, going from iLevel 640 to 655 to 665. Most of these items have random enchantments (and there's a bug where the goggles all have Intellect but not Agility or Strength, but I'm sure they'll fix that,) but rather than making you create a whole new item if you don't like the stats you get, you can instead build a different item that re-rolls the secondary stats on those specific items. I assume you can do this as many times as you like, which should help a lot if you get an unlucky mix.