by JR Cook - 10 years ago     show comments

At the moment, there’s not much more to test regarding garrisons in the alpha; missions don’t seem to be fully implemented yet, buildings beyond the Barracks and Alchemy Lab seem to bug out instead of completing construction, and there’s just very little to do to progress at this stage.

However, hope is not lost: now that we’ve seen the basic implementation of how follower abilities play into countering mission threats, a lot of information from previous alpha builds is starting to make more sense. Namely, since we know that followers will have a class and abilities from that class, we can tell what threats a given class will be potentially be able to counter, since we know the spread of follower abilities.

A few caveats before we start:

1. Alpha is alpha, and none of this is guaranteed. Blizzard might opt to throw out classes for followers tomorrow.
2. Abilities marked with a ? are not explicitly listed in the data (which you can view here, courtesy of Wowhead), but are based on some assumptions regarding what other counters a class has, and what icon the follower ability is listed with. (Example: There are two “Cleave” follower abilities, once with the Cleave icon and one with the Pummel icon. Since Warrior followers otherwise have no counter for Powerful Spell, I assume it’s actually Pummel and was mislabeled in the data entry.)
3. Only a handful of abilities were actually labeled in the data with what they countered. All of those descriptors were actually scrubbed out of the data a couple builds back, so ALL of the assignments made here are assumptions based on what the threat is called and what the abilities do. We welcome polite debate on the assignments in the comments, so feel free.
4. It’s currently unconfirmed if a single ability can counter two different threats. Shadowfiend, for example, is arguably a counter for Long Fight (since it’s a resource-regenating ability) AND a counter for Timed Battle (since it’s a DPS cooldown). However, because many of these abilities aren’t attached to followers we can actually recruit yet, and because the missions UI is incredibly buggy, there’s no way to confirm that.

Without further ado, here’s the first set of mission threats and their counters:

… and because tables can get really silly looking if they’re too big, here’s the second half of the mission threats and their apparent counters.

While there don’t seem to be many missions at this point that ask for more than one follower, that was certainly something that was a part of the system announced at BlizzCon. At that point, the mock-up UI showed us sending our followers on Scenarios, Dungeons, and Raids, in addition to Quests (which were solo efforts). The first garrison preview also maintained that later missions would deploy groups, but it’s possible that the strict sizes we were shown in the mock-ups might have been abandoned in favor of some other design.

Regardless of that, it’s pretty clear that once you start collecting followers, determining how to best group them up to counter threats and maximize rewards is going to be the name of the game.

Follower Quality

I wanted to drop a bit of information about follower quality, since that plays into how many abilities followers can have.

Followers have quality levels, meaning you’ve got Common, Uncommon, Rare, Epic, and Legendary followers. The quality level determines how many class abilities your follower has, with Common followers having one and Legendary followers having five. Note that this only pertains to class abilities: the mission-specific abilities like Plainsrunning, profession skills, or racial affinities like Death Fascination (mission success improves when grouped with an undead character) don’t seem to count.

You can see evidence of this in the list of datamined followers currently, and it’s borne out with the followers you can actually recruit in the alpha at this stage. My suspicion at this point is that there may be a way to improve your followers’ quality, which presents a different question: do you get to choose the ability the follower gets? Or does it get randomly pulled from the list of available class abilities?

As of yet, there’s no way to tell, but if anyone at Blizzard is interested in enlightening us, it would be a pleasure!

Got some speculation of your own about follower abilities? Let us know in the comments!