Warlords Alpha Build 18443: Garrison and Profession Updates

by JR Cook - 10 years ago     show comments

The new build of the Warlords of Draenor alpha was only up very briefly Friday night before Blizzard decided that the build was too unstable to leave live. However, we were able to pull out some bits of information:

Garrison Changes

With how unstable the alpha servers were once they came up, there wasn’t much time to test out the Alliance garrison in Shadowmoon Valley, but a few things were clear from the start:

• There isn’t a rare-spawn boss camped around the initial pre-garrison questing area. There’s a chance that the really big angry bird Matriarch is supposed to be that thing; the eggs in the nest behind her give you Garrison Resources, but it’s not on par with what you got from killing Gruuk in FFR. Possibilities? The mother-bird’s loot table is bugged, or it’s possible that Blizzard is eliminating that first stumbled-upon rare.
• Yrel offers the quest to kill a cave boss at the same time as the other collection quests, which is different from how the Horde pre-build quests went. Horde process was 1) plant banners for peons and 2) kill gronnlings, which in turn-in unlocked 3) kill big gronn. This is a trivial but notable change.
• Alliance and Horde appear to have different minimap icons for the Garrison Report UI.

Hopefully there’ll be much more to report about Garrisons when we get back into the servers on Monday, but it seems like iteration is already in play.

Meanwhile, in more garden-variety additions, there appears to be a new building specialization called “Buying in Bulk: Reduces the cost of purchasing buildings and changing specializations.” As to which building gets it, my bet is on the Trading Post.

Elementals are Back!

Looks like we’re getting elementals back as a critical crafting material (some inscription recipes appear to already be employing Sorcerous Fire), but the method of acquisition may be different from the past. Instead of farming them from particular elemental mobs, they are “magical byproducts” of particular crafting professions. Each elemental has a set of four professions that can generate them, and each profession has two elementals it can potentially generate:

• Sorcerous Air: Enchanting, Engineering, Jewelcrafting, Tailoring
• Sorcerous Earth: Blacksmithing, Inscription, Jewelcrafting, Leatherworking
• Sorcerous Fire: Alchemy, Blacksmithing, Enchanting, Engineering
• Sorcerous Water: Alchemy, Inscription, Leatherworking, Tailoring

Another notable change from MoP: these elementals are not soulbound, unlike Motes and Spirits of Harmony. However, that’s all that’s certain about the sorcerous elementals at this point in the alpha. Speaking speculatively, it’s possible that they’re generated by your garrison NPCs when they complete work orders for you, and that being unbound is meant to facilitate trade, which Motes/Spirits obviously weren’t. Until we get a stable alpha build, there won’t be any way to know for sure.

Inscription Updates

Not many professions actually picked up new recipes in this build, but Inscription did. Aside from some solid-looking iLvl 620 epics, we’ve got the return of gambling cards: anyone who remembers the Mysterious Fortune Card from Cataclysm will immediately recognize what the Card of Omens is about. However, to review, the Card of Omens can be flipped, revealing one of several Blood Cards that each has a fortune and a fixed vendor price, ranging from 1 copper to 6000 gold. Back during Cataclysm, the Fortune cards were an excellent method for Inscription-professionals to turn their raw materials into money, because selling the cards on the Auction House held the promise of big rewards. Provided these new Blood Cards survive the alpha/beta, it looks like scribes will still have an income stream, even with so many of their glyphs either disappearing due to ability-pruning or becoming auto-learned by classes.

Garrison Quartermaster Items

A large number of items were added (which you can see here, courtesy of Wowhead) that seem to line up with the different professions, but they all follow a particular pattern:

• There’s a white item, which the flavor text describes as being damaged in some way. There’s an on-use effect where you’re tasked to combine the item with a certain number of raw materials, which is either Draenor-grade leather, herb, ore, or dust.
• There’s a green item with no on-use effect, which the flavor text describes as being a serviceable standard-issue item that could be useful to your garrison quartermaster.
• There’s a blue item with no on-use effect, which the flavor text describes as being a superior-quality item that could be useful to your garrison quartermaster.

Possibilities? The white items may be mission rewards that your followers bring back, while the green and blue items are both possible results you can get when you combine raw materials with the white item. Since the green/blue items direct you to the quartermaster, and because the flavor text all seems to imply that these items are useful to your garrison soldiers, my speculation is that this is the method for generating follower equipment.

Of course, there’s a good amount of disparity in the list; while some of the items appear to line up with certain professions easily, some could fall into multiples. Some of the items appear to line up as standard arms/armor, but much of it does not. And while generating cool consumables like potions and elixirs is interesting, I’m not sure how that translates directly into follower equipment. So for now, it’s hard to say exactly how this new element is going to play out, but what feels fairly certain to me is that it’s going to link up with the garrison and follower equipment in some way.

We’ll have more information about the new build when it comes back, but until then, there’s still plenty to speculate on. Keep your eyes open.