by JR Cook - 10 years ago     show comments

First up, an apology: between the speed at which Blizzard has been updating the beta build and the rapid-fire nature of the changes taking place, I felt that trying to deliver the same degree of analysis as each build brought more new crazy stuff was too much to do in too little time.

Second up, fair warning: as I’m writing this, the beta servers have gone offline to push a new build. I want to use this opportunity to bring everyone up to speed with where garrisons were as of this morning, with the expectation that new information will be coming very shortly on its heels. Let’s get started:

Small Buildings

On the profession buildings track, it seems like stuff is still highly in flux. The NPC crafters are still a little buggy, and some of the building functions themselves (the disenchanting doodad at the Enchanting building still doesn’t work) but work orders for many of the buildings seem much more functional.

Also, the current work order time isn’t meant to be final (it’s under a minute for a work order to go from started to complete) but regardless of the final time, every building has a “First Work Order” quest that demonstrates how the functionality works, and gives you an instant work order for the first time, with the caveat that later orders will take more time.

Probably the biggest change is that the Tier 2 perks that started showing up some builds back may have been cut; for the most part, the profession buildings now state that the Tier 2 perk is the ability to assign a follower to the building. It’s unknown if the perks were just rolled into the baseline functionality of the building, or if they were just too wordy to include in the tooltip, but we’ll keep an eye out for them when the servers come back up.

Meanwhile, the Storehouse has stayed fairly constant, and the Salvage Yard’s functionality is becoming more clear. Once you have a Salvage Yard, your follower missions have a chance to reward a salvage package. You then unpack the package at the Salvage Yard, and what’s advertised is that you’ll get something useful out of it (higher ranks promise follower and player gear, for example). As of Build 18716, you get a Reward Placeholder item with 1 copper. Beta is beta, folks. Clearly, however, we can see the intention behind the building more clearly; now it’s just a matter of seeing what really comes out of the building in order to determine its value.

Medium Buildings

Let’s tackle these one at a time:

• The Trading Post has seen big iteration; now it’s not just a matter of opening up the faction-specific factions, but instead a location where you can exchange garrison resources for trade materials. Later tiers give you access to the Auction House and an across-the-board rep gain increase with Draenor factions, account-wide. After a bit of gameplay, the ability to take a glut of ore and turn it into Frostweed feels AWESOME.
• The Barn’s importance has been amplified a bit. It’s more clear that it generates leather and fur for leatherworking and tailoring (which is accompanied by the gameplay of throwing down traps in Nagrand and killing beasts over those traps in order to get the rewards), as well as meat for cooking (with greater specificity given to the “most powerful food” coming from said meat). A new tick at the last tier is generating savage blood, which will apparently be a reagent for “all epic crafted armor and weapons.” This boosts the barn’s economic value for sure if this Savage Blood isn’t BoP.
• The Sparring Arena has been renamed to the Gladiator’s Sanctum. Aside from all of the passive survivability increases (which I’m amazed are still there), the new functions are much more PVP-focused: killing enemy players in PVP gets you broken bones, which you can trade in for a Conqueror’s Tribute (which might be your World PVP method of generating PVP gear); the Nemesis quest series unlocks the ability to get a glut of titles for killing hordes of players of specific races; and the Battle Royale arena event, which currently we know nothing about. The short version is that instead of just being a building you take because of the survival improvements, now you take it if you really want to get into the business of killing players.
• The Lumber Mill continues to feel more and more like a gathering profession that’s encapsulated entirely within a building. It’s value is going to be predicated a lot on whether you really need a big income of garrison resources, since it’s still not clear what we’re supposed to spend them on once we’ve got all our buildings situated.
• The Inn has shifted a great deal; Tier 1 gives you a daily dungeon quest handed out by a revolving cast of notable NPCs. Tier 2 gives you the ability to pull a random follower with a specific ability/trait once a week, while Tier 3 will let you actively set abilities/traits for the follower you hire. Tier 3 also unlocks the Treasure Hunt missions, which we don’t have a clear indication of yet.

Check Back Later

The newest beta build (18738) should be available soon, so we’ll have a follow-up for you shortly that’ll cover changes to the buildings and get into what’s been going on with Large Buildings. Keep it locked.