Warlords of Draenor Preview, Part II
If You Build It…
In Part I, I gave a broad overview of garrisons. More than ordinary player housing (these don’t really qualify as player housing anyway), garrisons are essential to anyone who wants to succeed in any way in this expansion.
Garrisons come with three different sizes of buildings for you to create, and you gain the option to make more as the expansion continues. The smallest set of buildings are your profession houses, capable of completing work orders on raw materials to create items useful to the profession (i.e. leather from hides), and acting as a crafting menu to make recipes from those items. They can only create a certain amount of work orders per day, and it generally takes them a day to generate the raw materials you need, but the majority of common recipes can be made at the building as many times as you have materials for.
Don’t have herbalism, but want to have an alchemy building in your garrison? No problem. Each garrison is eventually provided with the opportunity to unlock a mine, an herb garden, and a fishing shack to supply raw materials to your profession buildings. These buildings unlock at different levels and require quests to be completed before they are fully operational.
The garrison profession buildings do not fully replace crafting skills. If my chosen professions are herbalism and alchemy, there are some recipes I will only be able to make with my skillset that are not available to any old joe with the garrison buildings. But, thanks to garrisons, basic items from each profession are available to everyone, leaving the big moneymaking for the best and rarest recipes.
…They Will Come
The medium and larger garrison buildings provide all sorts of buffs and perks depending on which you choose. Some offer new quests, others offer transmog gear. There’s a building that will eventually provide you with an auction house and bank access, and another that gives you waypoints all over Draenor to ease the speed of fast travel. All buildings are upgradable and come with new perks at each level, and new buildings can be unlocked for construction as you find blueprints in Draenor.
Each garrison is equipped with a Town Hall from which you oversee construction and send your followers on missions. In the last article, I compared the follower system to that in the Assassin’s Creed games, but one thing I think it does better is giving your followers personality and backstory. Though some followers are merely acquired through other missions, most of your followers are NPCs you have completed quests for and fought alongside.
Followers, along with most decent equipment, have the chance of receiving a random upgrade upon reception. They will get a combat (if a follower) or item (if an item) level boost and a boost in rarity, making it possible to be carrying around epic-quality weapons very early in the expansion, but without diminishing their rarity.
the high points greatly outweigh the low ones, and Draenor promises to be an exciting expansion for everyone: veterans, those returning from hiatus, and newbies who are motivated enough to slog through four expansions worth of old content to make it there.
Other little tidbits I appreciated in Draenor include better bag organization, a useful marking on all “trash” loot so I can find at a glance the stuff I’ll be selling to vendors, and main stats on all items. Now, I’m nothing like an expert at how stats work–I generally just pull up a guide and do what it says. But my favorite part about armor stats in Draenor is that the “primary” stat of each item (i.e. Agility, Intellect, or Strength) will change depending on your class. So, if a mail piece drops in a raid, I (a caster) will see the piece as having Intellect, but for him the piece will have Agility. This means that I have much better odds of getting something useful out of a dungeon or raid, and groups as a whole will be tossing aside less armor because they don’t contain a class that can use it.
My biggest concern with stats, armor, and classes is the lack of customization available. As someone who remembers a day when shamans could tank, I miss having a billion buttons at my disposal and high volumes of armor stat choices with systems such as Reforging (which is gone in Draenor). Though the new system, which has pared down abilities to streamline classes and made many effects passive, is easier to use, it means that I’m confined to the role that I roll. This isn’t a big issue–WoW is not a game known for lots of customization. It can be unforgiving to those who haven’t geared and enchanted themselves just right. But if there was any opportunity for someone to play a little outside of the box, Warlords has removed it entirely.
Overall
I’m seriously impressed with Draenor. The expansion is a glorious mixture of new features and old Warcraft style. It’s not perfect–the introductory areas and linear Horde storyline will get tedious to those leveling alts, the garrisons are unavoidable if that’s not your thing, new players will likely be overwhelmed by the sheer volume of content (there’s really no easy way to just jump in anymore), the dungeons aren’t remarkable, and there’s really just a lot of orcs. It provides a striking contrast to the happy land of Pandaria, which Warcraft veterans will likely welcome, but those who loved the light-hearted panda expansion may wrinkle their noses at it. But the high points greatly outweigh the low ones, and Draenor promises to be an exciting expansion for everyone: veterans, those returning from hiatus, and newbies who are motivated enough to slog through four expansions worth of old content to make it there.
For more impressions, daily screenshots, and general hype for World of Warcraft and a bunch of other video games, check out my Twitter @rvaliantine. I’ll be posting a WoD screenshot a day until November 14, and will be happy to answer any questions about the beta as well as offer more Warlords of Draenor preview information. You can also comment below! Or follow us on twitter @GameSidedDotCom. For news and stories wherever you go, download the official Fansided App on the App Store or Google Play Market today.