Warlords of Draenor Garrisons: a Touch of Warcraft 3 in WOW?

You bet, and that’s a great thing… There is indeed nothing quite like getting home from work and heading back to your own little patch of real-estate, to collect your Work Orders, to pick some flowers or to just tend to your herb garden. Garrisons are indeed quite possibly the top feature brought by WOW’s newest expansion, finally answering players’ wishes concerning player housing, in a uniquely innovative way, which goes way back to Blizzard’s RTS roots.

What is a garrison – I ask you – if not a sort of an instanced Warcraft 3 base, which comes with its NPC followers, its own building-selection and which essentially opens up a new game within the game for Warlords of Draenor players? It is indeed all that, and much-much more: the followers themselves represent an entirely new world of potential small-scale satisfaction for the player, as they too can level up, they too can get better gear and have their own traits, abilities and class. These guys aren’t simple décor: they can in fact attempt to wade through the same dungeons the player himself battles through, although there’s no interactivity in this regard just yet.

The garrison itself can be taken up all the way to level 3 too (sort of like the main building could be upgraded in Warcraft 3), and the individual buildings can be leveled up as well. Perhaps the greatest thing about the whole garrison experience however, is the fact that players can send their minions on quests (missions) of their own. Essentially, one finds a mission, and then a follower whose abilities cover/counter the specific threats presented by the said mission. He then sends them out to toil away for the greater goal of forwarding his personal cause (whatever that may be), and they go out and do it, slaving away even while the player is logged out. While all this may taste a bit of cheap social media gaming, without the added bitter seasoning of micro-transactions, it can and is fun beyond belief.

The bottom line: if you ever needed a reason to immerse yourself into WOW, or to return to the game after an absence, the garrison system alone might provide you with it.

Philip Thalberg has been a Gosugamer since 2007. Gosugamers.net has been your best destination for counterstrike items since essentially forever (in web terms).