🚀 go-pugleaf

On Sat, 11 Oct 2014 10:31:07 -0500, Cryptoengineer
<pete...@gmail.com> wrote:

>If you could provide some hints on good use of the garrison for
>levelling I'd be quite grateful - my pally tends to level as ret,
>the holy spec is more background these days. My lock already has
>a personal tank.

A lot of it's down to personal preference, the personal tank I
mentioned is a feature where you can select one of your "followers"
(who normally perform missions for you on their own) as a "bodyguard"
(some come with the bodyguard trait, which lets you select them this
way), and their spec determines what they'll do with you, apparently.
I've only got a prot pally NPC with the bodyguard trait, and she's
perfect for me as a Disc priest, made a huge difference for me, but
I've heard there are dps and healer followers available as well, so if
you get one which complements your spec, it can make a big difference.

The above only works if you have a Barracks at lvl 2; you start your
garrison with a barracks, but I, being clever (so I thought), swapped
it out for something else, not having realised how useful the
bodyguards would be! You can't get the building to lvl 2 for a few
lvls anyway, but in the earlier lvls existing gear carries you, it
gets a bit tougher at higher lvls when your secondary stat ratings
have decayed down to hardly anything!

Most other garrison things don't affect levelling too much, I just got
professions buildings and eventually settled on a lumber mill (having
been through most the alternatives) for a medium building. You can't
make any building lvl 3 until you're 100 (and most require an
achievement to be completed first even then), so don't do what I did
and look at the bonuses lvl 3 buildings give and get the building for
those; look at lvl 1 instead, maybe lvl 2 ;-) You can always change
later on, they're entirely swappable, only limited by resources, and
I've got plenty of those.

Another helpful thing btw is each zone has an "outpost", which gives
you a garrison buff, and some extra features, plus a different set of
quests, some give a lot different (Gorgrond in particular, most of the
zone changes depending which outpost building you chose), some only a
couple, but it means a bit of variety when you level an alt and pick a
different building. Mainly it doesn't change much as the buff as
fairly similar, I'll say for Spires of Arak get the smuggler's outpost
though, the vendor you can summon gives some really nice buffs and
even sells a 28-slot bag, which is VERY useful if you didn't have a
maxed tailor (I never got that recipe!), it's unique, but one is still
good!

Btw you don't have to spend hours on your garrison if you're not that
interested, once it's set up in your first few quests in SMV/FFR, just
drop in between zones to pick up any useful quests you've been given
(it gives the breadcrumbs to each zone...but you get a breadcrumb from
the previous zone to go back there and check in anyway). I loot my
mine and herb garden every day, because hey, free stuff, but you don't
have to even do that if you're not interested, most of it's entirely
optional, although you'll probably want to pick up the Apexis Shard
daily there at lvl 100, since the shards are the main currency for
pretty much everything!

>The Thunder Forge was a real playing skill check for me, by far the
>hardest individual fight I'd had in game; I learned a lot about
>boosting my dps on both toons from that, both from gearing, and from
>better rotation. When I started I was probably pulling about 50k dps,
>by the time I actually completed it, about 120.

Wow, nice progress! Amazing the difference class makes as I really
didn't have much trouble with that fight, it must just have suited
priest a lot better than paladin, since I'm certainly not the most
skilled of players, I'd have expected you to do better than me, since
you sound like you're a better/more knowledgeable player than I am!