Follower Mix, Salvaging, and the Inn

[chazus]

Now that were a number of weeks in, I figured people had started to set up the "perfect storm" of followers. I'm wondering if I'm doing things wrong, or if I'm aiming in the right direction.

What I have
-Barracks Level 3 (For 25 Followers, 5 will be spent on manning buildings. Barn, Mine, Forge, Garden, Engi)
-War Mill for Follower Upgrades from GR
-Inn for getting Scavengers or Trainers or Epic Mount
-Salvage Yard

I ditched my Trading Post, as it seems having scavengers will produce more resources than the TP.

It also appears that only 1-2 followers qualify for buildings, so I can't really choose much which ones.

Now, that said... I currently have ~6 followers at ilvl 645 or so.

With 20 available... should I be looking to have ~2 Scavengers and ~2 Trainers and ~2 Epic Mount

OR

Should I just replace one of my characters every week until I have 2-3 Trainers, and ~8 Scavengers and ~8 Epic Mounts, and just save all my gear upgrades for them?

Am I doing anything else wrong/right?

[Deleted]

http://www.mmo-champion.com/threads/...onuses-A-Guide

If you have an inn, try that. Search your current followers for one that has 2 racials and go from there. Only need 3 followers then for any good mission so you can swap one out per week for a better from inn. Also your question is weird. It doesn't seem like your 2 underlined options are mutually exclusive, unless you plan on getting rid of the inn. If you got war mill/scavenger going and log in once a day to do ALL missions, your follower gear will reach a surplus to an extent that you'll be able to quickly gear 1 fresh char per week from inn as soon as he hits lvl 100 (and probably still have leftovers). I currently have 22 645+ (other 3 are working so whatever), and still a bunch of instant 630 weapons/armor right now.

[Marxman]

You don't need to have the followers assigned to buildings all the time, just when you pick up your work orders. This may change in the future according to the devs.

Always pick Epic Mount from the Inn. Scavengers are GREAT early on, but pretty quickly you'll reach a point where GR aren't worth much.

[Daedelus]

I'd keep Trading Post. Already I am running with 5k+ Garrison resources with a couple of scavengers. TP is a great GR sink for buying stuff either for yourself or to sell on the AH, and on Blackrock Ore day it's free GR

[cityguy193]

Epic Mount isnt to great either. I do have now 6 of them and now I'm getting Combat Experience (extra succes on missions) as my next followers.
While getting followers with Combat Experience, I also try to get all abilities around 5 times (still have 9x danger zones and only 3x massive strike, but thats way better at the start where I had 16x danger zones and 1x massive strike).

Will take a long long time to get 25 perfect followers (good mix of abilities and no shitty traits like extra experience on epic followers or a profession ability).

You only need 3 followers sharing racial traits. You can use them for any mission.

[Thelxi]

Now that were a number of weeks in, I figured people had started to set up the "perfect storm" of followers. I'm wondering if I'm doing things wrong, or if I'm aiming in the right direction.

What I have
-Barracks Level 3 (For 25 Followers, 5 will be spent on manning buildings. Barn, Mine, Forge, Garden, Engi)
-War Mill for Follower Upgrades from GR
-Inn for getting Scavengers or Trainers or Epic Mount
-Salvage Yard

I ditched my Trading Post, as it seems having scavengers will produce more resources than the TP.

It also appears that only 1-2 followers qualify for buildings, so I can't really choose much which ones.

Now, that said... I currently have ~6 followers at ilvl 645 or so.

With 20 available... should I be looking to have ~2 Scavengers and ~2 Trainers and ~2 Epic Mount

OR

Should I just replace one of my characters every week until I have 2-3 Trainers, and ~8 Scavengers and ~8 Epic Mounts, and just save all my gear upgrades for them?

Am I doing anything else wrong/right?

My plan is very similar to yours, I am going for 17 epic mounts and 3 scavengers. So far I have the scavengers and 6 epic mounts, so I have 11 more weeks to go. I also ditched my TP, but I have swapped it back to get rid of a few thousand resources because I hit cap, and then made the inn again. Also Blizzard said that next patch we will have other stuff to spend resources on, so that should be fine.

Trainers are very useful initially but I wouldn't waste a whole inn lockout on getting one, rng will probably give you 2-3 anyway.

Now about saving the gear upgrades.. yes it is kinda a waste to get non scavengers/epic mounts up to 645, but you might get bored not having any geared. What I would do is get 3 of your suboptimal followers that completely counter the highmaul mission up to 645, and save the rest of your upgrades. You can always instantly gear up your fresh 100 epic mounts/scavengers every week even if they are green since they will stay forever.

[Archimand]

this is what you need to have 645 ilvl ready for raid quests


wild agression,deadly minion,massive strike,timed battle,danger zones,powerful spell
wild agression,group heal,group heal,danger zones,minion swarms,magic debuff
massive strike,timed battle,minion swarms,magic debuff,deadly minios,timed battle
wild agression,deadly minions,danger zones,powerful spell,deadly minions, timed battle



so u need
2 followers with timed battle+ other things
2 followers with group heal+ other things
2 followers with cc+ other things

[Deleted]

Epic Mount isnt to great either. I do have now 6 of them and now I'm getting Combat Experience (extra succes on missions) as my next followers.
While getting followers with Combat Experience, I also try to get all abilities around 5 times (still have 9x danger zones and only 3x massive strike, but thats way better at the start where I had 16x danger zones and 1x massive strike).

Will take a long long time to get 25 perfect followers (good mix of abilities and no shitty traits like extra experience on epic followers or a profession ability).

Can you please up a screenshot where you are in the headhunter's menu when chosing combat experience as trait/abilitiy? Would be very useful for a lot of players. Thank you.

Or "yeah not possible sorry".

[Thekri]

Epic Mount isnt to great either. I do have now 6 of them and now I'm getting Combat Experience (extra succes on missions) as my next followers.
While getting followers with Combat Experience, I also try to get all abilities around 5 times (still have 9x danger zones and only 3x massive strike, but thats way better at the start where I had 16x danger zones and 1x massive strike).

Will take a long long time to get 25 perfect followers (good mix of abilities and no shitty traits like extra experience on epic followers or a profession ability).

And by "Getting followers with combat experience" you mean you got Blook? There are no other followers with that trait and you can't get them from the inn. If you get burst of power and always pair it with epic mount it is a similar effect, but you need epic mounts for that (Which you said aren't great).

[sinednarow]

This may change in the future according to the devs.

[MrExcelion]

This is my current mindset, as someone going all out with the follower minigame on my main:

- Barracks + Inn + Bunker + Salvage Yard are your follower buildings

- The usefulness of Scavenger drops off significantly after your 3rd or 4th one. That's usually enough to handle any GR missions that come up. I have 4, but I'm probably going to drop to 3. I don't even hold onto a 90-94 GR follower anymore for the extra GR missions because the prices on meat from the TP tanked, but I will say the bags still drop small chunks of valuable herbs, better than Treasure Missions at least. I could get by with 2 or 3 Scavs, but it is nice to be able to use them for anything that might pop up. Note that they talked about adding more uses for GR in the future so Scavs might become something to stack. Won't know until the 6.1 PTR.

- For mission success, on Alliance you ideally want to stack Draenei/Human followers with Ally of Argus and Humanist from your Inn. I focus on Ally of Argus and pick whatever Draenei or Human follower shows up [if one does], but some Humanists are good too because it's about a 60/40 split.

- On Horde, I'm not sure, but it looks like the main race is Orc by far, then it's evenly split between other races

- I haven't had to worry too much about having ability counters when I got 25 epic followers. Seemed to work itself out, but there can be a weak point or two. http://www.wowhead.com/guide=2533/wa...lities-warrior You can check this out and see what specs can roll certain abilities before using reroll certificates. For example, prot and arms warrior are the only two warrior specs that can roll taunt

- Regarding epic mounts, I prefer 3 minimum to knock out those long missions to keep followers freed up and available. I'd probably use for the inn for a couple if I was unlucky enough to not see any, but haven't needed to. There might come a time in the future when I try to roll the dice with more epic mount followers if they end up overloading us with missions but 3 seems to get the job done. Certainly don't mind more and I don't think there's much of a dropoff in having more. There's a lot of 95-99 missions with long durations.

Archimands post is also great for countering the current Highmaul missions and racial preferences are really strong too. This forum has a guide for countering with racial prefs too.

[Deleted]

Orc/goblin seem to be the most common horde races to me, those two plus dancer or some other success bonus often give me 4 counters/bonuses from a single follower.

Right now I'm starting to get rid of some scavengers with deadly minion counters as those are wasted slots, simply put. After that it'll be time to get some group heals. I have 6 epic mounts now and unless they have other bad traits I'm going to keep those. They are amazing to level followers with.

[Peg Ee]

I haven't had to worry too much about having ability counters when I got 25 epic followers.

If you have enough Group Damage counters without actually hiring some, you're very lucky.

It can happen, though.

[MrExcelion]

Yeah it's lacking a bit. On Alliance, Soulbinder Tuulani, Cleric Maluuf, Leorajh, and Vindicator Heluun will roll it. Magic Debuff can be lacking too, just Vindicator Onaala, Daleera Moonfang, and Talonpriest Ishaal. Onaala is a one-time quest only follower, so I found myself having to recruit a proper draenei magic debuff follower from the inn. Wish I had picked Onaala.

[Peg Ee]

Yeah it's lacking a bit. On Alliance, Soulbinder Tuulani, Cleric Maluuf, Leorajh, and Vindicator Heluun will roll it. Magic Debuff can be lacking too, just Vindicator Onaala, Daleera Moonfang, and Talonpriest Ishaal. Onaala is a one-time quest only follower, so I found myself having to recruit a proper draenei magic debuff follower from the inn. Wish I had picked Onaala.

I don't know about Alliance but in general, my experience with Horde is that there are no followers that are readily obtained that always have a Group Damage counter. Perhaps the followers you get from loremastering FF or Arak. I dunno because I haven't done that.

In general, your first inn picks should be: (1) Scavenger (if you have none), (2) Epic Mount (if you have none), (3) Group Damage counter (if you have none).

Then you can worry about mixing and matching racial traits or +follower XP et cetera.

If you need a group of "assassins" that can always do any mission regardless of counters then yeah the right overlay of 3+ followers with 2-3 racials is ideal. But until you can come up with that you will need the "utility" traits.

OP: The Garrison Resource missions generally need either a Massive Strike counter (common) or Group Damage counter (RARE). Most of the rest need a Magic Debuff counter. You would really like to have a Scavenger with a Group Damage counter, but if you've already got 2-3 Scavengers, it's not worth looking for more to hopefully come up with one that can counter Group Damage, especially if you don't have at least one Epic Mount and/or one general Group Damage counter.