Follower Equipment Upgrade Strategy?

[Redwyrm]

I am starting to get a stack of armor and weapon upgrades for my followers and was wondering what everyone's method was when it came to who should get upgrades first.

Also, is there an ideal spread of abilities/traits I should be going for? Do some abilities get used more than others or is it all random?

[Tapaj]

Get the add-on Master Plan. At the bottom it has a tab called, "Missions of Interest." There you will see which combos of followers can give you the best percentage of success for all missions available to you and future. Here you can see which ones the add-on suggests and upgrade those til you have them of acceptable level.

[Redwyrm]

Thanks, I'll give that a shot.

[Nahuun]

I am starting to get a stack of armor and weapon upgrades for my followers and was wondering what everyone's method was when it came to who should get upgrades first.

Also, is there an ideal spread of abilities/traits I should be going for? Do some abilities get used more than others or is it all random?

I always go to upgrade my epic followers first. This cuts alot of time down for when you want to start rerolling stats and need to level other follows up to epic before they can get the full benefit. Really getting a epic follower is like gift from the RNG gods, especially if you value your time. All my epic followers get upgraded items first - all the while I try to get their perks as optimized as I can with rerolls.

Works for me.

[Redwyrm]

all the while I try to get their perks as optimized as I can with rerolls.

Ok, noob question here and this may be answered with the addon but, how do you determine when perks have been optimized?

[Sengiratolom]

In the "missions of interest" tab is a list of unused followers (not part of the optimal teams for anything), ability wise that depends on what combos your other followers have.

If you lets say only need 2 danger zones+ powerfull spell (just to name something) and you have 4 of them, you basically waste 2 of them, thus would be better of rerolling their abilities in hopes of getting something you lack/have only a few off, lets say you only have 1 minion swarm counter.

For traits the same logic applies, in general terrain bonuses are bad, same with (mobtype) slayer as there are several possible targets and you want traits to be generally beneficial. High stamina on its own is nice, but as soon as you get followers with epic mount it might cancel eachother out, the more epic mounts your followers have, the worse it gets, and ofc is completely useless if you have both on 1 follower.

Good traits thereby leave: burst for power (lower then 7h missions have a better successrate), epic mount (half mission time), Racial group traits (higher chance of succes if paired with race X), i'd avoid the beast/mechanical/ogre traits that you get from items, as there frankly are fewer of those followers.

If you have all missions of interest displayed @ 100% (it uses ilvl 675 for all of them to calculate, so use item upgrades until you get them maxed) you can make the leftover folllowers gatherers, as in scavenger and or treasure hunters, preferably with epic mounts to reel in those currencies faster and thus more often.

[Redwyrm]

Thanks for the write up, that will be a helpful when I get planning this stuff.

[KitWalker]

Also, if you hold ALT when clicking the "Missions of Interest" tab, it'll show in BLUE disabled followers that would increase the success chance of those important missions - so you know who you need to enable back to get those missions to 100%.

And since now you need to disable someone because you just brought out of retirement that follower you didn't care much: at the bottom of that same Missions of Interest tab it shows the "redundant" followers - good candidates for retirement.

[Redwyrm]

Do all followers (except for the Legendary one) have basically the same potential?

That is, can any follower reach the same maximum level and have any ability/trait (except for those you can't re-roll)? And it's only a matter of luck in getting the right combination of abilities and traits from the respec items and enough armor/weapon upgrades. That the names and ranks of the followers aren't as important and that you could get 20 scrubs from the inn and have the same chances at mythic caches.

[KitWalker]

Do all followers (except for the Legendary one) have basically the same potential?
That is, can any follower reach the same maximum level and have any ability/trait (except for those you can't re-roll)?

No. Each class has specific abilities they'll get from a pool of abilities. See here:
Wowhead Follower Guide

Example: A Death Knight follower must be FROST spec in order to be able to counter "Magic Debuff". And it isn't guaranteed he'll have Anti-Magic Shell to counter it - you may have to re-roll him.

That said, there are other classes that can counter "Magic Debuff" and can counter a different set of enemy abilities. A RESTO Druid follower at level 100 has the same chance to counter "Magic Debuff" compared to the FROST DK at 100.

What matters later on is the combination of abilities and traits. When you get the higher ilvl missions (645+) you'll need to counter 6-7 enemy abilities.
6 is easier - you have 3 epic followers with 2 abilities each = 6 counters.
7 is trickier - you need to not only counter almost all those enemy abilities, but your follower team needs to have some traits to increase mission success.

Master Plan will help you achieve exactly that: prepare the right teams for the right missions.

[Redwyrm]

Well, I knew about class abilities. I was more concerned with not having to track down a group for Leroy or Croman for example. A better question probably would be "Are there any "named" followers that are essential?"

[KitWalker]

There are some with unique traits:
Nat Pagle: fishing trait that allows you to catch lunkers without bait (not mission/follower relevant)
Harrison Jones: has a trait that upscales followers to his lvl / ilvl - this makes him interesting for boosting low lvl alts (XP penalty won't be applied to them).

Bodyguards are also kind of unique - because you can take them outside with you and they have a special ability when on max "reputation" (not mission/follower relevant).