Okay, so what exactly is the point of these follower trait items?

[Deleted]

I got over 2 dozen of those trait items in my bank: 5 Hearthstone books (which are useless if all your chars are epic already), 2 Grease Monkey guides (for mech bonuses), 6 birdwatchers, 4 Ogre buddies, 3 manuals of dance and 6 wildlings. These items are just wasting space in my bank. I might be able to use them on my followers, but realistically, I can't use them because I don't want to risk losing a treasure hunter. All I maybe CAN do with them is delete them, but I don't like that solution becaue it means I wasted those missions.

What can I do with them?

[slightdave]

It comes down to if you want to min/max your garrison followers. I've never bothered because it seems entirely too much effort for something that's already pretty lucrative without getting the perfect set up.

[Alroxas]

Could have sworn that as of a recent patch, some of those items allow you to pick which ability you're going to lose to replace it with.

Also wasn't grease monkey bonus to oil?

[tumppu]

Manual of dance is good for any character on which you can't naturally get the danger zones counter and on which you have some lesser bonus trait, like a profession trait which you do not need. And yes, you can choose which trait to replace.

Ogre buddy is good if you have retained Blook, Tormmok and Dagg, all of which are easily acquired. Wildling helps with Leorahj, the skinner cat whose name I can't remember and the fight club follower which I also can't remember. Mech buddy and Arakkoa buddy are not that good, since there are fewer easily available followers of those types. Usually they require rep grinds and/or gold (Pallas, Varyx). Ariok counts as Ogre iirc.

[tuesday the paladin]

When on different followers the buffs stacks. So you can't give one follower 3 ogre buddies and run with an ogre. But you can split then across three characters to get 6 increased racial successes. Add in some innate increased success chance (like Blook) and you've got a very high success chance before even looking at abilities. This will allow you to 100% virtually every mission with these three followers even if only 1 or 2 abilities actually counter anything. In doing so you can complete all the lucrative missions (raid caches, champions honor, rep tokens, gronling mount, etc) with as few followers as possible thus giving you the most amount of followers to dedicate to GR and gold generation.

Get a robot follower, give it ogre and wildling. Get a catman follower, give it robot and ogre. Get a ogre follower, give it wildling and robot. Reroll their abilities to get as few repeats as possible. Now since you get to choose which trait to replace they're quite easy to get a good team. Get a combo of epic mount, burst of power, or some increased resources (gold, oil, garrison resources, apexis) and you've got a very solid team.

Once you complete the 'dream team' you don't need anymore and are safe to delete the rest, or just not send out those missions.

[Arcanimus]

When on different followers the buffs stacks. So you can't give one follower 3 ogre buddies and run with an ogre. But you can split then across three characters to get 6 increased racial successes. Add in some innate increased success chance (like Blook) and you've got a very high success chance before even looking at abilities. This will allow you to 100% virtually every mission with these three followers even if only 1 or 2 abilities actually counter anything. In doing so you can complete all the lucrative missions (raid caches, champions honor, rep tokens, gronling mount, etc) with as few followers as possible thus giving you the most amount of followers to dedicate to GR and gold generation.

Get a robot follower, give it ogre and wildling. Get a catman follower, give it robot and ogre. Get a ogre follower, give it wildling and robot. Reroll their abilities to get as few repeats as possible. Now since you get to choose which trait to replace they're quite easy to get a good team. Get a combo of epic mount, burst of power, or some increased resources (gold, oil, garrison resources, apexis) and you've got a very solid team.

Once you complete the 'dream team' you don't need anymore and are safe to delete the rest, or just not send out those missions.

Or just use Garona, Blook, and Oronok Torn-Heart.

[JemiS]

Could have sworn that as of a recent patch, some of those items allow you to pick which ability you're going to lose to replace it with.

Also wasn't grease monkey bonus to oil?

I'm pretty sure every trait addition item (not re-rolls) now lets you replace a specific current trait.

They're not as useful as they were early on, but they do let you roll very powerful teams around some specific racial traits.