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11/11/2013

Warlords of Draenor - Gold-Making and Beyond



In case you've been hiding under a rock and haven't heard Blizzcon was this last weekend and we got to learn about World of Warcraft's next expansion "Warlords of Draenor". Warlords is going to be set on Draenor 35 years in the past (you know, before being exploded and turned into Outlands).

While there is going to be lots of news and media in the lead up to the expansion release (which I'm predicting will be late-ish 2014) I thought I'd take some time to highlight a few of the new features that us gold-makers will be interested in. Read on past the jump for more.

Garrisons

One of the most obvious new features of Warlords of Draenor that gold-makers should be interested in is Garrisons. This is player housing done World of Warcraft style.

Garrisions are similar to your personal farms from Mists of Pandaria but multiplied by 100.

With garrisons you will be building your own personalized instanced (or "phased" to be more correct) town on Draenor with buildings, followers and much more.

Below are a few key points of garrisons that may pertain to gold-makers.

  • Build profession buildings
  • Own your own mine that you and your followers can mine for ore
  • Gain access to professions that you don't have (like any of us are missing professions)
  • Gain followers that you can send on missions

From the list above it seems that there may be some gold-making potential in garrisons. As more information comes out we will start to get a more clear idea.

Because garrisons are faction specific it would seem that we will get to build a garrison for each of our characters which could mean that, like the Mists of Pandaria farms, we could benefit from having multiple alts with garrisons.

For some great detailed info on garrisions straight from Blizzcon be sure to see Kailope's Blizzcon Report, Day 1 and Blizzcon Report, Day 2.


Garrison small buildings.

Beside the fixed location starting buildings like town hall, mines, farms and fishing shacks and large buildings like Barracks, Infirmary, Armory Stable, Academy and Mage Tower there are also Small Buildings that include things like profession buildings.

Below are the professions-specific small buildings mentioned.

  • Alchemy Lab
  • Smithy
  • Enchanter's Study
  • Engineering Works
  • Scribe's Office
  • Salvage Yard
  • Storehouse
  • Tailoring Studio
  • Jewelcrafting Gallery
  • The Tannery

The developers mentioned that these building and followers may allow you to gain some access to professions you don't currently have.

My guess is this might also allow players with full maxed professions the possibility of gaining extra supplies etc.


Warlords of Draenor Battleground Rewards

Battleground Loot

It was announced that Battlegrounds will offer the chance to get random loot (much like drops from dungeons and raids) that will be Bind on Equip.

Being able to sell these BoE items on the auction house means that Battlegrounds have the potential to make you an extra bit of gold.

In the past gold-making in PVP has been fairly limited and for those of us who like to PVP this is a feature to keep our eyes on.


Warlods of Draenor Inventory Updates

Inventory Updates

With Warlords of Draenor Blizzard has finally heard our cry and is going to be making some much needed chances to the inventory system.

  • Collections will offer us a bit more bag space by making Heirlooms (woot!), toys and possibly tabards to account-wide panels similar to the current pet and mount journals.
  • The Collections also has the side benefit of finally allowing you to use Heirlooms on any server which should make leveling alts on different servers much easier.


Warlords of Draenor Sortable Bag UI

Sortable bags are coming to Warlords of Draenor and, while not as slick as my favorite bag addon AdiBags, it includes many of my most loved features of AdiBags such as:

  • New item highlighting
  • Item quality highlighting
  • Ability to assign bags to automatically contain certain item types (AdiBags' auto icon sorting does this much better).

In addition, quest items will now go into the quest journal and not be placed in bags.

One of the inventory updates that will be of most direct use to gold-makers is the ability to craft directly from your bank. 

This will make it much easier for those of us who do a lot of crafting as we won't have to trek back and forth to the bank as much.

They didn't say whether you will be be able to craft from guild banks or if it will be from personal banks only. I know in my case most of my personal banks are full to the brim so this may not be as useful.

Still overall a nice quality-of-life improvement for those of us heavily into professions.

Instant Level 90

Each copy of Warlords of Draenor will include the ability to instantly level any character, including new characters, to level 90.

For players like me that already have 11 level 90s this feature may not seem that useful but with connected realms coming this extra level 90 will likely be very hand as a profession alt.

Perhaps I'll finally make another female Dwarf. (In Wrath I leveled a female Dwarf to 80 although now she is a female Blood Elf.)

Connected Realms

While not strictly a Warlords of Draenor feature as time goes on Blizzard will be connecting more and more realms together with their Connected Realm technology.

As I wrote in You See Connected Realms, I See 11 More Alts this means that if your realm is connected you have the potential to add 11 more alts (per connected realm) to your gold-making arsenal.

I recently went on a bit of an alt "spring cleaning" (yes I had nearly 50 alts) and culled my alt army so that I had enough character slots so that I could build 11 more alts on any realm that gets connected to mine.

The days of logging into 11 alts to do 2 cooldowns each are coming to an end for me. Some day it may be 22 alts.

Non-Gold-Making

There are tons of other really neat features coming in Warlords of Daenor. While all of them aren't necessarily gold-making related as a player of the game I am looking forward to them.

One of the features I'm looking forward to most are the revamped player character models. Below are a few images of the new female Dwarf and female Gnome (including the obligatory twerking).


New Dwarf Female Model
New Female Gnome Model

Gnomes Did It First Miley

We've all been waiting a long time for new player models and from what I saw at Blizzcon Blizzard isn't planning on letting us down.

Draenor

As someone who has built terrain as part of an MMO development team I have to say my breath was taken away by what I saw during the World of Warcraft art panel.

The tools the developers have to build the terrain in Draenor (introduced in Mists of Pandaria) look simply outstanding.

Geeky things like the ability to layer one texture over another based on a height map mean that doing things like layering snow or lava into the cracks of a terrain look fantastic. In addition the ability to change texture sizes on the fly looked crazy. 

I'll stop geeking out on world building now but I'm sure we can all agree that Pandaria was a beautiful land and Draenor looks to be just as beautiful in its own savage *drink* way.

Exploration

I love exploring in World of Warcraft and Warlords looks to bring that back in a large way by not only providing a large new (and savage *drink*) world but also, much like Pandaria and the Timeless Isle, provide things to stumble across in the world.

One example given at Blizzcon was a broken-down wagon that you could come across and if you were able to kill the protectors and beast of burden you could get loot from the chest in the back of the wagon.

Little touches like this made exploring Pandaria a treat and I can't wait to see that Draenor has to offer.

Conclusion

So there we have it folks. Blizzcon is over and (in my estimation) we have a whole year (give or take a few months) to get excited about Warlords of Draenor.

I think Blizzard is back on track to make expansions that players will love to play. They seem to be getting better with each expansion which is a good sign after the pain of Cataclysm.

What aspect of Warlords of Daenor are you most excited about?

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Posted by iiimjiiim on 11/11/2013 Labels: , , , ,

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