The Queue: Abrogator Stones, garrisons, and player housing

Welcome back to The Queue, the daily Q&A column in which the WoW Insider team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Alex Ziebart will be your host today.

It took until January, but it's finally cold and snowy in Wisconsin. Now, I'm not a big fan of the freezing cold or anything, but it's Wisconsin. It's about time.

Chadalac2 asked:

Anyone else not getting that many stones for the legendary quest? I have like 39 and a fellow guild mate has 120. What the heck.

I have 62. I acquired them through running LFR weekly, work orders, and follower missions. I'm really not sure whether I'm accruing them quickly, slowly, or at the intended rate. It feels slow given how many of them I need, but it's from the legendary questline, so ... it may be intended to be slow.

ooglieworld asked:

QFTQ - follower missions. Besides the occationally gear, money, resources, etc is there some grander reason to run all these missions? Or, is it as I suspect and just another disguised pointless grind? Sorry, my disillusionment is showing.

It's the same as anything in an MMO: do stuff to get stuff so you can do more stuff to get more stuff. Level up your followers to get higher level quests. When they're at level 100, equip them with better gear so they can do more difficult quests -- with better rewards. You can eventually send them on raid missions for raid gear.

xeraphax asked:

Is the Garrison Inn really a TARDIS? It's much bigger on the inside than the outside.

It must be. When I upgraded my inn, I spent a lot of time trying to figure out if I was going crazy or not. Is it bigger on the inside or am I just imagining it? I'm still not completely sure. It could just be perspective doing strange things when you're inside it vs. standing outside of it. I do know, however, that where the windows were placed inside do not match where they were placed outside and it makes me twitch.

Also, the ambient voices inside of the inn sound creepy and demonic. I kind of want to burn it down and salt the earth.

BeastMastery said:

So I basically am done with my garrison. Everything is leveled to level 3 and all Im doing is missions. Now I have resources that are piling up and have nothing useful to spend them on. Cant spend them on elixirs cause those are bind on pickup. If they were account bound then I could use them for alts. Other than that, nothing else I could really spend them on.

I know this wasn't a question, but for anyone in a similar situation, I wanted to point to the Dwarven Bunker/War Mill and the Trading Post. With the former, you can pump your excess garrison resources into transmog gear. With the latter, you can exchange resources for crafting materials. Even if you have no use for those materials, and even if your server's auction market is so swamped that nobody is buying any of that stuff, you can at least vendor all of it for pocket change.

@DaltonDeringer asked:

do you believe we'll ever see garrison customization that truly brings it into the realm of "player housing"?

It seems highly unlikely. Other MMOs are continuously doing cool and interesting things with player housing, but Blizzard has seemed wholly resistant to it. The garrisons are "player housing" in that it is a place a player can go ... but the actual garrison isn't customizable enough for players to give it their own flavor. I would call my garrison "mine." I've mixed and matched the small number of Blizzard's pre-selected structures and it's still looks near-identical to everyone else's garrison. I think that's as close as we'll get. Whenever the topic has come up, Blizzard has essentially said nah, what's the point?

I don't say these things to imply I dislike garrisons; I generally enjoy them. They're just not player housing and never will be, because Blizzard hasn't been interested in doing something like that. It's unfortunate, because if there's one thing that makes me jealous of other MMOs, it's their varied approaches to player housing. If Blizzard could nail down a housing feature to go alongside their solid gameplay, I'd be in heaven.

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