Fantastic Followers: Understanding Draenor’s Masterful Minigame

In Warlords of Draenor, the big highlight feature is the Garrison – World of Warcraft’s take on player housing that provides quests, mounts, invasions, high-level crafting, and resources. The system that links everything together within these walls is based on followers, adventurers that you’ll pick up during your journey to 100 (and after, for many of the cool acquisitions like Leeroy Jenkins or Milhouse Manastorm).

When introduced, followers appear to have all the substance of a fire-and-forget mobile game – set your basic minions on missions and wait for them to come back with experience or gold. After spending a bit of time with it and as you get deeper into the system, managing 20 followers (or 25, if you opt to build a level 3 barracks) allows you to gear out and use your followers in everything from valuable support as potent “pets” in the overworld of Draenor to gearing up your army and sending them out on raids of their own, raids than can potentially bring back raid quality gear at the highest tier. You’ll find weapons and armaments to equip your crew with from salvage boxes at the salvage yard and can create equipment boosts at the War Mill, but how do you even begin to turn your army from the low level crew you start with and get them to that level?

One of the first systems you may or may not encounter right away is that minions can “roll higher” than their acquisition rarity. Minions come in three flavors – uncommon, rare, and epic, mirroring Warlords of Draenor’s loot tiers. You may get lucky and come into a few purple minions as you travel through Draenor, these minions won’t need experience points in order to reach level cap. Green and blue minions will simply need to go on some experience missions in order to realize their full potential and become purple, so don’t dismay if you don’t see any big upgrades.

Minions come with abilities and traits, and acquire more of these as they go through the rarity tiers. What should you be looking for? One of the most valuable traits is scavenging, which allows followers with it to bring back an additional 200% resources from missions, which will keep your garrison nice and stocked and you able to continue sending your followers out to level and gear up. Some other notable non-combat oriented skills you’ll want to look for are epic mount, which cuts a mission time in half, or extra training, which increases experience gain for every follower on a mission. While many of the missions you receive early on are single-follower affairs, you’ll quickly unlock missions that require the special talents of 3 or more minions working together.

So what if you don’t receive any minions with these abilities? You’re encouraged to seek out some of the high level automatic purple minions at level 100 that come from heroic achievements like Croman or Leeroy or some of the reputation based follower unlocks, but the tavern Garrison building is potentially your most valuable asset here for creating a custom army. Each week, you can order up a new follower like a pizza at a tier 2 tavern with a specific trait or ability, allowing you to fill much needed gaps in your random ranks. If you don’t land a natural scavenger on your journey, I’d highly recommend taking care of that first so you’re not feeling resource starved inside your Garrison walls.

At level 100+, the follower game becomes even more advanced as your followers start to gear up and work on item level, just as a player would. As your team begins to get members of ilvl 615, 630, and 645, new missions will unlock and allow you to hunt for bigger and better rewards. As raids come out in a week or two, a player with a crack team of followers will be able to shoot for the stars and potentially bring back extremely high quality loot on occasion from the highest missions available.

There’s yet another perk I’m seeing lots of players ignore from the follower system outside of bringing back gobs of gold and treasure – a tier 2 barracks will allow your followers with bodyguard to accompany you out into the wilds of Draenor and makes taking on tough creatures a breeze. Bodyguards will gain reputation with you as they fight, and unlock new abilities. While this may not seem important because a lot of the post-100 game takes place in dungeons or raids, the daily quests for apexis crystals all take place in the overworld,as do many of the lucrative reputation farming areas. Followers can be a huge asset in these situations.

The follower system is much more than a reason to log in everyday and “set it and forget it” and I’m sure Blizzard has some great ideas to keep the system interesting and involved as we move through the Warlords of Draenor expansion and beyond. While follower management can be engaged with as a minor minigame or completely ignored if the player wishes, it’s one of my favorite things in Warlords of Draenor, and I can’t wait to send my carefully curated team out on epic encounters.