Garrison establishment quests don't play well with Party Sync

Support Bug Report
1

My son is levelling through Warlords of Draenor, and was doing the quests that establish the garrison, and had trouble with Quakefist. No problem, says I, and go grab one of my tank characters to go help. We group, I make him the party leader, turn on the option to see party leader’s garrison, and turn on party sync - but when I got to the garrison area, there were no enemies and only a couple NPCs. At first I thought ‘okay, this is returning me to the state before I started a garrison, so I just need to do that real quick to get into the same phase so I can help’ - but the NPC that gives that quest isn’t present in that phase, there was Thorn (who wanted to send me to Ashran or the Proving Grounds) and a rando laborer, and that was it. I had to bring a character that hadn’t even touched Warlords content (and therefore had no garrison) to get in the same phase. I suspect what’s happening is the garrison surroundings have three states:

  1. Haven’t started a garrison
  2. Started quests to establish garrison
  3. Garrison exists
    And a player who is in state 3 who groups with a player in state 2 and turns on Party Sync gets punted to state 1 with no way to progress.

HOW TO DUPLICATE:
Have two characters where one has a garrison and the other is beginning one - the specific example I encountered was when the player that needed help was on the quest Quakefist https://www.wowhead.com/quest=34585/quakefist , and the character intending to help already had a garrison.
Bring the helper character to the general area, group up, set the character who needs help to leader, turn on ‘view leader’s garrison’, turn on party sync.
The ‘helper’ character should now see a blank area where the garrison should be, with no hostile mobs, out of phase with the ‘needs help’ character (and therefore no way to help). Furthermore, the necessary NPC to advance the state to catch up with the ‘needs help’ character is missing - I suspect what’s happening is that when party sync is enabled, it sees that ‘Finding a Foothold’ has been completed so there’s no reason to offer that to the ‘helper’ character, but that the ‘needs help’ character doesn’t have a garrison, so there’s no garrison to display with the ‘view leader’s garrison’ option - thus sticking the ‘helper’ character in the ‘there is nothing here’ state.

WORKAROUND:
A ‘helper’ character who hasn’t started the quests to establish the garrison will be able to assist the ‘needs help’ character. Grouping / view leader’s garrison / party sync works as intended from then on.

2

I’ve come across the same issue, although in my case I was trying to complete some missing breadcrumb quests by party-syncing with a lower level character. Party sync works most of the time, but when it comes to Garrison/Heart of Azeroth/Chromie related, it does NOT work very well. I would imagine it’s just extra engineering work, e.g. creating a temporary Garrison/HoA and all the subsequent implications. Making such quests unavailable to pick up in Party sync mode is just a lazy but effective solution, even though it contradicts the idea of Party “sync”. There’s really nothing we can do unless Blizzard fixes it (if ever). The workaround sounds like neither character has done the quest anyway, so technically you can just complete the quests together even without party sync.