I would miss them more if they had a lot more customization, to include location.
I did like that you had to find all the pieces to make the AH (or buy them) and I did like that they were a decent size… but at the end of the day, swapping out building positions and some building types was not enough.
Agreed. I also loved that when you found a recruit out in the wild, they showed up at your base and walked around, had some things they would say as you walked by etc. Little things like that to spruce it up.
P.S. - Some people might say “Well garrisons ruined interaction with players. All I did during WoD was queue for raids/pvp while farting around in my garrison.”
That’s what we’ve done ever since the Dungeon queue was released in wrath, anyway.
Sounds like you just want player housing. 
No I still wouldn’t want this, who would wanna come see my pixels?
Pixel enjoyers, add my bnet if you enjoy admiring others pixels and static meshes. 
Exactly. That’s all I do now, I just sit in Valdrakken afk. Well, not now that I rediscovered garrisons. I’m back in there again lol.
Yeah once I complete all of the quest achievements during an expansion, Who runs around out in the wild like “I want to meet people!”
No one. No one does. We either stay in a major city, or farm old raids for transmogs. The only people out wandering around are pvp gankers.
A garrison felt like my house. It felt like something I created. Give us another garrison, or the equivalent of, and don’t make it worthless when the expansion is over. Give us a reason to keep using something.
Blizzard loves to reuse assets like recoloring armor, or using enemies from previous expansions, and just renaming/recoloring them. I really don’t understand why blizz wouldn’t have done that with the garrison. Maybe just make a new one next to a main city so people won’t have to go all the way back to Draenor.
But hey, i’m farting around in Valdrakken instead surrounded by other likeminded people!
… Would probably have worked to had garrison have the option to toggle other players in the main square.
Definitely nice to have a hearth to my own personal AH, bank, Guild bank, etc. every 20 minutes.
If an alt its going to be played much I always get all that set up.
I absolutely do, and I STILL go back to my Garrison to do ground and naval battles. I still go back to Dalaran and the Hall of Valor for those, the Banshee’s Wail for those missions as well, and drop by my Night Fae Covenant to tend to those as well. I love them because they have that personal connection to the game that’s been missing for the 19 years I’ve been playing this game.
I made a long post about Guild Halls n’such pointing out how most other MMOs, even ones that pre-date WoW have had such things and done them well. Hopefully Blizzard sees it and gets the idea that WE can actually pay for such things, if they do it right.
Blizzard needs to implement a better player home/guild hall type thing, because old players like me are willing to spend a lot of money to cement some of our best memories of this game. Tired of being a vagabond and homeless in one of the biggest MMOs. There is no excuse. We need something more.
Great post Scardark
Garrisons are still there
As another old 40+ gamer who’s been here more time than most of these kids, I absolutely agree and that was an awesome post 
I still visit all my garrison type things, but I love the Garrison the most because it became that personal attachment to the game that we built up and progressed. Really bothers me that they are all so useless now, and we still don’t have a real player home or guild hall, despite most MMOs (even the ones that pre-date WoW) have em.
I hope Bliz sees this and changes their minds. I made a post outlining how they can even have us pay for it all too… there can be a huge amount of money to be made from such things, if they do it right. Ah well.
I don’t miss garrisons at all.
The garrisons main building had one room off to the side with a table and nothing else. I used that as my hangout during that expansion.
Garrisons were really fun for about 3 weeks, which is about all it took to max it out. After that it was just kind of a hole that had everything you could possibly need, so interaction in hub cities was basically nil. Not a huge deal to some people since it’s mostly just SEEING people around rather than actually doing anything with them, but they definitely gave Garrisons too much utility.
It had Trade Chat. It had its own separate Hearthstone. You could unlock an AH. It had Banking, Repairs, and general Vendors. It had Herb / Ore / Fish nodes. It could do professions you don’t actually have for you. It had a portal to the pseudo-hub if you ever actually had a reason to leave. It had a Pet Battle vendor. It had Mission Tables to generate literal millions of gold (or just good gear) if you played a few alts regularly + an auto-generating cache of Garrison Resources with which to run said Missions without ever having to earn the Resources.
I can’t think of a single reason WoD had to ever actually leave the Garrison other than simply walking to a Raid Entrance. Dungeons were still irrelevant back then, World Content didn’t offer any meaningful rewards until the end,
But here’s the thing. Blizzard is allergic to putting resources into content that people won’t HAVE to interact with. If people aren’t actively using it, they’ll consider it a failure. Which is why they always tie whatever new thing they’ve made directly into endgame progression somehow.
So we can talk about how maybe they would’ve felt better if they didn’t have all of that. If there was more reason to go out and do other things and visit other places in WoD.
But that doesn’t matter because it’s not how Blizzard does things.
And there’s some merit to that. If Blizzard blew a raid tier’s worth of resources on Garrisons and it was just some optional side activity, people who play for the usual grind and treadmill would be LIVID.
In a world with unlimited resources, we’d probably see more optional content.
I never really liked the garrison. Giving everyone a mine and herb garden made those mats worthless even to this day.
If there had been even a tiny amount of racial customization it could have been a lot better. I don’t miss that expansion at all.
The Garrisons were great, but also greatly flawed. Because what you are saying here is that the Garrisons just became a place where you parked your characters for the most part as you played the game. That was the inherent flaw with them, which is a huge part as to why WoD felt so empty of a world despite there being plenty of people running around the place. Because an even greater majority of players just sat in their garrisons for good reason.
Which is why they developed this idea further and created the class order halls and covenants respectively. These places are really good and damn nice for the game, but it still needs the communal aspect to them. Otherwise they create this lifeless world devoid of any meaning to go outside of one’s doors.
Here’s the thing though … progressing your characters is exactly what you are doing though. You even said so yourself, you went there and waited as you queued for PvP. Your garrison became part of your PvP progression. As you waited to progress your character … you made progress on your base.
We will, at some point, get another version of the Garrisons/Class Order Halls/Covenants again in time. But they will be part of the progression system because that is what we as players play the game for.
Whether one likes the analogy or not; we are all rats in the labyrinth, looking for cheese, as the cheese is laid out in such a way that it guides us towards the end of the labyrinth. Only to then be put back into the labyrinth to run it again. That’s the nature of games and what games like WoW does so damn well. Regardless of however it sounds reading it and being compared to a cheese hunting rat.
I like my Garrison.
I wish they would let us add new things to our Garrisons like our own castle or mansion that we can build and personalize.
Garrisons are awesome and I wish blizz would continue to expand on them and update them.
I get what you’re saying and it makes sense although I don’t really agree with the garrison becoming a part of pvp progression. Your major point is a good one though. Hopefully they can find an in between.
I do want a town to progress but I just don’t want it to be something mandatory or even better than being the real world. Mission tables that give fun rewards but maybe don’t give you a way to make tons of money (I don’t think I ever got that far in WoD). Town progression for flavor and fun but not a replacement for mining/herbing etc.
Sure-but not completely. Or rather, Blizzard has the opportunity to make multiple labyrinths with lots of different cheese that the mice can actually pay for, if Bliz develops it well enough. I think Garrisons were badly underrated. They created a personal link to the game, something that’s been missing for 19 years.
If they adapted what most other MMOs have for player housing/guild halls, even the ones that pre-date WoW, they could find a way to dominate and rake in cash. That can open up soooo many aspects that will have permanence through out the game regardless of expansion.
After nearly 20 years playin this game, we are all still homeless vagabonds… too little bank space for the lil treasures we have, no where to celebrate our achievements or to show others. This is sorely missing from the game.