Across all twelve of my characters (Demon Hunters don’t count) I’ve been doing Garrison, Class Hall and uhm… the BFA ship missions every single day for about a month. One thing becomes blatantly obvious- Garrison system rules, but if that system was combined with the itemization of Legion Class Halls, then it would be great. The suckiest by far is BFA missions, followed by Legion. It’s a clear case of the resource requirement for expendable (!) troops to fulfill most missions. I don’t like the system at all. Garrison is great because there’s no cost, while all the other mission tables come at the very tedious cost of having to maintain resources where the Garrison GAINS resources, which in turn can be converted into actual resources for leveling trade skills across alt characters. Blizzard. It was a good system in the Garrison. It really was!
The only problem WAS the overwhelming amounts of gold and followers available which was fixed long ago. There’s easily a happy medium between all three without it having to be some endless grind for War Resources that essentially only exist to spend on missions that provide very little in terms of return. The world quests to get the resources and time spent give more rep than the missions themselves. Anyway, I really do think the Garrison is viable and a brilliant idea (cough) despite the drawbacks of players getting too much gold, those issues can be fixed. The itemization of Legion is amazing and immersive, leaving the BFA system just a tedious, very bland version of it’s predecessors. The itemization in BFA is terrible, almost lazy. There’s little to no immersion and the missions are there simply as another thing to do, the charcters sent are uninteresting and not diverse. I mean there isn’t even a Vulpera follower, whom are meant to be “resourceful”. I think the point is clear there. Perhaps it would be best if the person behind the mission table learned to fit tyres and left the task to someone passionate about creating immersive, fun missions that have good itemization and don’t exist simply to distract the playerbase and extend their playtime.
Holy paragraphs Batman!
Shots fired
(cries in demon hunter)
I’ll assume this was a jab at Demon Hunters and upvote it.
(Wall of text crits Demon Hunter for 10million damage)
Good thing my last resort was off cooldown
tl;dr BfA missions were bad because you don’t generate resources and lack immersion. Legion was slightly better because it had better rewards. WoD was better overall, but was a little overwhelming albeit fixable.
Hey I know it’s a long post, but I’m an adult so I don’t complain about something without offering solutions. It takes a bit to explain something and offer context while providing a couple of jabs at devs and the playerbase who would defend the devolopers. I think the last sentence is the most important thing that many players just don’t see.
The WoD garrisons were the most engaging by far. There were so many followers, and several of them were obtained through doing things in the game. This made acquiring them it’s own part of gameplay, but required actually making a lot of followers. Matching traits with the missions was also at least somewhat mentally engaging, since it led to your trying to assemble a web of followers with different traits.
As a result though, the followers themselves were meaningless to you. With the exception of Garona basically every other follower might as well have been a nameless NPC with traits. I think this is what the Legion variant was meant to address; it wanted your actual followers to feel like important individuals. And this sort of worked, to a point, but it meant that trait matching had to be nerfed down a bit. I think Legion’s system with a few more followers (to make for more traits to match) would’ve been about right.
But BFA’s is a joke. It tries to do as a Legion did and lean on a small number of followers you connect to, but the connection isn’t there at all (in part because EVERYONE gets the same followers). But then Blizzard made it worse by 1.) making the traits of your actual nameless followers RNG as to which traits you would receive, 2.) making it so that traits only your troops can able to appear alongside traits that make including troops hurt your chances of success and 3.) Making the rewards from the table barely worth flying over to do them. If it weren’t for there being so few other reasons to use war resources, I doubt I’d be doing the missions at all.
Blizzard needs to either commit wholesale to the idea of a mission table and give it real support and engagement, or let it be an idea to phase out. I like that they’re trying to make better mechanics with the SL variant, so I’d like to see how it plays out.