First off, I’ve been sick for what amounts to a month with a chest cold.  Turns out it was bronchitis and even with anti-biotics, things don’t seem to be improving much.  It’s worse when I talk and since my job is mostly talking, I’ve taken a few days off work.  Lungs are on fire after a coughing fit and woo, is that not fun. Hope this clears up before the holidays.

Leveling Without

Sort of stemming from Murf’s post, though predating it somewhat, I wanted to test the limits of the WoD garrison mechanics.  The requirements for this are a level 3 Barracks (for the 25 follower cap), level 3 Salvage Yard (for the large crates), a level 2 Dwarven Bunker (for follower items), and a level 2 Inn (for the headhunter for more followers).

Two particular tests mind you.  My Monk hit 100 the long way, capping off in Nagrand.  My Druid took the side road, hitting 100 in Spires but heavily supported through Character Experience missions.  100 is the bare minimum to do run the experiment, since you need a level 3 Garrison.

Ok, so that aside, here’s the details.

• Ensure an even spread of skills across all followers
• Have at least 1 follower with a scavenger trait (triples garrison resources)
• Avoid any tradeskills (replace with the Headhunter in the Inn)
• Avoid any bodyguards
  • Exception here is Leorajh.  Max him up so you can use the garrison table anywhere.
• Load up the bunker on orders, to get follower gear
• Run all level 100 missions.  They give a large crate.
• Upgrade followers with your items, focusing on getting 3 to 615, then 3 to 630 and then 3 to 645.

After that is set up, then you need only run every mission that has player gear.  They stick around for a while, so only run them with your best followers.

Here’s the result on my monk after a few weeks.  If you see an Agility weapon, then it hasn’t updated to my healing spec.  I’m at ilvl632 right now and I’ve never stepped into a heroic dungeon or a raid.

My druid only hit 100 last night but here’s his workup so far.

So far, the only piece of gear I haven’t got from missions is rings and off-hand items.  Everything else can come from there.

It’s an interesting experiment to see how far a character can go.  I wouldn’t say it trivializes the rest of the content, given that you’d likely be better off just running dungeons.  It does however, remove the social aspect of the gearing treadmill which I’m not a super fan of for the genre.  We’ll see where this ends up.