Back to Work
Last night I think I caught up completely on my sleep that had been missed from the previous days. As a pre-emptive strike I took some Melatonin about 7:30 last night, which put me in the mood for bed around 9 pm. Apparently I slept like a rock not really waking up until after midnight, and only then for a drink. I woke up a few times in between but I have to say it was probably the most solidly I have slept in ages. Here is hoping that this extra sleep helps me through today because I have a feeling it is going to be a rough one. I absolutely love the period of time between Christmas and New Years. I’ve been with my current job long enough to need to “burn down” my vacation a few times a year to keep from losing any. So I decided that the perfect solution was to take off the few break times my teacher wife gets, so we can actually spend them together.
As such I generally take off starting that Friday before the week of Christmas and going back the Monday after New Years. The problem is… two weeks off is a really long time, and I am completely out of “work mode” at the moment. I have tons of stuff to do upon coming back, but for the life of me I can’t really remember any of it. I am sure this morning as I sift through a mountain of emails it will all come crashing down on my shoulders. It will be an interesting time because not only am I going back to a New Year… but also going back to new leadership of my department. Time to scurry around and get prepared for all the stuff that is going to happen in the coming months. Since I did not get a text, call or email asking for help… I have to home that means everything went smoothly while I was gone.
Wizard Chores
Doing your Garrison dailies has become collectively known as “Wizard Chores” and the problem with that is I have no frame of reference for WHY… other than maybe the Sorcerers’ Apprentice? The earliest mention I could find is during a Reddit thread, but pretty much since release a handful of my guildies have been calling it that. While I have embraced the term, I always find it odd… considering I don’t really play that many “Wizard” type characters. Yesterday I mentioned that I was finally about to start my Garrison dailies on twitter, which is a long drawn out process of swapping between alts for awhile. I’ve heard folks refer to this process as the “Garri-go-round” which is also fitting, because it sees everyone in the guild logging in all their alts to make sure everything gets harvested and looted. In the middle of all of this, I had a friend on twitter ask just how much time it takes. Well honestly… not as much as you might think.
My main Belghast, has a tier 3 everything in his Garrison except for the Fishing Shack… and that is largely because I have done next to no fishing in Draenor and have yet to unlock the tier 3 blueprint. Without a doubt he is my longest “Wizard Chore” of the day, but even then I would say if I am focused I get done in 5 to 10 minutes and if I get distracted maybe 15 minutes? Now I currently have seven characters with their Tier 2 Garrison, and I believe at last count I had 5 mines and 3 herb gardens in total. So you take that 5 to 10 minutes per character and multiply it by seven alts… and you start to get some actual time. I would guess on a daily basis it takes me about an hour or so of fiddling with characters before I finally settle on the one I am going to play.
Feeling Productive
The process does require some jumping through hoops but overall I feel far more productive at the end of it than I ever did doing daily quests. I think the fastest I ever managed to get a SINGLE faction worth of Dailies down was 30 minutes per character, and that was during Burning Crusade doing the Isle of Quel’danas dailies. With more modern dailies there was seriously no way in hell I was going to do more than one characters worth per day… and maybe just maybe on the weekends I would do ALL of my characters. With the Garrison it feels natural that you tend to your base before going out into the world, because that is exactly what the Garrison feels like… your home in Draenor. With Belghast I have a Bank, Guild Bank, Void Storage, Transmogrifier, and eventually if I can get the rest of the parts an Auctioneer. I have everything I need in one place without having to deal with the fact that someone thought it was an awesome idea to set on the mailbox with their Corehound mount. Fiddling with the bits of my Garrison make me feel balanced and ready to go out into the larger world and encounter people once more.
The thing is… Garrison save me so much time. At least once a week I would go into a farming frenzy that would take several hours worth of mining, herbing, and skinning to be able to support another weeks worth of daily tradeskill cooldowns. I have one of every kind of tradeskiller in my menagerie of alts, and at this point I have all of them but my tailor with a garrison… something I really need to remedy. Other than farming leather as a consequence of playing my hunter… I do absolutely ZERO farming of resources per week. I have enough gardens to keep myself supplied in pots and flasks as well as being able to dump resources into the trading post whenever I need to. I have more than enough ore to be able to craft a True Iron effigy of myself and then have plenty left over to create effigies of all of my other characters… because seriously you get a lot of ore. Basically this hour long daily routine keeps the wheels of my alt machine whirring smoothly.
The Savage Blood Problem
The biggest problem with this whole smoothly running crafting machine… is the fact that EVERY SINGLE CHARACTER needs Savage Blood. It doesn’t matter what your tradeskill is, or if it even makes sense to be using blood with it… to upgrade your gear you are going to need 15 of these things at a time. The problem is that there is a single way to get Savage Blood as drops… and that is through the use of a single garrison building… and only at tier 3. Of course you can turn in 750 Primal Spirits to get your 15, and that is precisely why I do my Mine and my Herb Garden every single day… because both generally yield quite a few. But still at best I am yielding a single Savage Blood per character every other week. My friend pegged my problem with the Barn when she referred to it as the slaughter house. The Barn just isn’t something enjoy doing, and trapping animals… just somehow feels wrong to me.
Granted I am out in the world on a daily basis killing critters of all sorts. But then I feel like I am actually using the resources from those critters properly. When I kill a beast on my leatherworkers, I can use all of the resources from it. When I trap an animal… it just sits there helplessly as two hicks banter back and forth… all the while a blood animation spurts out of the trap to really drive home what a horrible human being you are for doing it. I have built barns on most of my alts, but I just can’t ever seem to bring myself to use them. Maybe once I get the tier 3 one.. the lure of Savage Blood will be too great for me to avoid doing it, but man it is not something I care about at all. It feels like a pretty crappy choice that if you did not build a barn, and you do not trap lots of animals… you are basically screwing yourself out of upgraded gear. I feel like they need to make a chance of getting savage blood from ALL of the buildings, much like there is a chance of getting Apexis Crystals. If they fix that then I will have very few complaints about the Garrison system… other than the fact that there is no Stable Master for my hunter.