Garrison: Optimal Setup

Introduction
The Garrison is the hub of your PVE experience here on WoD. It is where you receive missions, complete work orders for your professions, learn the highest quality recipes, gain toys/mounts/cosmetics, create portals, and setup your own personalized city within Draenor. The Horde faction has their Garrison in the Frostfire Ridge, and the Alliance has theirs in Shadowmoon Valley.

Creating Your Garrison
There are a number of methods to create your Garrison. First is to work on the starting quest, gained by going to your capital city and being sent to the Blasted Lands, walking through the Dark Portal and following the quests from there. I find this to be slow and sort of... pointless.

Build Garrison NOW: Be lvl90 --> Capital City --> Portals --> Shadowmoon Valley or Frostfire Ridge --> Talk to Big Guy

Immediately take all the quests in your garrison and walk to the "Garrison Cache" (it's a pile of crates that replenishes Garrison Resources passively). It will give you exactly the right number of g.resources to upgrade your Garrison to lvl2. Your goal should be to get to lvl3 garrison immediately, along with leveling. Many starting area quests and treasures will provide you with g.resources to aid you in this endeavor.

I strongly recommend you install the addons "Handy Notes" and "Draenor Treasures". They put points on your map marking where equipment, treasures, toys, pets, mounts, and rare npcs are so you can go gather them quickly. These addons are found within my addon pack.

Garrison Buildings
Optimal Starting Buildings: Bunker/War Mill, Mage/Spirit Tower, Inn/Tavern, Trading Post, Salvage Yard, Professions x2

Here on Firestorm not all buildings are working as they should. You are encouraged to experiment independent of my advice, but there are some optimal building choices you should select by default. I have listed these in order of Large --> Medium --> Small buildings to make it easier on you. The optimal choices are as follows:
 * Dwarven Bunker / War Mill: Provides follower upgrade items, transmog options and "Seals" for extra loot rolls
 * Mage Tower / Spirit Tower: Provides portals around Draenor continent, Apexis Crystals, and Mission Complete Certificates
 * Inn: Provides optimal items like the Crystal, Feather, some cosmetics, and the chance at follow recruits
 * Barn: Provides hides, fur, Savage Blood, can have accelerated progression via purchased Work Orders
 * Trading Post: Allows for the conversion of garrison resources into materials and provides transmog items, and garrison resources, also provides potential for Auction House in garrison
 * Salvage Yard: Grants added bonus to completing garrison missions (follower missions), transmog, gearing items, and materials like herbs
 * Storehouse / Bank: Allows for bank access, transmog and void storage capabilities, and guild bank access
 * Profession Buildings x2: Grants additional profession mats and most of your end game profession recipes

Some small buildings (with a follower attached) will provide bonuses useful in combat and the world. Most notably the Leatherworking Small Building allows the creation of tents that grant a 10% stats buff which stacks nicely with other buffs. The Blacksmithing Small Building grants you immunity to item repair/degradation and the ability to proc an elemental that will aid you in battle (it's not very strong). The enchanting building gives anyone the ability to disenchant and to tmog their enchantment color/type.

Once you're fully and completely powered, build these buildings: Stables, Mage Tower, Trading Post, Barn, Storehouse, Profession x2 or Profession x1 and Leatherworking for the tents.

Garrison Followers
Followers are the way you are able to interact with the "Mission Table" in your garrison. These are sub-characters you gear and level up to send on missions for various rewards ranging from gold to gear to extremely rare items. One should endeavor to gather every available follower in the game. Addons like "Collect Me" assist in this, as do various guides on WoWHead. I recommend you open the WoWHead guide and go zone by zone getting every follower you can. Between the open world followers and those available from the Inn/Tavern you are able to build an overflowing roster of followers for your garrison.

Once you have a full roster of followers, begin leveling them up using garrison missions. There is no "fast way" of doing this, you simply have to grind follower level and gear ups using the systems available to you. The benefit is that once you are finished they are done forever. The optimal (end game) setup is all followers at lvl100, fully geared to 675ilvl, upgraded to Epic/Purple status, and each one with mission duration perks. You should aim to get this done as soon as possible. Garrison Missions are vastly superior when you have this setup.

Followers have two important features: abilities and traits. Abilities represent what the follower can counteract in garrison missions (think of it like Pokemon typing). They are important sure, but don't spend ages bothering with an optimal ability setup. It will happen naturally. Instead focus on traits.

These followers are unavailable and unobtainable (only alliance listed): Garona, Meatball, Millhouse, Oronok, Harrison, Nat, Phylarch, Talon Guard, Image of, Thisalee, Talonpriest, Kimzee, Rangari Eranii, Tormmok, Pitfighter Rulkan (though I believe that Garona and Nat are technically available, Garona IS but only with GM and legendary ring. Nat MIGHT BE but that building is troublesome if you've already ugpraded your garrison).

Mission Duration Traits
There are two especially useful traits for followers and both are "Mission Duration" traits. Mission Duration traits reduce the amount of time a garrison mission will take by 50% and they stack. I call these "speed perks". Lets say you have a mission that requires three followers and will take 8hrs (common). If all three followers have a speed perk each then the mission goes from 8hrs to 1hr. 8hr-->4hr-->2hr-->1 hour. You can see how powerful this becomes!! There are two speed perks in the game and they are called "Speed of Light" and "Epic Mount", they are represented by a yellow feather and a horse icon. Once your followers are 100% upgraded to 675ilvl and purple quality, begin rerolling your followers (see your Garrison Quartermaster for trait reroll item) hoping for speed perks.

I recommend you reroll a single follower until you get one speed perk, then move on to the next. Later you can be picky and aim for multiple quality traits which I affectionately call "speed and XYZ".

The other notable traits are: Scavenger, Mentor, and anything that improves missions success rate. Sadly gold, oil, and apexis doubling do not work on Firestorm's WoD.

Garrison Missions
Once you have a beautiful setup with Garrison Buildings and Followers you will discover that your missions are greatly improved. The missions can drop a number of extremely rare items that are worth a literal fortune each. Firestorm has a bug wherein missions over 630ilvl will disappear if you log offline. This means while you have these highly lucrative missions waiting to complete that you must stay online. This is why speed followers are so essential and why the Mage/Spirit Tower Building and it's auto-mission-complete certificates is so useful. I strongly recommend you download my addon pack and install "Master Plan" immediately. It completely revamps the garrison missions UI making it a series of right clicks and hitting space bar, greatly increasing the speed and success at which you'll be able to complete missions.

There are many wonderful missions available once you're fully upgraded, but by far the best and rarest is "The Botani Stirr" which provides the item "Champion's Honor". A consumable item that grants 1000 honor and 1000 conquest points (pvp currency used in gearing characters). VERY FEW players are able to farm this item, making it worth a literal fortune. Expect to be able to sell these for 999,999g or more.