Starting at level 90 you can get your Garrison after completing the initial quests. It’s pretty important that you have you’re able to upgrade your Garrison to Level 3 right as you hit level 100, which is easier said than done. Upgrading to level 3 garrison requires 2000 Garrison Resources, which is a lot more than you would think. Keep in mind once you finish quests in the zone that give Garrison Resources that’s it, you have to get Garrison Resources the hard way.
Summary Steps
- Get a Lumber Mill at Level 92, farm timber, and place work orders at the Mill
- Make sure you do all of the quests that provide Garrison Rewards
- Focus on Garrison Missions with your Followers that reward Garrison Resources
- Kill all elites and find all the treasures in each zone
Lumber Mill
At level 92 you’ll be able to upgrade your Garrison to Level 2, this is simple enough. You’ll now have a choice to put in some medium sized buildings. If you’re looking to get to Garrison Level 3 as fast as possible, the best option is to go with a Lumber Mill. The initial quest gives Garrison Rewards and the work orders you turn in return Garrison Rewards.
As you are leveling, you’ll notice that there is Small Timber that you can harvest. You can take this Timber and start a work order at your Lumber Mill, when finished you’ll get Garrison Resources. You need to make sure that you always have an active work order going at your lumber mill, take time to cut down trees that you can, it doesn’t take very long at all.
At level 98 or when you have a Spires of Arak Outpost you’ll be able to upgrade your Lumber Mill to level 2, this will allow you to harvest Medium Trees, upgrade this as soon as possible.
Also make sure to complete any lumber mill related quests you get along the way, there will be a few you encounter as you’re cutting down trees.
You could also go with a Trading Post. A Trading Post will take random resources (changes daily) in exchange for Garrison Resources. It works in the same fashion with work orders except you give them a random resource. I didn’t like this option because on some days I didn’t have that specific resource so I’d have to go buy it from the auction house or farm it — stick with the Lumber Mill it’s easy.
You gain 20 resources per work order which results in about 120 per day if you keep your work orders active.
Questing
There are a lot of quests that provide Garrison Resources as a reward. Click Here for a complete list of Garrison Resources Quests. There are 3 really notable quests that happen in the Spires of Arak that are optional to the story lines but you need to do them anyway because they offer 100 Garrison Resources for each one. All you have to do is go kill an enemy, loot it, and turn it in for a reward.
It says group required but honestly I soloed them all with my hunter at level 98’ish but you can get help if you need it normally there’s a lot of people walking around that will throw in some damage.
Horde
Alliance
There are other quests with lesser Garrison Rewards. Anytime you’re told to kill something that’s elite or might take a group, that’s a sign that there could be some serious Garrison Resources involved.
Garrison Missions / Followers
The biggest mistake people make is not realizing that each follower mission you do consumes Garrison Resources. So if you’re the type of person to just run to your Command Table and send everyone out on a mission you’re going to be depleting resources fast. For example, at level 100 I have 22 missions available to me. If I just did all of them that would cost me at least 220 Garrison Resources which is a lot.
So what we’re looking for here is doing mostly Garrison Missions that reward Garrison Resources. In the mean time you should focus on doing Bonus Experience or Experience missions in order to PREPARE your followers to do missions that give you Garrison Resources.
Don’t do any Gold Reward missions, the gold isn’t nearly enough to make it worth while.
This brings us to our Large Plot and what to do with it. If you really want to focus on leveling followers and generating Garrison Resources through followers then you’ll want to put a Barracks in. A Barracks let’s you have more followers, gives you special patrol missions, and let’s you level them faster.
However, if you aren’t going to be focusing on your followers then you’ll want to have a War Mill in place for upgrades so you can start running heroics sooner or right at level 100.
Rare Spawns / Treasures
For those of you that really want to get out and get some Garrison Resources there are many many treasures and rare spawns across the world of Draenor that give you Garrison Resources. Anytime you’re travelling and see a Skull on your map you definitely want to check it out and kill it if you can.
You can find an addon to find the rare treasures or a map at a place like Wowhead, here is an example map at Wowhead for Rares/ Treasures in Nagrand, there is a lot of information in there so you could follow this type of map for each zone.
After you’ve completed all of the quest story lines in the zone you can fly to Warspear or Stormshield and purchase a Treasure map for that zone from the Archaeology Fragments vendor.
It will take some time to kill all the rares and farm all the treasures but you can earn a massive amount of Garrison Resources. I recommend doing as many as you can as you are leveling in that zone.
Use the links to the maps below for the zone you’re working in. You can also see in the complete lists which ones give Garrison Resources.
Treasures and Rares in Draenor
Random Heroic of the Day
If for some reason you don’t want to do some of the stuff above you can get 50 Garrison Resources a day for completing the daily heroic. You can also get Garrison Resources for participating in PvP and earning some of the achievements, but with a Lumber Mill and farming rares / treasures you should be able to upgrade to Garrison Level 3 right at level 100.