How to maximize garrison resources

The need for garrison resources is never ending. You need them to level up your garrison and upgrade your garrison buildings. Then you need them to send your followers on all sorts of missions rewarding you with follower experience, follower item tokens, gold, raid-level gear, Apexis Crystals and, surprise, more garrison resources. And you’ll need even more if you want to churn out extra crafting materials through the Trading Post or follower item upgrade tokens through your Armory. On top of all that, Patch 6.2 promises an even greater need for garrison resources with the new Shipyard and ships you’ll need. Plus, you can use them to purchase extra Seals of Tempered Fate every week for another chance at a raid drop.

So with that in mind, how does one grab as many garrison resources as possible? We’ll start with listing all of the ways you can gain garrison resources and then talk about how to maximize your daily output.

Clickable locations in your garrison

• The first place you should always look is your garrison cache sitting outside your Town Hall. It automatically generates 6 garrison resources an hour (144 per day) until it hits a cap of 500. That means you need to empty it every 3-1/2 days at the minimum to make sure it continually generates garrison resources for you.
• Follow Pippers the peppy pug! If you spend any time in your garrison, you’ll see a pug running happily about digging holes. Follow Pippers and click on the mounds of dirt he leaves behind for resources. This is one time only though you can do it for every level garrison.
• Jump into the fishing pond in your garrison and swim to the underwater cave in the back. You’ll find a treasure chest against the wall containing garrision resources.

Garrison missions and buildings that generate garrison resources

• Many follower missions offer garrison resources as the reward. They don’t require any garrison resources to start and if you have a follower with the Scavenger ability you can increase the amount of resources you get as a reward. Significantly in some cases.
• The Lunarfall Inn/Frostwall Tavern at level 2 offers an NPC that will recruit a follower for you every week with an ability or trait that you specify. This is great way to get a variety of followers with the Scavenger ability (or Treasure Hunter!)
• The Lumber Mill allows you to harvest trees in Draenor for lumber that the Mill can then turn into garrison resources. With a level 3 Lumber Mill you can quest for Phylarch the Evergreen, a follower who can be assigned to your Lumber Mill to increase the garrison resource output of each work order by 50% (from 30 to 45 garrison resources per work order as of Patch 6.1.)
• The Trading Post building allows you to trade in crafting reagents for garrison resources through the use of work orders.
• The Stables can also provide you with a good chunk of garrison resources. By capturing and leveling up all 6 mounts through the quests offered by the Stables, you can end up with 1,600 extra garrison resources.

Questing, rares and treasures

• Completing the first Warlords of Draenor random heroic of the day will reward you with 50 garrison resources.
• If you have a level 3 Town Hall, the random visitor of the day may be the one that offers the daily dungeon quest. Killing the boss at the end of the dungeon assigned to you will result in 175 garrison resources as your reward along with some gold.
• Questing in the outdoor zones of Draenor will net you a great deal of garrison resources. Many quests in the WoD outdoor zones offer garrison resources as their reward. If you didn’t complete all the quests or zones, now’s a great time to do so.
• While questing through Draenor, be on the look out for rare mobs. They will drop garrison resources the first time you kill them along with unique items. You can find them by buying a treasure map of the zone from Grakis in Stormshield or Srikka in Warspear. You will have to have completed the majority of quests in the zone for the treasure map to be available to you. Alternately, and highly recommended, there are two addons you can download  to help out with the hunting — HandyNotes and HandyNotes_DraenorTreasures. Not only will they mark all the rare mobs on your map, they’ll remove the marks after you’ve killed them.
• Many treasure chests are spread throughout the questing zones of Draenor. Some are easy to get to while others require jumping or some form of limited flight to find. They often contain garrison resources as well toys or useful buffing items. Again, a treasure map or the HandyNotes addons will point you in the right direction.

 Maximizing your garrison resource generation

Before we dive too deeply into this, remember that your garrison can only hold 10,000 resources. Any more than that will be lost.

If you need a lot of garrison resources quickly, we recommend stopping any activity that costs garrison resources. That may sound obvious, but if you are used to sending out all your followers on missions every day, restrict that only to the missions that generate garrison resources. Also, no new Armory work orders for follower item tokens. Then hit the questing zones with the HandyNotes addons to start picking off rares and treasure chests you’ve missed, and don’t forget to hit the wanted quests in Spires of Arak if you haven’t already. Those bounty quests in Spires will net you up to 100 garrison resources per kill.

If you are looking simply to stockpile garrison resources for follower item token generation via the Armory, to buy extra Seals of Tempered Fate or in preparation for 6.2’s Shipyard building costs, you can largely rely on your garrison cache which will pump out 144 garrison resources per day. If you start with zero resources, you will hit the 10k cap in 70 days simply from looting your cache on a regular basis.

Want to kick it up a notch? Consider a level 1 Trading Post. It will cost you no garrison resources to build (as of 6.1) and it will add another 120 resources a day to your stockpile if you keep the work orders constantly filled. Don’t have the crafting reagent the Trading Post NPC is asking for on a particular day? Buy them off the Auction House if you are swimming in coin or run an alt through Draenor content to get them a garrison of their own to farm ore (Level 2 garrison and level 92 character to unlock mine) and herbs (level 2 garrison and level 96 character to unlock herb garden) to send to your main.

For the hardcore, consider a Lumber Mill. Like the Trading Post, it no longer costs garrison resources to upgrade, so your real cost here is the time it takes for you to harvest the lumber necessary to keep it running constantly. Upgrading it to level 3, harvesting large timber and assigning Phylarch to your Mill will result in another 180 resources per day.

At this point you are looking at 444 garrison resources per day generated.  You’ll hit the 10k cap in 23 days at that rate. Add to that follower missions that reward garrison resources, overlooked rares and treasure chests and soon you’ll have more garrison resources than you know what to do with.