Hailstorm Gaming Network

Salvaging is one of the most lucrative features of Warlords, and most people with Level 3 Salvage yards would agree it's been a bit on the "OP" side. A recent change today, however, retuned it to be less abusable, but not necessarily less effective.

Salvage crate contents have not changed, so your loot is the same today as it was a few days ago. How salvage crates are obtained, however, has changed slightly with these two changes confirmed today by the devs:

Level 90-94 missions will only award a Bag of Salvaged Goods (level 1 reward) regardless of the level of your Salvage Yard.

Followers can take a lot of work to get right, but your buildings help make things easier. Here are some more quick garrison follower tips:

Rush Salvage Yard. The easiest and cheapest building that will give long term benefit is your Salvage Yard. This is the single best reason to keep low level followers and grind missions. Grind salvage by using low level missions and their short durations (typically under 2 hours) and get your level 3 schematic quickly for your account. Salvage is plentiful, can give you upgrades for your followers to increase their item level or even yourself, and can give a lot of interesting loot including transmog and rares legacy BoEs.

Keep your barracks. If you are pursuing follower progression or mission rewards, you need a good team of followers. Your Barracks right away at level 1 gives missions with great bonus XP rewards, even when they've hit level 100, helping upgrade qualities as well. Even when you aren't leveling or upgrading, the building is useful, giving you space for 5 more active followers, helping you have more counters and more followers to manage your mission load.

Consider getting an inn. Your inn has a lot of bonuses that tie into and help your followers. At level 1, one of the characters who can visit you is Millhouse Manastorm who, if you perform his quest, will join you as an automatically epic follower! At level 2, you can recruit one follower every week for a specific ability or trait. This lets you fill in bald spots for your team, finding an ability to counter a threat you can't currently handle or find a useful trait to make your team better. At level 3, they unlock treasure missions that, while not amazing gold on their own, with a full team of 100 followers, quickly add up to some lucrative gold that doesn't require you to do anything but send them out!

Use your inn for Scavengers and Epic Mounts. Your inn can recruit a follower once per week, and getting a counter you don't have is very important, but if your team is all set or you want something more useful, two of the best traits you can get aren't bonuses to success chance. Scavenger and Epic Mount will work even when the follower is vastly underleveled for the mission (success chance perks, like counters, do not trigger when over 2 levels below the mission). Scavenger will triple the amount of garrison resource a mission can reward and Epic Mount halves the time they take and these bonuses can stack for massive rewards or absurdly short mission times. They can help get massive amounts of use out of missions.

Unlock achievement followers. Followers from achievements or reputations are very worth it (once your team is ready for level 100 missions). Ones like Archmage Vargoth (who requires some exploring) or Leeroy Jenkins and Croman (who require a capable heroic dungeon group) start out as epic. These can help immensely when getting started with level 100 missions and getting more counters. Just make sure you're ready for having level 100 missions!

Garrison followers can be tricky to manage, so here are some quick garrison follower tips to help smooth out your experience or make your alts go a little better.

Don't rush. Your followers will get to 100 soon enough and you won't be missing out on things. Available missions match your followers' levels... but NOT the number of them. As soon as one follower hits level 100, you will be getting multiple level 100 missions. These will not take away from other missions, but will be sitting dead in your log until you get more to 100. Try to level as even as you can.

Because of this, Avoid unlocking 100 followers early. There are followers from reputations and achievements that you can get early on, in particular a level 100 blue follower for only 5k gold from the first zone for your faction's corresponding reputation. Hold off on getting this or any other level 100 follower until you have a few already or you may end up with level 100 missions you cannot complete or do not want.

ABC: Always Be Countering. Countering threats is your single best way to complete missions. If every threat is countered, you will always have 100%. Having an even spread of every threat will allow you to easily tackle any mission the game throws at you. This means having variety in your followers and prioritizing your counters on the missions that mean the most to you.

Epics help a lot. Your followers have a chance to be rare (blue) or epic (purple) in quality when you obtain them, but if they aren't, don't worry. Once they hit level 100, XP goes to increasing their quality. It takes a lot of time and XP (and your Barracks can help, see below) but it's worth it. Higher item level missions will have more threats than you can send followers, easily having 5-6 threats. Countering becomes very difficult, making traits pick up the slack, but epic quality followers have two abilities, helping you counter more.

Missions slow down at 100. When your entire roster of "active" followers (this includes ones not on mission and ones stationed at garrison buildings) is all at level 100, you will mostly only get level 100 missions. This means right now you may only get 4-5 missions at once. Keeping a few low level followers means more missions at once. This has several uses, but the best is grinding, whether it's for extra follower XP to upgrade quality or for salvage.

Everyone's favorite time of year is coming, but before Steam blows up with sales, take a chance at getting a game you've always wanted in our December Steam Giveaway! There are over 90 available prizes including over 30 different games. A mix of new releases and modern classics, all redeemable on Steam!

Find out more on the Hailstorm forums.

The biggest announcement and saved for last was the reveal of Blizzard's first new IP in 17 years, Overwatch.

Revealed with both a pristinely animated trailer and highly polished gameplay footage, Overwatch looks to already be on the fast track of being a massive new movement for Blizzard. Directed by veteran Blizz developer Jeff Kaplan, Overwatch is a 6v6 team shooter with a colorful and unique cast of characters set in a bright superhero universe.

It looks to be very familiar for players, with capture point-style gameplay seen in the trailer, but more details are pending the official website for Overwatch coming online.

Find out more and apply for the game's beta in 2015 at playoverwatch.com!

Another massive reveal was the next expansion in the Starcraft 2 saga, Legacy of the Void. Finishing the trilogy and focusing on the Protoss as they unite to face the Xel'naga threat, the expansion will be standalone and not require Wings of Liberty or Heart of the Swarm.

No dates were announced, familiar features and modes will be returning, including The Lurker!

More details can be found at legacyofthevoid.com!

But that wasn't all. Online CCG Hearthstone, coming soon to Android tablets, also had an expansion reveal in the form of its first major card pack, Goblins vs Gnomes.

Sporting over 120 cards, the card pack focuses on the explosive exploits of Warcraft's most beloved rivals and will introduce new a massive amount of new abilities and strategies to the game next month!

Lastly, some news for Heroes of the Storm was announced in a new trailer showing new modes (including Ranked Play), maps, skins, and two newly announced characters: Warcraft mainstays Thrall and Jaina Proudmoore!

It's that time again! To celebrate our relaunch, we're doing another giveaway, this time for 6 WoW TCG items. This month we're giving away:

Blazing Hippogryph

Magical Ogre Idol

Party G.R.E.N.A.D.E. x6

Paint Bomb x2

The Flag of Ownership

Tabard of Flame

Find out more on the Hailstorm forums.

Due to unforeseen circumstances involving developments between Mojang and Microsoft, we’ve had to reconsider the direction of our Minecraft servers and of the Hailstorm community in general.

Given the unknown status and developing nature of Minecraft and its acquisition and recent changes to SMP and modded servers, we are moving away from Minecraft. While we can’t say just yet what our future plans for Minecraft are, currently all plans for Minecraft are indefinitely on hold or offline.

In light of this change, however, we are proud to announce our new initiative to bringing you a much wider variety of fresh gaming content from our contributors. We’ll be refocusing away from Minecraft and more on a broader range of original content.

Branching out to Youtube and Twitch, we’ll be bringing you video content covering new features in gaming including in-depth coverage of popular games like World of Warcraft, gaming news, guides, and streaming.

We'll also be doing events and giveaways as we branch out into more games and expand our community larger than ever before.

We've also change out main site to reach out to new users through Tumblr, making it easier to keep track of what's going on here at Hailstorm and share it with your friends and comrades.