As title says.
Esp. with the condensed pre-patch and expansion calendar, Arch leveling needs at least a slight buff imo. As is, I don’t think it’s going to be worth most people doing it - even for the sweatiest folks whose guilds insist on full pre-bis for raiding.
There are a few ways Blizz could (but probably won’t) do this without fundamentally changing the profession.
- There are currently ~4 dig sites that appear at a time per continent. Increase that to 6-8.
- At least on beta, skillups for digging stop at 50. Increase that to 100-125, even if it goes yellow.
- This one would probably be harder to code perhaps, and would be somewhat less impactful, but decrease the size of dig site zones by 20%, and/or the size of your detection range by 10-15%.
The first two would be most impactful, since flying around EK/Kalimdor ~20 times is by far the biggest time sink, but the third would remove some annoyance.
Edit - or I suppose also #4, either just increase the amount of frags per dig by 20% or decrease the number required to craft by 20%.
Personally I say just leave it as it is, it’s a time sink.
It certainly is that. And to a point, I even agree that’s fine.
But [on beta] it’s much worse than I remembered - like, Vanilla-level grind. I don’t see that going over well for people with actual lives, people who’d hoped to do it on alts, etc.
And, as above, I think that’s a more glaring issue with the condensed Cata schedule.
You could counter it’s probably less of a grind than fishing, and I’d agree, but fishing has the ‘pool’ workaround that means you don’t really need to be capped to access most of the value of the profession.
Although Archaeology can be a bit of a chore, I personally feel that it’s designed well. It’s easily finished during pre-patch and then it’s no longer a worry outside of finishing achievements later on. Most people who do it are going to be pushing for pre-raid BiS items, so I couldn’t imagine much changing due to the nature of the rewards.
I’m curious if you did it on Beta.
I do think the pain point is in the 75-300 skill range, and for that stretch the only similarly grindy profession is Blacksmith. And BS you can just drop gold to power through. Even fishing 1-300 is a bit faster and is also easier to do in small doses (though conversely slows way down after 300).
So maybe the solution is just to have skill-ups from farming last longer.
IDK that the profession should be balanced around 1 pre-bis item that will be irrelevant for most within a month of launch. Most mid-tier players will probably skip it (unless they want to do arch for other reasons), take a 2nd-bis they can get from rep/heroics, and then gear up in normal raids.
Not sure if OP did, but I leveled it to 525 in beta. I’ve been farming these things for hours at max level. I have every toy/companion/mount, have yet to acquire a single 359 piece for any class or spec. Feels real bad.
I’m curious if you have a guesstimate of how many hours it took to reach max before the RNG farming?
This is really unfortunate… Actually, it causes me to wonder that if leveling Archaeology during pre-patch will even allow the collection of the 359 pieces prior to the actual Cataclysm launch.
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15-16 hours to reach 525, 12 of that was the 1-300 which seemed to go slower for some reason.
I’m wondering that too, I’ve seen no evidence to say that they are even in the game on beta.
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I’m going to jump back into the beta for the rest of the week and see how the Archaeology goes… I’ll keep you updated on if anything fun happens.
At least it’ll give me something to do during the downtime of pre-patch. 
That was my thoughts, but so far I just hate myself.
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Its fun the first time around.
Its already 4.4 archaeology, buff it anymore it will become MOP
They need to make either archeology gears weaker (down from ilvl 359 to 346) or implement some mechanic with which your chances of getting next solve being epic increase for every low rarity solve.
Yea i know, i know, some ppl will be against it for wtvr reason (especially those who got Zin’Rokh). Let’s just be honest, 99% of players do archeology just for the epic raid-level gears not for “fun” or “exploration”.
It’s ridiculous in 2024 to purely let RNG play the game.
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I completely agree with you. It’s a pointless time sync that was so badly designed that it was ignored moving forward.
Raid content SHOULD be difficult, true trade skills SHOULD be time consuming. Archaeology is not an aspect of the game that should require tens of hours to complete in order to obtain one or two items that are useful for a month, especially since beyond that it is a completely useless skill.
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Honestly, if a single piece of gear is such a big deal that you’d do something you actively hate then you have bigger issues to worry about
Me and many of our raid members have 3 or more toons that need to be lvl 85 with pre-raid bis gear by the end of first week. The expected time to find epic weapon from archeology is probably 100+ hours, that is simply not gonna happen if you have multiple toons that need to be hard-mode raid ready in a week.
Zinrokh and staff are too big of a deal for pre-raid chars that you simply lose your competency for not having them, given that your raid is composed of a competitive pool.
Nobody wants to bet on RNG as an opportunity cost for getting another toon raid ready. They might wanna just allow archelogy botting otherwise since its purely self-beneficial as it doesn’t hurt the economy.
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Have you ever raided in any competitive environment? There is absolutely no way if this is your take.
And even if you just have a single toon, chances are you still most likely won’t find the epic weapon since its too small of a chance coming from pure RNG.
Many competitive (top) raid groups will consider toons with epic gears with priority. I am incentivized to hire some1 to grind archeology with my account or just write my own script to automate it.
They are simply encouraging actions against TOS.
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