It’s taken me roughly 8-9 (miserable) hours to reach 280 in Archaeology on the beta so far. In that time I’ve acquired 3 toys and maybe 200g worth of vendor trash. This is not compelling gameplay to me, I’d love to ignore it and never touch it again. Here in lies the dilemma, at least one preraid BiS item for every class is locked behind this profession grind and RNG. How do we fix this to not feel like a terrible chore?
Increase the fragment drop count per survey so it takes less time to actually max the profession and cycle through the RNG items.
Give more skill points per solve from 1-300, most players doing this will not be level 20 doing it casually as they level up. It will be 80+ players trying to get to the relevant portion of the content.
More controversial option lock the 359 ilvl gear for phase 1 so that guilds do not expect their raiders to do excessive amounts of noncombat content to remain competitive.
Remove the RNG for the gear items and guarantee them as the next solve at certain skill levels, so there is a tangible goal to work toward and not random chance.
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There’s a reason why they ditched archaeology. Once everyone got their BIS pre-raid weapons they never touched it again.
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It would be fine if you didnt had to travel across the globe for every other node. Its such a waste of time …
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Archaeology got cool stuff in Legion
Uhmm the idea of Archaeology is, like in real world, exploring old zones across the world
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I’ve actually quite enjoyed the exploration of the new zones that grinding Arch to 525 has provided me. However, the grind far exceeds the exploration opportunities. I quickly realized I was ending up in the same areas over and over and over again.
Now that I’m capped its still more of the same, farming crap for untargetable rewards. You want a mount from a certain race or a weapon from another? Too bad your only have digsites for some other race.
You are braver than I am for doing all that in the beta. Archaeology is one thing from Cata I basically already decided I will do just about anything to avoid. I got all my kicks the first time in retail and came out of it with a very sour attitude.
I don’t know what changes would be needed for me to want to do it again this time, but pre-raid bis isn’t enough for me. Since…ideally it gets replaced fairly quickly with actual raid gear for whichever character, or perhaps that some other item is a reasonable enough close second.
I get that. The RP element of the proffesion works perfectly even with the lore of each individial relic. That was done great.
But im sure you do understand how anoying it is to get relics dig sites in tanaris then go to hinterlands the back to uldum then go wetlands…if you wanna just level up this proffesion, coz there is an preraid bis item that many ppl will feel like fish for, you need to get trough this slugfest.
And im not even mentioning that you had to go to northrend too. But im not sure if that was in cata or added in mop.
That’s exactly what kills it for me. The entire system is like a Matryoshka Doll set of rng. It’s basically as bad as some of these newer pay to win games out there, only you just pay a montly sub to do the same thing with unlimited “rolls”. The perception that you are working incrementally towards a specific desirable goal is almost nonexistent.
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The entire reason I did was to determine if the raid gear was worth it on life for me. I’ve determined it isn’t so I won’t waste my valuable time trying for something that probably won’t happen before I can replace it.
I actually felt like I was near the end on the way to 525, but then the skill up stops and I farmed for another hour before seeing race digsites I needed. It’s just such a piss poor system to put gear in. Decent time killer otherwise, I’d support just the vanity items.
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T11 raids will 100% be clearable without getting archaeology weapons. If you absolutely have to have them, then do the grind. Pro-tip do it with a dwarf. The weapons are BoA so can farm it on a different toon np.
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I made a very similar post to OP’s on the Wrath forums. Leaving aside people’s concerns about the RNG nature of the gear, I agree with OP the 80-300 grind is slow and the opposite of fun.
I’d planned to test the whole grind, but quit 4-5 hours in.
I think there are some pretty simple tweaks that could make it better. Off the top of my head.
- Have collecting frags give skillups longer. Most of the guides say you get skill til 100, but on beta mine went gray [non-dwarf] at 50. Not sure which is supposed to be correct, but 50 was painful since it requires the equivalent of also making 50 solves.
This would be the simplest with the least impact on later arch - just have skillups from farming turn yellow at 100, green at 125, and gray at 150. That reduces the number of solves to 30 (not accounting for rares, but again, they seem to be a wash overall in time per skill point) to advance to Outland.
2) Alternatively, as OP said, have normal solves give more than 5 skill points as a baseline.
3) Change the ratio for rares - they do give 3x the skill points, but generally require about 3x the mats. Either drop the mat requirement for low-level rares, or increase the skill points.
4) Increase the number of spawn points active on EK/Kalimdor. While still RNG, this would tend to reduce the amount of travel required since you’d be more likely to get spawn clusters.
I suspect the sweatiest guilds will require the grind, casual/solo players will do it as a way to get blues in phase 1.
It’s really the mid where it probably makes sense just to skip this grind and get epics out of the normal raid for most slots before you progress to HM attempts anyway.
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Reality is that all the really good Archeology drops are BoAs. Its not intended as a predictable gearing path, but if you actually want to do it as an escape from the usual game play or for the achieves there is a chance of picking up something useful to help gear your alts. No reasonable guild will require you to grind for the pre-raid BIS Arch items. Sure some very sweaty guilds will, but if thats a problem for you then you are clearly not sweaty enough for your guild and might need to find another one 
Also worth noting that if properly implemented as it was in original cata, then Archeology awards a modest amount of XP (however this is not currently working in beta). It wasn’t as fast as you can level through other methods but rather than grinding for the item on your main you can grind for it on your alts to level them, and if the right BoA drops just mail it to the main.
They should make it like herbing, if you need a specific herb you stay in a specific zone and wait for respawns. I agree that flying between faraway zones to clear the troll site so you can spawn a fossil site is pretty terrible.
i mean there is a reason it is a secondary profession that eventually retired in retail.it was a bad experiment and its not mandatory.ill drop a huge philosophy thing here,if you dont like something,dont do it.
What would make you think there is going to be an overhaul of archaeology in classic? This isn’t the version of wow where major overhauls happen.
No, archeology is not an option, it is just mandatory for top 0.5% raiders in Cata. Competitive raid environments only consider toons with Zinrokh and staff. If you don’t them you won’t be considered.
Blizzard realized this was a terrible philosophy and they retired it.
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Your better off farming or levelling another toon for heroic dungeons then you are farming Arch for very bad stat 359s.
There is no world were it is viable to farm these things other been extremely casual and just wanting them. Top guilds won’t be farming arch.
Its just like the job market. When there are 8000 applicants for 1 job, recruiter gets to select either the strongest profile even if that means overqualification, or the kids of largest shareholders.