Archaeology Is Here

Your friend and partner in archaeology: a surveyor's scope

The new profession Archaeology made its debut in the most recent beta build as well.  I started to write a thorough how-to of this new profession and then thought better of it. Other sources will do that better than I can. When I bump into a good link I'll throw that up as well. So, instead I cut to my first impressions.

• Fun!

• But only fun. There is nothing here that is going to make or break the game for you.

• This is totally a profession to work on when you are waiting around for people to show up to a raid, or when you're just chatting with folks online and don't want to get too wrapped up in anything really serious.

• One thing I especially kind of enjoy because it takes a fair amount of stress out of things: Archaeology nodes are not shared. No one can ninja your node. There might be a despicable blood elf paladin digging in the same spot as you, but he's going to find what he is looking for and you will find yours. They are totally different.

• This is also another profession I would not bother leveling until basically at max level, for a couple of reasons. You want a flying mount so you can scale a cliff really fast and not have to walk around. The only realy danger to archaeology comes from whatever local wildlife you happen to bump into. If you outgear the zone, this will be much much easier to deal with when your scope takes you through the middle of a bunch of undead trolls, for example.   

• This is a pretty cool way to go checking out the old world. You can discover that the high elves of Quel'Lithien lodge have turned into those evil husks that Kael'Thelas did back at the Sunwell. Or that the Crystal Shore in STV is now full of goblin oil derricks.

• So, you collect fragments and then eventually assemble them into artifacts. My first assembled artifact was Wooden Whistle. It's grey, just sell it to a vendor. Ghostcrawler, in his description of how all this works, sorta made a quip that selling them to a museum would be good. But I think he was channeling Indiana Jones rather than suggesting an in game mechanic there. I went all over the Explorer's League in Ironforge and didn't find anybody willing to buy my whistle.

•  I'll have to get back to you as soon as I find something cool. I could have sworn I saw a list once, but there were some BoAs, epic mounts and stuff like that to find!