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All of the latest Mists of Pandaria newsBreakfast Topic: Could transmogrification save archaeology?
by Matt Clerico 
Nov 18th 2011 at 8:00AM
Ah, archaeology -- a secondary profession with so much potential in theory, and the mind-numbing death of many hours of playtime in reality. I was originally really excited about a global scavenger hunt as a downtime activity, but after skilling it up, I lost interest. Piecing together tons of vendor trash in the hopes of my next find's being a rare became just another grind for items.
Now that the Cataclysm expansion is winding down, I've been thinking about where archaeology could grow from here. Certainly there will be more toy-type items and account-bound epic gear to chase after, but what else could this profession bring to the game?
It occurred to me that with the coming of the transmogrification feature, digging around Azeroth could be made interesting again. Instead of adding a number of gray-quality artifacts to sell for pocket money, why not have the common finds be transmoggable art pieces? Think gray-quality versions of gear, good only for costume unlocks. What better way to bring old stuff back to the present than by having us literally dig it up? It could work as an avenue to bring back discontinued tier looks (imagine digging in Eastern Plaguelands for pieces of original Naxxramas raid gear) or even open up items that never were before available to players (like a giant totem skin for two-handed maces, so you can look like a tauren warrior from Warcraft III)!
Where else do you think archaeology could go? What do you think we could be digging up in the next expansion?
Filed under: Breakfast Topics, Guest Posts
Reader Comments (Page 3 of 4)
Thomas Higgins Nov 18th 2011 9:10AM
Arcaeology. Damn, what a hard word to spell even when it is in the page header, but anyways, yeh, archaeology as it is put in the game just now is worse than useless. Either get rid of it completely and just do the sensible thing of giving us a useful third profession, either gathering or crafting, or revamp the whole system so that you are not spending metric tonnes of time looking for stuff that the game itself has decided isn't there in the first place because you didn't sacrifice enough virgins to the RNG gods.
And I haven't done any for weeks now, not with Fallout 3 and Fallout New Vegas to contend with. I remember the mental scars though. I like stuff in games that wastes time when I am not possessed with the ravening urge to kill everything that moves on my screen that isn't positively identified as friendly, which is why I love fishing in video games. All the way from Breath of Fire III to WoW, I love sitting down and catching a fish. It is relaxing. In the game's portrayal of archaeology, the way you go around digging up things from the ground smacks too much of real-world bonekicking. There is no excitement to it.
tl:dr Bin it or fix it.
Thomas Higgins Nov 18th 2011 10:41AM
I cannot spell. Very first word and I screw it up. Oops.
septane Nov 18th 2011 9:14AM
So are we talking about a method of getting transmog gear that goes something like this: You dig thousands of fragments, completing hundreds of grey items, several *random* rare transmog pieces, none of which go together, and when complaints continue on the forums about the unavailability of those gear sets, Blizz says, "Just dig them up!" Really?
Curzen Nov 18th 2011 10:09AM
Archaeology is one of those things that should never have been added to the game. Why it wasn't at least scrapped during beta I'll never understand.
Thomas Higgins Nov 18th 2011 10:44AM
They needed something to fill the big "Path of the Titans" - shaped gap in the game caused by that feature's removal at the eleventh and a half hour. Archy (sod trying to spell that word again after no sleep for twenty four hours) was the best they could come up with.
Rather than, say, something useful like a third tagged gathering or crafting profession.
Schadenfreude Nov 18th 2011 10:08AM
This is an awesome suggestion. Post it on the official forums!
babywhiz Nov 18th 2011 10:33AM
I would totally get back into Archy again if one of the items teleported me to, say Light's Hope Chapel. or Feathermoon Stronghold.
Thomas Higgins Nov 18th 2011 10:46AM
What if it was a lethal joke item instead, that transported you to Orgrimmar if you were Alliance, or Ironforge if you were Horde? That would be some entertainment anyways.
Zachariahs Nov 18th 2011 11:16AM
@Thomas: if it teleported a horde to IF you could just hearth out cause no body is there, while an ally in Org would be dead before there loading screen ended.
Thomas Higgins Nov 18th 2011 11:45AM
Hehe. I think you may be right there. So many folks now in Orgrimmar that it has become the new Shattrath City. With a far less enlightened leader at its head.
Eliezer Nov 18th 2011 10:49AM
Bring back the pain! Create a new gate/unlock system for Caverns of Time which requires you to dig up artifacts from the time period you wish to travel to :-p
DarkWalker Nov 18th 2011 10:52AM
I will only touch Archeology again if the need to travel all around the world is greatly reduced and the random rewards element is greatly downplayed.
Otherwise, no matter what the rewards, I won't try it again - and if the rewards become so great that I feel like Blizzard wants to push players into Archeology regardless of whether they like it or not, without concurrent changes to make Archeology actually fun, I would be more inclined to leave the game than to try Archeology.
(On the other hand, the idea is a nice one - and more so if the cosmetic pieces are made BoE, so Archeology can "produce" items for other players. It's just that, with the current Archeology, it could give us Legendary weapons that I still wouldn't be interested.)
Puntable Nov 18th 2011 10:52AM
I could not level archeology because there is just too much flying around. I don't mind the digging part but the flying is not fun. Make the sites respawn like mining nodes so that half of them are always spawned and there is always one close. I don't know why they made it so hard to level it. You can level mining or herbing without taking out time from questing. Why not archeology?
Brock Nov 18th 2011 11:01AM
This is one of the best ideas I have heard for archeology, blizzard do it!
Silma Nov 18th 2011 11:02AM
Seems that my earlier comment is lost in never ending maze of web... Idea that archeology could be source for transmoging is really good.
But what they could also do with it is rethink Path of the Titans concept, perhaps not in original design but in some form. Remember how it was announced that glyph system will give us ability to alter look of our spells, well tbh I haven't noticed, and I'm sure most of us have encountered in the past some trinket or item that had some unique ability, Nibelung for instance- it gave you chance to own your very own dead vyrkul lady a.k.a. Val'kyr, there are fun items we were never allowed to use like Allea's bottle that attracts meteors.
On the other hand as a paladin I find minor glyphs useless, perhaps other classes had more luck. My idea is to replace/enhance them so they now do give some minor buff but also so they change our abilities. Those "glyphs" don't have to be class specific. Allow me to illustrate: most known paladin AoE is Consecration, imagine that you can modify it so when you cast it happens what usually does but also pillars of light, lets say 3 of them, erupt around you and stun/trap 3 nearby mobs for short period of time. But same "glyph" would add same spell modification to other AoEs of other classes, warlocks would spawn 3 imps to hold mobs, death knights would have skeletal arms hold mobs...
Archeology could provide ways to use abilities from items we no longer use, and also provide ways to influence some of our core abilities more than just change number of targets, mana cost or duration of effect. Even some artifacts we now create could be altered to be used in such way. There is no need that buffs received through this system be major influence on gameplay, but should be more than 3 dwarfs dancing around you.
Amaxe Nov 18th 2011 11:08AM
Archaeology was ultimately disappointing because it became an RNG way to try to find epics. After continually getting low value greys from races where you had already got everything but the epics it gets annoying: "Troll dining ware again? F***!"
What I'd like to see:
1) A great deal more lore to discover. Blizz knows the lore they want. Why not use Archaeology to let us discover it?
2) More races, especially in relation to #1. Would like to discover Tauren, Human, Blood Elf items.
3) More of a ramp system. Discovering low level artifacts provide some sort of clue points to discovering greater finds, which can lead to finding usable items.
Other people might have other suggestions, but ultimately it would be fascinating to start discovering the past of Azeroth and Draenor and not just "Dammit, not the voodoo doll again!"
MattKrotzer Nov 18th 2011 1:29PM
Honestly, it's an even easier way for them to put more lore into the game. You don't even have to write quests or program anything. Just dump it into a reward for completing archaeological items.
Amaxe Nov 18th 2011 9:25PM
Well, personally I'd like to see something like discovering fragments of documents/tablets etc which, when solved, point to sites (something like one of those caves that are intended to be a sort of micro dungeon). Of course these sites would have to be unlocked, and until they are, you can't enter them.
So you could perhaps discover the tomb of some ancient pharoah or an ancient tauren leader, and learn more lore... perhaps culminating in some kind of soloed instance where you defeat the guardian and get some sort of epic treasures.
Along the way, you can find other artifacts which you can either misappropriate for personal use or decide, "It belongs in a museum" and turn it in to the Explorer's League or Reliquary.
No idea how this would work in game or how hard it would be to install, but wouldn't that be a cool way to handle each archy race?
lolikitty Nov 18th 2011 11:48AM
Archeology is great when you want to catch up on you favourite podcasts. I got pets, a nice ring that was totally useful at the time i got it and continues to be on my alt, a few 100 or 200g greys, and I just dug out the mount so i'm happily working on that. Also, not too bad when you're a mage *ducks tomatoes*
Implementing transmog stuff would be fantastic though.
Hoofio Nov 18th 2011 12:12PM
Unlike most posters here I like the travel .. It's kind of the point to show off flyable azeroth... I encountered those psychotic gun-toting critters north of mulgore doing arch.. that was brilliant... and it's made me look at parts of the world I knew were there but never bothered to check out like the fairy ring in ashenvale.
It also makes you think about the most efficient way to visit the sites you want (for all us non-mages) which is sort of fun. I agree that more sites are needed though.
It's the 'game' bit of it I can't stand.. reds that point in the wrong direction and greens that are actually yards away so you do like three or four before you find it ... like three or four putting in golf it's incredibly frustrating.
Digging up old armour sounds cool and I very much agree with making them BOE. tbh I don't understand why Blizz doesn't do that a lot more to create new markets and stick it to the gold sellers
.. meh, I'm a druid, not an economist.