It's funny: Just last night I was commenting that they need to drastically boost the effectiveness of bandages, because outside of leveling, nobody uses them anymore. I can't remember the last time I used one mid-encounter.

And I'd love them to do ANYTHING that makes Archaeology more interesting. I had a whole RP concept for my gnome rogue that was going to be based around the profession, but once I started actively leveling it up, I abandoned it. They need to triple the amount of lore that you discover through Archaeology, at the very least. They could make up all sorts of interesting, funny or even sad stories that would be discovered... but the current pace of piecing together the lore bits is way too sparse to keep it interesting, IMO.

bandages are a must when you are running arenas with a non healing class

I always bandaged when I dps'd Chimaeron during the 'clump up' phase, since we had the hit debuff and by that point the healers were gasping for mana. Um.

I'm trying to think of another time. Failing.

One thing I've been thinking for Archaeology is allow us to make keystones. Each race has an always available solveable for a keystone... make it require 12 fragments, which is what a keystone can replace. This allows us to use fragments in dungeons when we might not have been lucky enough to get a keystone while digging. Just a thought.

I think all it would take to make the skins idea bring life back to archaeology is to make them BoE. That would create a market for them, and markets are way more fun than just grinding for yourself. Vanity items aside, I would like to see other rewards like ore, gems, BoE recipes, potions and elixirs, and anything else that might be useful or marketable.

While i like the idea of old-school transmog gear being added to Archaeology, that alone will definitely not save Archaeology. Blizz is going to have to change the way Arch works to bring me back to it. Just adding some new rewards won't be enough.

They need to give us more control over the sites we dig, perhaps add some type of artifact turn-in repeatable quests to spice it up a little bit, or maybe implement a currency system where you can trade in a certain number of common artifacts for rare ones, etc.

Because the current system of doing nothing but flying around endlessly for days and weeks and months to the same Nightelf dig sites over and over when you need anything BUT Nightelf dig sites in the hope that maybe (someday) the RNG will be nice to you and give you the item you want, totally blows.

They could mix in some BOE profession-level-up items/books and recipes from digs; similar to Inscription's Books of Glyph Mastery except they would be available for every profession.

The books could have varying numbers of skill-up points like they did with cooking/fishing dailies (+1 Blacksmithing Skill, +3 Jewelcrafting Skill, +5 First Aid Skill, etc) and the recipes could include some of the more difficult to find random world drops.

Profession recipes, that would be really nice. Especially those that seem to be lost forever, like some of the blacksmithing weapon specialization recipes. Or weapons and gear that were lost, like from old ZA or ZG raid instances.

So are we considering fishing to be a lost cause? Because no matter how boring archaeology is, its infinitely more engaging than fishing.

Taking the Books of Glyph Mastery suggestion, possibly link to another profession. There can be special spells or recipes/patterns to craftable gear or weapons.

Control of digsites would be nice along with adding more. Don't really need to change the RNG on what you learn next. You can work towards trying to get a specific item. It would be annoying not seeing that item come up, but it wouldn't be as annoying as working on that rare item in the queue, but not ever seeing the dig sites for it.

Thinking about it. A lot of ideas to help Archeology would require removal of one RNG factor. Transmog, patterns, materials, all of it. We'd have to remove the randomness of race so we can work towards one or remove the randomness of the item we are working on.