Posts with tag improving-wow-archaeology

Every Thursday, The Overachiever shows you how to work toward those sweet achievement points. Today, we are still searching for the Crawling Claw.

Wow. OK, a lot of people care about archaeology, or at least about improving archaeology. Last week's OverAchiever, How archaeology could get a lot worse (and why we hope it won't), spurred a ton of discussion and was kindly linked on the forums as well.

Players wrote in with a lot of their own suggestions, criticisms, and comments, and a lot of them were so good that I honestly felt that WoW's most widely despised profession probably merited another look with those in mind.

Every Thursday, The Overachiever shows you how to work toward those sweet achievement points. Today, we are really, really pissed off that we can't get the Crawling Claw.

There are two kinds of people in WoW: people who hate archaeology, and people who really hate archaeology. While it seemed like it was one of the more promising additions to Cataclysm, archaeology just hasn't worked out as well as everyone had hoped. Even the most dedicated lore nerds are guaranteed to wilt in the face of the game's most relentless RNG.

Whatever, right? Some experiments work, some don't, and it's ultimately more important that Blizzard's willing to take these risks in the first place. But ever since Mists of Pandaria was announced, I've been worrying more about archaeology's future. As Ghostcrawler once observed, archaeology was designed to be easy to add to, and it's reasonable to expect new races and new items to appear in the future. However, unless something fundamental about its design changes between now and Mists, it's the only profession guaranteed to become an absolute hell as it expands.

Why? Because archaeology suffers from two problems: It's too random, and it's not random enough.