Grab a shovel and dig there

It was a long time since I last participated in Blog Azeroth’s Shared Topic, but here comes the current one from Ringo Flinthammer with a question about Archaeology. Since I’ve been doing it quite a lot recently, it’s a good moment to talk about it a bit more.

I have to admit I wasn’t really paying a lot of attention to Archaeology before the expansion’s release. Obviously, I knew it was going to be in and that it will provide bits of lore and stuff, but that’s pretty much all. I definitely wasn’t prepared for what it really is.

It’s a bloody annoyance and yet I still do it.

Now, don’t get me wrong, it’s not like I dislike the profession itself – after all, I get all kinds of different stuff from it, some useful, some not really, and the most useful ones are very rare and seem impossible to obtain. It’s just absurdly annoying to do, even with the abundance of flight paths all over the world and a 310% speed flying mount.

I like getting new pets, mounts, fun stuff like Bones of Transformation or Innkeeper’s Daughter (speaking of hearthstones, I’ve recently read the Stormrage novel and was surprised at how apparently hearthstones are very rare and expensive artifacts – yet all adventurers have one) and even the gray common items have either amusing tooltips or provide nice lore fragments, but it all just takes a lot of time.

I wish Blizzard would “fix” it a little bit, and I’m not talking about tinkering with the Survey ability, which will happen in 4.0.6 and will reduce time spent on the site itself. That’s all good and a welcome change indeed, but how about some kind of a mechanic that will not spawn a site in Winterspring after I complete one in Uldum?

How about extending the durations on the items? Surely there’s nothing wrong with me running for an hour around Stormwind as a Naga or a Wisp – the transformations either drop if I enter combat anyway or I can’t use spells and abilities in them. 20 seconds is cool for random amusement in raids before a pull, but not for much more.

So… it’s an annoying profession and has a lot of downtime spent on flying around, but it’s still something to do in the time between raids or when listening to some podcasts, as it’s a bit hard for me to focus on tanking or healing while being distracted by people talking. Which is about on the same level for me as Fishing or other gathering professions are.

I didn’t pick it up on my druid and probably won’t do so on either of the alts here on Deathwing, but I might use it to speed up leveling on other realms. And on low level, the new 4.0.6 prices of common items will surely help to get some gold.