Cataclysm

[SurfD]

Heh, I'm pretty sure Azazel plays at times when I'm at work or asleep, given the Aussie > US time exchange.

Also, don't come to Proudmoore. It's a crowded release-day server that hasn't had the hamster replaced in years. We do have a fairly dominant Alliance population though.

I seem to recall Morat is on Tich, which is a VERY crowded release day server. 

I play on tich, and yeah, it has stabalized a fair bit, but it is still a very crouded release day server, and will willingly still shit a brick when any interesting stuff gets released and the swarms decend to check out new content.

[Lakov_Sanite]

back on topic!

Originally Posted by Ghostcrawler  (Source)
Archaeology just went in this build for the first time and we don't yet have any of the support around it to teach players what to do. It has been informative to watch players learn to swim by drowning, but we thought it was time to offer a little more direction.

Digsites
Once you train archaeology, you can see digsites on your map (not your minimap - your map). There are always 4 digsites per continent. These will not change until you dig one out. Most of the time, you're probably only going to be concerned with the 4 sites on your current continent, but at higher character and archaeology skill levels, there will be 16 sites active at one time (4 each in Eastern Kingdoms, Kalimdor, Outland and Northrend.)

You will only find sites in zones of your level or lower. A level 25 player will have all 4 sites per continent in level 25 zones. (This means Outland and Northrend will have no sites at this time.) A level 80 player will have all 4 sites in any zone. A low level Kalimdor player might have sites in Ashenvale and Stonetalon, while a level 82 might have Uldum, Ashenvale, Stonetalon and Silithus.

Sites are race specific. You can usually guess the race by the location. Kalimdor tends to have a lot of night elf ruins. Eastern Kingdoms tends to have a lot of dwarf ruins.

Some races are only available on some continents (such as orc and draenei on Outland). You need to have a minimum character level and a minimum archaeology level to use these. Currently you can see them if you are a certain character level but can't gather from them until your archaeology skill is higher. For Outland, the skill is 300. While somewhat consistent with other gathering skills, we think this is confusing and we will change it so that you don't even see the digsites until your archaeology skill is sufficiently high. Tol'vir artifacts are the most rewarding, but also require near max archaeology skill to recover.

Some players are reporting some issues with digsites not showing up correctly. We'll look into these bugs.

Unlike other gathering skills, digsites are player-specific. Other players will be searching in different locations. There is no competition for digsites.

Fragments
Each digsite can be searched 3 times before it despawns and a new site spawns. If there is a digsite somewhere too far away from you or otherwise inconvenient, just ignore it and hit the closer ones. You won't run out.

To search a digsite, use the Survey ability. The survey tool will spawn and point in the approximate direction of the artifact. Red means you're far away. Yellow means you're close. Green means you may be within 40 yards or so. When you discover your find, you'll get fragments specific to a particular race.

There are two main strategies to surveying. You can attempt to triangulate by moving around the outer edge of a digsite. (Like quest blobs, the digsites are not necessarily circular.) Other players just keep surveying, heading in the direction the tool points until they strike paydirt.

Remember, the thing you uncover is yours. There is no competition with other players and nobody can gank your node.

Artifacts
Whenever you get a new fragment for a race, you'll start a research project. You can only work on one artifact per race at a time. When you have enough fragments, click Solve to complete that artifact. You won't waste excess fragments -- they will just start the next project. You can be working on one project for each race at a time.

Most artifacts are common. These give you a little bit of lore or flavor text and an item you can sell for a small profit (presumably to a museum!) The profit increases as the value of the artifact increases. You can estimate this by the number of fragments needed to finish the artifact. You will only find cheaper artifacts at low level, but you can find cheap and valuable artifacts at higher level (the reason for this is we want players to be able to find all the artifacts if they want to). You won't find a second copy of a common object until you have found all the artifacts of that race. If you get stuck at a certain skill level of archaeology or character level, you may find an artifact more than once until you reach the next tier.

Some artifacts are rare. These always make a blue or purple item. Many of these have no in-game power and are toys or for flavor. Some of them are actual weapons and armor. The latter items are all bound to account. They aren't heirlooms in that they don't scale, but you can pass them around. So if you are level 80 and you find a level 60 axe, you can always have another character use it when they are level 60. You will never get a rare artifact more than once.

The future
We designed archaeology to be easily expandable, so we plan to add much more content in future patches, including new races to research (though to be fair, there's a sizable amount of content already). We also have a feature that is not available on beta yet, that allows you to use your archaeology skill for a slight (think Fish Feast-level) bonus in the Cataclysm dungeons.

kinda sounds fun.

[Rendakor]

I like the idea of BoA gear; it'll make powering it up at 80 (or 85) more useful because at least I'll have things to pass down to alts.

[WindupAtheist]

I like this casual/fluff/lore version of archaeology a lot better than the previous mandatory character advancement "path of the titans" bullshit.

[Ingmar]

Yeah it looks cool, and it seems like they've designed it in a way you won't feel like you have to do it on every single character too.

[Simond]

One of the archaeology rewards is a rideable-anywhere Qiraji battle tank. 
Oh, and the main Alliance teacher is (of course) Harrison Jones. The Horde get an expy of Belloq.

[WindupAtheist]

The final nail in our neverending Horde-is-evil nerdfight!

[Simond]

Yeah, yeah. 
Anyway, full (so far) list: http://db.mmo-champion.com/skill/794/archaeology/

Oh, and the 4.0 PTR (live, not Cata beta) servers just went up.

[Merusk]

Paladin (Forums / 3.3.5 Talent Calculator / Cataclysm Talent Calculator / Beta Skills/Talents)

    * Paladins now have a new resource bar.

What?  Like a new graphic or did I miss them changing pallies from mana to something else?

[Rendakor]

They're getting Holy Power in addition to mana.

[lesion]

One of the archaeology rewards is a rideable-anywhere Qiraji battle tank. 

The ultimate fuck you to anyone who did the poopsockin' quest chain way back when. I like it.

[Threash]

Not unless its black, if im not mistaken.

[Drubear]

There also seems to be a new bind point "<home>" that is likely the reason why anyone besides mount and companion collectors (and a cloth and mail armor item) would do this.

[Simond]

Speaking of awesome mounts; the Alliance ground guild-mount is in: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0jE9ZteQLyY (White bits on saddle = tabard emblem).
Horde one isn't yet, but the menu item for it is - it's a riding scorpion. 

[Threash]

Which tokens can i use to buy gems?

[Merusk]

You have to downgrade your tokens to the lowest one.. Heroisim.

[Azazel]

There also seems to be a new bind point "<home>" that is likely the reason why anyone besides mount and companion collectors (and a cloth and mail armor item) would do this.

What?

[caladein]

There also seems to be a new bind point "<home>" that is likely the reason why anyone besides mount and companion collectors (and a cloth and mail armor item) would do this.

What?

http://db.mmo-champion.com/i/64488/the-innkeepers-daughter/

[WindupAtheist]

It's just a novelty hearthstone and <home> is the placeholder for the name of your bind point. What did you guys think it meant?

[SurfD]

It's just a novelty hearthstone and <home> is the placeholder for the name of your bind point. What did you guys think it meant?

I think people were hoping for the rumored ability to have a second bind location that was once mentioned, but never materialized.

[Lakov_Sanite]

It's just a novelty hearthstone and <home> is the placeholder for the name of your bind point. What did you guys think it meant?

I think people were hoping for the rumored ability to have a second bind location that was once mentioned, but never materialized.

I'm willing to bet it's a hearthstone with a reduced cast time.

[Ingmar]

I'm guessing same as the regular one but with a separate cooldown.

[Azazel]

It's just a novelty hearthstone and <home> is the placeholder for the name of your bind point. What did you guys think it meant?

I kind of understood the first bit, but the second was purely WTF material. Read his post again. The words are in English but I can't extract a lot of meaning from it.

There also seems to be a new bind point "<home>" that is likely the reason why anyone besides mount and companion collectors (and a cloth and mail armor item) would do this.

[ezrast]

Didn't seem that mangled to me.

There also seems to be a new bind point, "<home>", which (aside from cloth and mail armor items) is likely the reason why anyone besides mount and companion collectors would do this.

WUA (and Ingmar, I would guess) is right though; hearthstones also refer to <home> on that site.

[WindupAtheist]

It was pretty fucked up. It sounded like cloth and mail armor items were going to do archaeology because they wanted a hearthstone.

[ezrast]

The internet has ruined my standards.

[Simond]

You have to downgrade your tokens to the lowest one.. Heroisim.

OTOH in Cataclysm everything is going to two-tier currency format; one for current tier raids + first daily (i.e. Frost badges now) and one to replace all other badges  (including WotLK & TBC).

[Drubear]

It's just a novelty hearthstone and <home> is the placeholder for the name of your bind point. What did you guys think it meant?

I kind of understood the first bit, but the second was purely WTF material. Read his post again. The words are in English but I can't extract a lot of meaning from it.

Sorry. I was reading <home> to mean a separate bind point vs. <hearth> or somesuch.

As to shorter cooldown, I remember 30 minutes on the tooltip which is same as now, neh?

[apocrypha]

Yeah but if you've got 2 of them, on separate timers then it's effectively 15 mins. Kinda like shaman have already.

[Wolf]

And if you're already a shaman, that's like 10! 

[Musashi]

One of the archaeology rewards is a rideable-anywhere Qiraji battle tank. 

The ultimate fuck you to anyone who did the poopsockin' quest chain way back when. I like it.

The epeen I extracted from that mount was enough to sustain me for several years until I got bored of that dude and gave the account to a friend, who extracted even more epeen from it.  If you sat parked in a major city riding that thing, you'd be spammed with tells for as long as you were willing to sit there basking in it.  Noobs would literally gather around you like lemmings, asking you to wait while they called their friends just to come see your epic legendary idle.  I'm pretty sure you can't dig that out of archaeology.   

[Lakov_Sanite]

One of the archaeology rewards is a rideable-anywhere Qiraji battle tank. 

The ultimate fuck you to anyone who did the poopsockin' quest chain way back when. I like it.

The epeen I extracted from that mount was enough to sustain me for several years until I got bored of that dude and gave the account to a friend, who extracted even more epeen from it.  If you sat parked in a major city riding that thing, you'd be spammed with tells for as long as you were willing to sit there basking in it.  Noobs would literally gather around you like lemmings, asking you to wait while they called their friends just to come see your epic legendary idle.  I'm pretty sure you can't dig that out of archaeology.   

Can you dig up the wasted hours of your life back?

[Shrike]

Hell, about everything you did back in vanilla was a colossal grind. Remember Cultist rep camps? I do, and it's not a fond memory.

Just about anything out of the ordinary bring the looky-loos out of the woodwork. Just yesterday my DK was idling out in Dun Morogh waiting for the Gnomer event to kick off. She's a Bloodsail admiral and I had her parrot out. Man, the /tells I got hit with. "How do you get a blood parrot?" Well, you have to be a pirate...

Really old school stuff like the tank or mini-Diablo, Lord of Terror, really get them going. When I returned my NE warrior to active duty for Wrath, she was still in her T1/T2 armor with her Drillborer's Disk. I got no end of inquiries about "that cool looking armor". Heh.

[Ingmar]

The first time in history those tiers of warrior armor were ever described as "cool".

[Chimpy]

The first time in history those tiers of warrior armor were ever described as "cool".

Maybe 'cool' is a double meaning slang like 'bad'?