Snips and Snails and Puppy Dog Tales

Sorry for two posts in a row, didn't expect this second one to happen so fast.


Professor #3. Keen got the title pre-nerf, Dandelion and Thistle post-nerf.

This was Keen's total archaeology projects finished, before he even got the title:


This was Thistle's total once he got the title:


881 finished items without even getting the title pre-nerf, 242 post-nerf title achieved.

Need more proof that archaeology is already way too over-nerfed? I got the professor title without stepping foot into Northrend. (The Nerubian ones came from Eastern Kingdom.) I did this without doing a single high level dig (no TV/Uldum sites at all, not even one dig there). I started at level 60, ended less than 5% into level 81 (and that's with questing and dailies as well).

It just feels so silly-easy now. I can't believe Blizz is intending to nerf it further. That annoys me so very much. What, so people don't like to fly from site to site? Know what? I don't like raiding, but that doesn't mean I can have raiding gear anyway. Some people don't like PvP, so they don't get to have PvP gear. If people don't like archaeology, so be it, then they shouldn't get the generally worthless rewards from it.

And "funny" story. I now have FIVE Headdress of the First Shaman, a purple agi head piece. Thistle is a hunter, I could have used it on him... but I totally forgot that the item existed until he dug one up himself. *facepalm* He could have used that purple himself!

And now I don't know what to do with my WoW time, blah. Even with three professors and three other characters leveled 80-85 through archaeology, I've not gotten the troll sword, so maybe I'll keep digging in EK in hopes of getting it before Thistle hits 85. I don't have the Vial of Sands recipe on Alliance side yet, so I could try for that too... Or I could just hit myself in the head repeatedly with a hammer. One of those three options!

How badly was archaeology nerfed?

It took Keen more than 800 hours of digging to get his Professor title. (Edit: I'm getting old. Wasn't it 800 hours? I did a search of my LJ archives, but apparently I never mentioned it in a post. That works out to 30 days of straight digging, which I think is right. Man, as often as I ranted about that, I really should remember the number now...)

Friday night, hours before bedtime, I decided I'd go for it on Dandelion. Tonight, Sunday night, just over 48 hours later (which includes sleeping/offline time, unlike the 800 hours), and Dandelion is now a Professor.

I'm very happy to have the title, but it's just so sillyeasy now...

Icon is Dandelion! Eeee, wonderful guildmate did a series of pictures of him! :D

Edit: Wow, one of the new archaeology items isn't useful/silly cooldown! Drinking Horn, costume effect lasts for 10 minutes, has a ONE SECOND cooldown! Woot!

(#1: Next to normal sized worgen. #2: Next to a human!)


It makes me so big! :D I love it! I'm going to keep the effect up all the time I'm OOC.

Oh my god, finally. I had given up on ever getting this!

( Image huge! Back here! )

Still no progress on the Professor title (still 18/20), but eeeeeee recipe! Tomorrow I need to look at getting all the mats. x.x Then who the heck do I give it to! I have five possible alts! (Unless it's 85 to use, which it might be, then Keen gets it -- perhaps he should anyway.)

*laughs* I can't believe I actually finally got something from darned archaeology! Supposedly it has a 10% chance of dropping, and I got it from jar #9.

This would have been a perfect screenshot to explain why I am still doing archaeology if only the casting bar didn't block the text, ruining the joke! It says: "Do not stop digging! I will see that you die a thousand deaths if you even think about putting down that pick!" And you use a pick to do it, see? ...blah, jokes are ruined when you have to explain them!

But more seriously, I'm on vacation this week and next week, so I don't have all that much to do. Once I'm back to work, archaeology will be the first thing off my plate.

I'm actually making good progress. I got the final Dig- achievement ("Diggerest", make 100 unique items). I'm 15/20 towards the plain Professor title (Associate Professor to Assistant Professor to Professor). My two newest rare items are kind of fun:

The Last Relic of Argus: Use: Teleports you exactly where you want to go... if you aren't too picky. (12 Hours Cooldown) | I used it once so far, and it took me to the back of a cave in Darkshire. That was semi-where I needed to go, so it worked out!

The second item is actually pretty cool, and might be useful if I didn't have two hunters already. Headdress of the First Shaman -- despite its name, it is a hunter item. Purple, room for three gems, BoA, level 70. Perfect for level cap areas! Best thing about it is How cool it looks!, it shares a model with the Big Bad Wolf head! And it has a fun use: Seeing into the distance!



So I decided the Professor title is my new goal. Unfortunately the last five rares I need are going to be hard to get. For example, I still need a Night Elf rare item, and I made 104 NE items already without it coming up. x.x Not to mention, there are barely more than half non-Tol'vir rares left: six non-Tol'vir rares and five Tol'virs.

"Rare" isn't an accurate class in archaeology anyway. There's common, rare, and ultra-rare. Things like the mounts and pets and blue "fun" items are mostly just rare. Ultra-rares are many purples and BoA items.

Oh well, I have the rest of this week and next week. Hopefully I can get five more in that time!

Edit: I now have every single achievement except for the Professor one. Woot!

I spent the entire day trying to get The Innkeeper's Daughter. A second hearthstone. One of the most useful items from archaeology.

I spent 11 hours working on it. Just finished it.

It shares a cooldown with your hearthstone.

Could Blizz have made this more insulting? This is STUPID. This is POINTLESS. This is INSULTING.

*holds head* I spent two days, two more than ten hour days, doing archaeology to finish my Tol'vir archaeology item: Pendant of the Scarab Storm. BoA purple item, lets you summon a storm of peaceful scarabs. (1 Hour 40 Min Cooldown). That is indeed a lot of scarabs. They stay about ten seconds. Being peaceful, they do nothing. So, you have a BoA purple item that gives a cosmetic effect. For ten seconds.

I also have the purple Bones of Transformation, and again the costume lasts for less than 20 seconds.

Purple wisp necklace. Turns you into a wisp. For 20 seconds.

I've gotten one BoA item which are probably considered useful. A clothie chest piece, but must be over level 60 to use (I have no cloth-wearers). I'm currently working on Ring of the Boy Emperor, a BoA 85 ring for some class I'm unsure of (Paladin I guess? +286 Stamina, +190 Intellect, +haste and +mastery. Or paladin and caster?).

I also have six more blue costume/"fun" items.

I have no issues with so-called "fun" items, but the fact that the longest of them lasts 30 seconds and the majority of them last under 10 seconds annoys the hell out of me.

Mini-Keen hit 85 this morning, so now archaeology is even more pointless than before. I should switch to one of my non-85s, but I hate the idea of giving up.

Sorry I've been posting about this so much, it's just that I put so much darned time into this, it's really frustrating me.

Edit: And as usual, after I make a complaining post, I want to take it down. :P Going to leave it up though! I was trying not to compare the two games, but maybe doing so will make my unhappiness clearer: In FFXI, costume items last a half hour (or hour? 45 minutes?). I forget the exact time, but it's a darned long time. Long enough to run around town and be seen, to have fun with it. Items lasting for 10-30 seconds though... why? Would it hurt the game somehow to let you stay in costume longer? To make the item-animations longer? To be followed by "peaceful bugs" for longer?

Woo, for the first time in a while, I cooked something that was worthy of eating! This pork chop recipe. Basically:

1/2 cup soy sauce
2 tablespoons jarred minced garlic
1 teaspoon ground black pepper

Toss into a ziploc bag with the chop(s) and leave in the fridge for # hours.

Recipe said 12 hours, comments said anything from 15 minutes to two days. Also, other things to put in varied widely. I ended up adding a bit of teriyaki sauce as well (based on comments). They ended up sitting in the fridge under five hours-ish.

After marinating, toss them under the broiler to cook.

The one thing the recipe didn't say was what to do with the chops between marinating and cooking. Alton Brown has told me that burnt garlic is not good eats, so putting a chop covered with minced garlic under the broiler would be bad, no? So I rinsed it off.

For the most part, it was really good. There was way way too much black pepper though (which makes sense, recipe was for a pound of meat and I made one chop).

Wonder if I should have left the garlic on? I have a chop left, so I think I might make it this way again tomorrow.

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In WoW news, I think Blizzard is reading my LJ. Archaeology got "fixed" a little overnight! Now Uldum comes up as much as any other spot. I actually completed one of the items that gives you a chance at the recipe! (Didn't get it though.)

"But Thistle, you were going to go dig elsewhere today!" Yeah. I started out in EK, but it kept sending me to Twilight Highlands over and over and over again. x.x I actually even died there once! Eventually I wondered why it kept sending me to the highest place and it hit me! So I came back to this side to try it, and it's better. WOO!

I wouldn't argue with them increasing spots in Uldum even more, but I'm fine with as-is. It feels fair now. I can fully live with that.

Thanks Blizz! ;)

Edit: I so beat veloxe. Deathwing just killed me. Again. Death number FIVE in less than a week! Just this one character! Arg! STALKER DRAGON!

Okay, new plan! Doing archaeology as I am is making me miserable. Two nine hour days in a row, both days only sent to Tol'vir area twice.

Not to sour grapes, but why do I want the alchemy recipe to turn into a dragon anyway? Have you seen it in game? It's really, really ugly. It would be a good source of making money (short-term), but I don't need money. And in addition to this, we're still early in the expansion, Blizz might just adjust it and make it more reasonable in the future. (Okay, I am sour grapes'ing a little, it could be useful, but not enough to make up for the amount of time I've put into it!)

Also, I'll never progress from Associate Professor to full Professor if I keep chasing it. Nine hours today, and I did not get a single rare -- this tells me that you can only get each rare once (GOOD! What a waste of time otherwise!).

So I'm going to make my new goal... fun! Professor and the last archaeology-special item, the only one I don't have (which, ironically, is the most useful -- the second hearthstone!).

Tomorrow I will dig in EK and Outlands. I'll need to dig in Northrend eventually too, maybe. But EK and Outlands for now!

And I'm darned well going to try to find more RP, too. Been a couple weeks now! The longer you don't RP, the harder it is to return to it (even though it's a fun, great thing).

So, starting tomorrow, we shall try to return to fun!

AND I have plans to cook TWO things this week! At least two! Stay turned for how that turns out! :D

Farmer's Market in the middle of a storm? Best Thing Ever. Probably my favorite trip there! Wind was whipping the rain around, poor sellers had to keep a hand on their tent thingies at all times, it was wild and crazy! (And man, I love watching the trains go by. I don't know what my attraction to trains is, but they seem like the greatest things ever, I can't help but stop and watch them.)

Though I didn't mean to, I spent the least money I've ever spent there. Wasn't much I wanted, I guess -- certainly wasn't the weather driving me away. :D Wish I had gotten some of the fresh ravioli though; I was at the stand, was reading the filling options, when suddenly my brain went NEW FOOD SCARY RUN RUN RUN. Not that ravioli is new! But just... you know, not pre-packaged from a Real Store. :P Stupid brain.

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WoW: Only been three hours of archaeologing today and I'm bored of it so came to post about it instead! :P

Thistle's Continued Archaeology Guide: Post-525
I sure do wish I had known all this stuff before I started. Hopefully reading it here will help other people!

Depending on what your goal is, post max digging is a totally different animal than digging for skill. I've been buying the items that are worth "free fragments" towards completing items. After two days of that, I realized I had wasted hundreds of gold.

It no longer matters how many items I make.

If your goal is the recipe or a mount/pet, then there is no need to finish items in Night Elf or Troll or whatever non-mount/pet area. Zero. None.

"But Thistle! Just last night you posted about the bugged archaeology achievement!"

I was wrong. It's not bugged, it's just poorly worded. You don't need to complete 100 items, you need to complete 100 unique items. Thus if you are going for the recipe or pets/mounts, it will be impossible to complete. There are 107 items total (I think that's the right number, barely over 100) in the whole game, all areas. If you're going for the pet/mount/recipe you will not be in Outlands, Northrend, or EK. Thus it will be impossible to do.

Archaeology is nerfed almost nightly, making it easier and easier, so I have hopes that they will nerf where it NEEDS to be (as opposed to where they're nerfing now, which is stupid and annoying and unnecessary and fricking archaeology is easy already and does not need to be made easier nightly!) -- Uldum/Tol'Vir digging. You have such a tiny chance of being sent there (9 hours yesterday and 3 hours today and only sent there twice total) and no way to control it. When you hit max, you should have a greater chance of that area coming up as one of your four spots.

Oh archaeology, you are too much like chocobo digging for your my own good.

New title: Associate Professor... new body with it! Interesting that that costume removes your name as well. Item is bones of transformation, one of the purple items I've made. Costume lasts for all of 20 seconds. ...woo... Another purple I made turns you into a wisp. For 15 seconds. *yawn*

Like most folks doing archaeology, I'm going after the alchemy recipe that turns you into a dragon. This is why I had to switch characters when I already had 310 archaeology on another alt. I spent more than nine hours doing archaeology today. How many times did I get sent to the area you need to dig in to get the recipe? Twice.

*puts gun to head, shoots*

The recipe comes from completing items from one single zone. It is random where you get sent. Hour after hour after hour of not being sent there. Nine hours and I completed one item from that area.

Darned achievement system is bugged, too. I should have gotten Diggerest today, as you can see, I have over 100, but my count never moved from 61 all day. (Though... that text count does include rares, so actually it might not be 100 yet, but the fact that remains that I made many today and it never moved from 61.)

Keen is almost 75, too. All from just, what, a week and a bit of archaeology. Feels too easy. (Yeah, I know they want it to be easy.)

Tomorrow I intend to get away from the game and do RL stuff. That's the plan, anyway. Going to be hard since I have to pee every OH MY GOD 30 SECONDS. (Er. If that statement makes no sense to you, ignore it! Been locking boring medical stuff -- which seems better, by the way!)