Lets do Archeology

So Dec 7th. After a long day at work which was even cataclysmically slow you might say i get home.
Time to load up the game and do some archeology.

What it's all about.
Flying around in the old world discovering places.. digging .. then discovering the same places again.

How it works.
1. Go train archeology in SW keep library from Harrison Jones
2. Open your map for Eastern Kingdoms and find a "spade icon" on the map.
3. Fly to said spade icon location - when you get to the correct area it is marked with a red circle on your area map as well
4. Dig inside the circle - a telescope will spawn and a pointy flashy light will be next to it. The larger end will point you the direction of the item you need to find. The pointy flashy light will say how far the object is. Red - for very far, yellow for medium and green blinky light for close.
5. Navigate to the item using digging and just following in the direction the telescope shows until it is in the green and then just dig up the artifact
6. Do this 3 times - sometimes 4 for 1 single dig site.
7. from skill 1-100 archeology only dig for artifacts. (You need to train up to journeyman between levels 50-75).

8. At skill 100. Open up your archeology Tab. Click on a topic (fossil, dwarf, troll or nightelf) and see how many items you can solve. When solving items be sure to notice a hexagon at the bottom of some items. As you should have earned a bunch of dawrf, or troll or nightelf relics - by clicking on that hexacon you can use one of those special relics to reduce the amount of items required to make that discovery. Be sure to make good use of that.

And that's pretty much it.

Personal impressions.
My first impressions were good - lots of travelling and lots todo. But after about 4-5 hours of solid grinding archeology feels closest to fishing. Which is also just a very long grind doing the same thing over and over.
At least the items you craft with it are interesting. I also managed to craft my 1st rare artefact. A rare pet: http://warcraftpets.com/wow.pets/reptiles/raptors/fossilized_hatchling.asp
However as with fishing - grinding it for a whole evening is not the best activity unless you've got a good TV series or something to watch in the foreground and leave the archeology and digging into the background.

Also note worthy - i managed to gain 90% of the experience required for lvl 81 about 1.4Mil just from gathering archeology items - each of the gathered nodes gives about 5500xp.

Also noteworthy - apparently the higher you get your skil level the more fragments you get from digging up a single artifact. About lvl 100 it was 3. Same at lvl 200 at the moment.

PS! Some congratulations are in order.
Gratz to Primetime for being first guildie to lvl 85.
Gratz to my always lovely Estele for reaching lvl 85 just yesterday.
Gratz to Mortyhunter for being realm 1st lvl 85.