From the beta test of Cataclysm, there are lots of new things we need to learn to welcome the coming of its release, so to help you prepare for the game, this passage mainly tells you how Archaeology works in Cataclysm.

You may not very familiar with Archaeology, since there are seldom guide online talking about this. 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. 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.

You will only find sites in zones of your level or lower. 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. 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.

Since it is still in beta, from some players' comment, there are also some bugs in the game. Some players are reporting some issues with digsites not showing up correctly. More information about it will be showed later.

Unlike other gathering skills, digsites are player-specific. Other players will be searching in different locations. The most important different for digsites are that it is player-specific, there is no competition for digsites.

Fragments

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

Remember to use your Survey ability to search a digsite. 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. 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

You need to start a research whenever you get a new fragment for a race. You should remember that you can only work on one artifact per race at a time. When you have enough fragments, click Solve to complete that artifact. You can be working on one project for each race at a time.

There are commom and rare artifacts in the game, 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. The profit increases as the value of the artifact increases.

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. 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.

For the design of archaeology, we plan to make it easy to be expandable, so there will be much more patches in the future after the game release. There will also a feature which allows you to use your archaeology skill for a slight bonus in the Cataclysm dungeons，though it is not revealed in the beta version.

Source: www.wowruler.com