So, I thought I'd share a mini walkthru on using two pretty nice archaeology addons. Using these, you'll be able to remove some of the trial and error aspects of surveying for artifact pieces that I know many dislike. It's not a perfect method and it won't necessarily speed up your skill gains by much, but you will get artifact pieces a little bit faster than you would by not using these two addons.

First, download the addons (there are two for archaeology and one general one).

Archaeology Helper
Archy
GatherMate2

I won't go over the options for the addons, but you can play with them and see what works best. This is just is just a general overview of how I go about doing archaeology since I got these addons.



Here's what the addons look like the way I set them up. The pieces marked as number 1 are Archaeology Helper and GatherMate2. The pieces marked as number 2 are Archy.

Archy is pretty self-explanatory, I think. It shows you the distance to each digsite on the continent you're on, it's name and how many artifact pieces are left in each site. It also shows you what artifact you're working on and how many pieces you have of that artifact. It also shows you when you have keystones and how many will work for that artifact.

When you first load up the game with these installed, you may see nothing on your screen - that's ok. You should see the Arch Helper tool bar - the shovel icon will have a slash through it. Right-clicking that will enable the overlay and turn it off. The Archy button is a minimap button that you can click. You may also run into an issue where the Archy panels load in the upper-left corner of your screen. If you run into that, let me know and I can help you get them positioned correctly.

Archaeology Helper, on the other hand, requires some minor explanation, so here's the same view without the dark overlay.



You'll notice there are now three arcs - red, yellow, and green. They correspond to the little stoplight buttons on the Arch Helper toolbar. Pressing each one will make that colored arc appear.


Green


Yellow


Red

Those colors, as should now be obvious, correspond to the color of the light on the survey tool.

So, here's how you use it. See that shovel button to the right of the stoplight buttons? If you click it, that will place your survey tool. In most cases, the first survey you do will have a red light. So, turn your character to face the direction of the scope and then press the red stoplight button. You should see something like this:



What we just did was place the red arc on the screen. This is the potential area that your artifact could appear in. If you make a mistake, the left facing arrow is an undo. you'll also see a big green square in the center of your screen. That represents the distance you are from the survey point. As you move away from the survey point, that square will turn yellow, then red.

Now, walk, run, or fly forward until that square turns red and is inside the red arc (you'll see everything move as you walk forward). Once you are inside the red area, click the shovel again and repeat the process (face the direction the scope is facing and press the corresponding color of the light). You'll probably start to see this:



I've taken two more steps here and you can see that there are two green arcs overlapping each other as well as the red arc. That area where all the colored areas overlap is your search area. Notice just how quickly we've narrowed down the potential area your artifact will show up in. We've gone from that giant red arc to this small stretch of dirt where the two green arcs overlap the red arc.

You just keep doing this until you've found the artifact.



There's a third green arc and we've made that stretch of dirt into a sliver. Once more.



Hey, look! We found it!

Last thing, before you collect your artifact piece, go stand next to it. This allows GatherMate2 to record its location. In the future, when you return to digsites, you'll be able to see all the place you've dug up pieces in that overlay on your screen.

I hope that helps you guys out like it did me. It's not going to get you 525 points in one night - that still takes time to do. But this will at least take a lot of the guesswork, trial and error, out of your artifact searches.

Let me know if you have any questions!

For future reference, you can view the images above in a gallery by going here: http://inevitabledoubt.imgur.com/wow_archaeology

Wow. I'm going to check out all of these, thanks!

I guess it's an attempt to make a maddening exercise less maddening. For that, I am happy to regale you with cajolery. Harumph, harumph good sir.