The part that sucks as alchemist (or herbalist), is making pills/potions only to find out the effect doesnt actually do anything (or is unnoticeable).
For reference, the highest "affordable" self buff magnitude you can get by getting drunk is 9 (6 1.5 pills or 3 3.0 potions), realistically its 4.5 (drunk but can still see). The highest possible using mineral and organic catalyst and luck proc would be 16.5 but that is such an high value cocktail that lets not seriously consider taking the value of 3 gems every 10 minutes.
The highest "affordable" poison magnitude is 3 (3 herbs+organic catalyst) and highest possible is 5.5 with 3 herbs+2 catalyst + luck proc
Quality 100 buffs last about 10minutes, quality 100 poison last about 30 seconds.
Heres a list of what i could gather by doing extensive testings.
- - Antidote -
somewhat useful, will probably see more need when more people reach equip maintenance 90 to use poison in combat. The "buff" does not appear to prevent or reduce poison, but the action of eating an antidote reduce "magniture" off any currently active poison - - Damages Health (hHP) -
The only actual poison of any reasonable effectiveness, a good one made with catalyst, q90 herbs and lvl 100 alchemist will usually kill whoever you slash with it. Completely canceled by 3 q1 magnitude 1 antidotes (5 if the poison is using mineral catalyst on top) vanguard also has a skill to cancel it. - - Damages Health (sHP) -
useful thing to knock someone out, but very easily undid by adrenaline or antidote. other than that same as hHp poison - - Damages Stamina (hStam) -
Stamina preps completely counter that one and unlike adrenaline or antidotes, most people carry stamina preps - - Damages Stamina Regeneration (sStam) -
Pretty much worthless, will remove 3 soft stamina / sec on a magnitude 3 (3 herbs+catalyst), hardly noticeable at all on a 25+ sstam / sec natural regen and like all poisons only last about 40 sec when used on a blade, its not "nothing" since it does reduce your opponent stamina per 10%, but for the short duration and cost of having to apply it to your sword (not viable mid combat), its just worthless - - Flux -
I'm sure everyone here knows flux usage, its the most in demand item from the alchemy skill branch. Unfortunately very little high quality need as flux only represent 10% of every craft quality and is a first step craft (easily compensated by high craft skill level). - - Food flavour -
Has its use, but extremely cumbersome to use, with cooking 60, you use it to open a window listing all food in your inventory, you click on the food and it start a "craft" after said process the food will increase quality depending on food flavor quality, usually by about 10-20 quality if the food is lower than 50 and 10-1 above but those are just gross numbers. It is not usable in bulk and must be used on single unit of food (the single bottle is split equally between all food in the stack, if quality increase end up lower than 1, then its 0 and wasted). - - Lowers max sHP -
Does not appear implemented, even magnitude 6 does not reduce max shp or anything else that i could see - - Lowers max sStam -
Does not appear implemented, same as lower max sHP, also tested using my stamina to confirm it was not just a client side issue, with magnitude 6 poison on me i should at the very least have lost 6 stam and would run out of stam after 10 sword swing, but could still swing 11 as normally - - Naphtha -
Mildly usefull, used in painting, and bomb related things. Demand is limited compared to flux but at least it does what its expected to do. - - Raise max sStam -
Does not appear implemented, same as the lower version. - - Raises specific stat -
this is not an actual buff, but a description that apply to all stat bonus effect. Those buffs do not update the stat UI so its harder to tell if they work or not but still possible. - - Raises Agility -
Very slightly increase speed for the duration (increase the agility stat), 9 agi is a very small buff, barely noticeable at all and that is if you go at the cost of not seeing anything (drunk vision). Realistically 3 pills (4.5 agi) is getting pretty hard to run around with but still possible, the actual increase from 9 agility is around 0.88% and 0.22 less cooldown on combat sprint - - Raises Constitution -
Increase max shp and max hhp, does not recover the increased hp. Going with the same metric of 9 stat bonus (who needs vision if you have constitution !) then this is an extra 9hhp, the shp will not recover above the hhp so immediate impact is 0, if you use quality100 pills/potion then by the time the potion expire you will have recovered (and gained) a grand total of 1 hp, maybe 2, it also increase the weight of equipment you can wear, so if you wear heavy equipment, you will get more speed from that than agi. - - Raises Intellect -
Increase intellect..... does not temporarily increase your skill cap and intellect has no other known effect so should not even exist. - - Raises Strength -
Reduce stamina needed to swing your weapon, allow you to swing weapon above your natural strenght (up to including the magnitude off the buff) and also include the same equipment weight bonus as constitution. In my personal opinion this is the only stat buff worth taking, and even then the impact is negligeable at best. - - Raises Willpower -
Raise the max and soft stamina by "magnitude", does not affect inventory weight (if you overload by even 0.1 over your normal limit and add 9 willpower, it still wont let you move at normal speed so its not just a display issue). - - Restore hStam -
Probably the second most demanded herbalist product after flux. Extremely usefull for travel, stamina intensive work and battles. - - Restore sHP -
Has its use, will give excellent protection against blunt damage as it recover the shp before the hhp has time to lower much. Also allow you to get back up quickly if you are knocked unconscious with the prep/potion active. Does very little against non blunt damage but can still help a tiny bit if you have high battle survival. All in all, its an ok prep, on the weak side but not worthless
Now that the data is out of the way here are the actual suggestions as to how to improve it.
- - Antidote -
Make antidote and poison fight each other, if the antidote buff is present and a poison is added, remove antidote magnitude from the poison and poison magnitude from the antidote, <0 magnitude should remove the buff. if antidote is taken after poison, then same thing, remove magnitude from both and may the strongest win.
This way, high quality antidote become usefull as an extra protection layer, same with high magnitude, but any low quality antidote can still be used to actively fight against poisons. - - Damages Health (hHP) -
This one is rather powerfull but would be indirectly nerfed by the antidote buff since you could actually pop the before the fight and be protected. no need to change it in my opinion - - Damages Health (sHP) -
Prevent adrenaline from working while the shp poison is active. This would bring it on par with hHp poisons in power / efficacy but would be the non lethal option. Poison are much shorter duration than their buff counterpart, so being able to counter the poison with the buff is too easy - - Damages Stamina (hStam) -
same as shp, prevent hard stamina prep from functioning while this poison is active. - - Damages Stamina Regeneration (sStam) -
Increase the stamina regen reduction to 5 per magnitude. a moderatly strong poison would cut stamina regen in half for 30 seconds, this would still be weak , but at least would not be worthless, strongest poison would essentially drop natural stamina regen to 0 for those 30 seconds. should not be able to drop regen in the negative (no lowering sstam) - - Flux -
increase the quality ratio on products that use flux. Would not impact low quality products but would give value to high quality flux. - - Food flavour -
Allow bulk usage, select how many food flavor to apply, select which food stack to apply it to then a process begin of normal duration times quantity of flavor selected and apply them all at once at the end. The actual increase of quality would be the same, so would the time spent, but there would be no need to manually split all food in stack of 1 then manually click them all 1 by 1 with the flavor ui. - - Lowers max sHP -
Actually lower the max sHp by magnitude*15. This would mean 45 max sshp on a moderatly strong poison (so up to 45 sshp damage if the person was full when hit) and 82.5 max sshp using mineral catalyst poison for 30 seconds. Still rather weak, but at least would do something - - Lowers max sStam -
Actually lower the max sStam by magnitude*15. Same as the lower max shp suggestion - - Naphtha -
nothing here, unlike flux, quality of the naphtha already matter decently in most of its crafts, only reason its currently not worth much is the lack of siege implementation in the game. So get the siege working and naphtha will become cool. - - Raise max sStam -
Increase max sStam by (magnitude*5)% this would translate into a 45% increase under affordable overdose, which on sstam would be good to have but nothing extraordinarily (sstam regen would untouched and so would hstam) - - Raises specific stat -
Add to all stat effect, a permanent increase to the specific stat (respecting caps / limitation in the same way you can raise your stat leveling skills), basically just an alternative way to finetune your stats build. I would suggest something like (0.02*magnitude*(quality/10)) increase, so magnitude 1.5 preparations with quality 100 would allow for 0.9 stat increase every 10 minutes if you take the maximum does. - - Raises Agility -
Remove the current effect, instead increase mvm speed per 1%*magnitude, resulting in 9% mvm speed increase at full drunk mode and 4.5% at usable level. - - Raises Constitution -
increase max hhpd by 3*magnitude, recover 3*magnitude hhp on use, on expiration remove 3*magnitude hhp. This would allow for temporary survival / delayed death kind of drug which would be quite fun. 27 hhp is hardly immortality but could be enough to allow you to reach friends before your inevitable death (assuming you lowered bellow 27 hhp). - - Raises Intellect -
increase exp gain by 5%*magnitude. This would translate in 45% exp gain using affordable preps and at most 82.5% exp bonus for 10minutes if you used extremely valuable ones. Compared to high quality food giving 500% this doesnt feel like much. - - Raises Strength -
buff strenght by magnitude*3. This would translate in 13.5 additional strenght under usable drunk level, which isnt that much but would still be worth using for the stamina cost reduction on weapon, ability to wield heavier weapon temporarily and heavier equipment - - Raises Willpower -
increase inventory weight by magnitude*5, this would mean 45 (or 90 overweight), extra weight if you get so drunk that you cant see in front, or 22.5 extra weight under usable drunk level. - - Restore hStam -
that one is fine, its already widely usefull and fill in a nice spot - - Restore sHP -
Restore magnitude*3 shp instead of the current magnitude*1. sHp is rather weak in the first place, mostly only usefull against practice weapons and some wild life an increase wouldnt change much in actual combat but would still make it more interesting for hunters.
On the catalyst side, please remove flux, naphtha and food flavor from the possible effects on them. Those 3 have no magnitude and cannot benefit from catalyst.