Do you even alchemy?

[Veladarius]

I think the character I have now is the first one to actually actively collect ingredients and make potions. She is a sort of custom elf (modified breton) who is a hunter and avoids staying in cities. I decided to start doing it because the game has been very stingy with healing potions and such (I generally don't use the ones that improve stats or resistance) but anything for regenerating or replenishing health, mana and stamina as well as cure disease are mainly what I am looking to make. It is still early in the game and she has a lot to learn (as do I).

[SmedleyDButler]

My ideal revision of Alchemy would be the following:

 

- Diseases are no longer cured by "Cure Disease", but must be cured by specific potions. Diseases are also stronger then a mere annoyance.

- Followers can also be diseased.

- Alchemists can craft two sorts of injury-healing items - potions and conventional medicine (poultices, bandages, etc).

- Medicine items heal over time without drawbacks, but potions heal immediately only with some sort of drawback (longer term reduced regeneration or drain on the affected stat, or maybe even another stat - i.e. a health potion might heal 100 HP, but then leaves you with a HP drain effect for 5 IRL minutes, or maybe a stamina or magic drain instead). That way potions are good if you need something to save you RIGHT NOW, but you will have to deal with the consequences shortly after battle.

- Buying potions or medicine items from alchemists should be EXPENSIVE.

 

I think almost everything on my list is part of a mod SOMEWHERE (like CACO or Diseased), but there's no one mod with all those features and a lot of them are part of larger mods which included things I don't want or which conflict with other more important mods I use. Next time I want to go for a big playthrough I want to see if I can find a way to get all or most of these effects with as little unneeded extra junk as possible.

[Unkaar]

step 1: collect ingredients

  <>step 1 collect from mineral deposits, plants and animals unusable misc items

step 2: prepare ingredients with a mortar&pestle OR a retort OR a calcinator OR an alembic

  <>step 2 will create the usable ingredients

step 3: use  the usual crafting station to make your potion, poison, oil, salve, drug, food, drink.

 

Cooking is a long lasting buff with weak but useful effect, drugs are short but moderatly lasting, potions and poisons are a quick burst effect.

We can craft unique potion at the the hagraven craft table.

 

And of course the mod would offer useful  option for sexlab in the form of ointment perhaps.

[Dallas-Arbiter]

I have always avoided alchemy and enchanting. I don't even know how to do either in Skyrim.

[Shaddranat]

I use alchemy quite a bit, for the most part. The obvious Health/Magicka/Stamina potions, sure, but certain specific Fortify potions are used, primarily ones that effect my other crafting skills (enchanting and blacksmithing). It should also be noted that, even while the ridiculous stack limit was patched a long time ago, Fortify restoration potions can still be used to help make stronger versions of other "fortify" pots, which will allow your character to produce even more powerful weapons, armor and enchantments. The difference between an "Epic" tempered sword and a "Legendary" tempered sword is a single Fortify Blacksmithing potion ^_^

 

Also, though this is character RP dependent, but crafting poisons is also something I will do on occasion, particularly early in the game when I haven't gotten my weapon skills very high yet.

[Ernest Lemmingway]

15 hours ago, SmedleyDButler said:

My ideal revision of Alchemy would be the following:

 

- Diseases are no longer cured by "Cure Disease", but must be cured by specific potions. Diseases are also stronger then a mere annoyance.

<snip>

That was (sort of) how disease was handled in Morrowind. Diseases were certainly stronger and could block certain social interactions until cured. There were also three categories of disease: normal, blight, and corpus. The first two you could catch and needed the proper type of potion (or spell) to cure, but the damage done to attributes and/or skills could take time or separate potions/spells to heal. Corpus disease was a plot device so it doesn't really count.

 

I actually miss the days of diseases being serious and requiring more than a cure spell/potion to fully recover from. Damn you, Bethesda! You went from "Keep It Simple Stupid" to "Making It Too Simple." 

[Darkpig]

On 2/4/2018 at 2:39 AM, Tirloque said:

I'm not really fond of mods who easen difficulty nor overpowered mod items for my part, so I do not share your experience about weak dragons. However it seems you missed some parts of the regular games, as with DG/DB you can buy a small mortar to pile ingredients/prepare potions wherever you go.

Weak dragons? No! Badass fists. Heres a guide:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=anQe2lB7fb8

On 2/4/2018 at 4:02 AM, Nazzzgul666 said:

Imho it's not OP, think about all the time you put into skilling, collecting ingredients... considering that alchemy is rather underpowered. Well, maybe depends on. I start new games quite often, pretty much for every bigger quest mod i want to play so i hardly ever get above lvl 50, often i'm done at lvl20. 

If you have a character with lvl 200 and alchemy is already skilled or you just rush through to use it for the next 1k hours... then it's still not worth it as you mentioned yourself.

This is a good point. If you save all your poisons for Alduin then you will have a clear advantage but If you are smashing every opponent, then you'll need some actual crafting skills for the long haul. Enchanting pretty much makes most potions negligable anyway.

[valcon767]

hmm alchemy

 

i would love to see a mod like SmedlyDButler described

 

as someone who started on console for several years then switched to pc (RL issues meant i could not afford a decent pc for a while there but i was lucky enough

to get a x360 as a gift shortly before Skyrim came out), i tend to use potions very sparingly (i don't hoard them but i do come close).

 

so for me alchemy is a sort of weird usage during game play

 

at lower levels (0 to about 15-20) i usually find enough in loot to keep me alive with, this is when the found potions just are not strong enough anymore.

during this time i do collect (what i find as i go along) ingredients, but i do make some potions along the way, usually cure disease, cure poison, waterbreathing,

and some regen potions (very few regen potions).

 

around level 15-25 when found potions and those i can buy just are not strong enough any more is when i will take and devote a few levels to making potions

almost exclusively, so that i can actually make potions strong enough to do some good (skill maxed and working on perks). 

 

as for poison i almost never use it due to to 2 things, the"one hit" effect of it  (i really think that it was a mistake to program all poisons to only work on the very 

next hit no matter what type weapon is poisoned, for bow/arrow i can understand it), and poisons just do not do enough damage to make them worth using

while the theory (for damage) is pretty good it just does not translate well during game play.

 

at low level you fight stuff with an average of 50-100 hp and the poisons you get (usually) do a damage of 5-25 damage total (over time which i do agree with)

think about it you fight something with 75hp and your poison (found or made) does 15 hp damage over 15 seconds,  that is 20% of its max hp

sounds nice doesn't it???

but it does not take into account natural hp rgen, so if they rgen 1hp per second that poison just negate natural rgen....not much gain for a poison you have

to apply beforehand and reapply after every single hit.

so poisons are not really very useful at all most of the time (unless you alchemy far outstrips what it would be on average for your level)

now if when they wrote the code they had just added a single effect to all damage poisons it would have made poisons much more useful, all they had to do

was add a stop rgen effect (all poisons stop natural rgen while it is affecting someone or something).

by doing this they could have taken the (almost) useless poisons and made them actually useful - ie they would actually HURT stuff you poisoned while

the poison ran its course.

 

just my thoughts on Alchemy.

 

 

[NNS10]

On 2/1/2018 at 9:59 PM, darkconsole said:

 also i use a mod that levels alchemy when cooking.

Which mod do you recommend for that?

[Texmarker]

For me the worst thing with alchemy is that i feel obligated to collect all those plants around me. So instead of leasurely wandering through skyrim, i zigzag through it looking at the ground. Made a personal mod that disables the ability to pick up ingredients from plants and distributed them to the vendors instead. That solved the get rich quickly problem that alchemy had along the way.

[worik]

1 hour ago, Texmarker said:

Made a personal mod that disables the ability to pick up ingredients from plant

Maybe you like to try Banemaster's FMEA https://www.loverslab.com/files/file/3516-failure ... and you can see where picking up flowers and clueless alchemy ends

[Mud]

Poisons are something I've wanted to use in my playthroughs but in their vanilla state they're just too much hassle to use unless it comes with a very powerful effect like Paralysis - then it becomes something I save for a pinch. But standard damaging or debuffing poisons that aren't Paralysis that constantly need to be reapplied are just not worth it, and simply increasing their potency just makes for overpowered gamebreakers. They'd have to work like temporary enchantments to strike that balance between power and usefulness, adding extra damage or effects for the next X minutes. No one's going to bother carting around any of those weak low-level poisons you crafted early on in their vanilla state, but giving +10 damage for 10 minutes is much more likely to be useful while also greatly reducing the number of these silly things you need to keep on hand.