Alchemy in the Elder Scrolls is wacky, over the top and extremely abusable. For some this is fun, for others this is totally unfun and immersive breaking.
Arguments rage about where the balance should be. What skill level should be the goal and alchemy be balanced around. 100? 50? What effects, what magnitude and which duration should be the norm? What price should be set for ingredients? What value should be set for a player created potion as opposed to shop bought and found?
If you nerf player created potions into oblivion and beyond, why should player invest in alchemy at all? It is basically unusable and a waste of perk points.
If you do not nerf player created potions, their value turn game breakingly high. For potions that are totally unusable due to their mixture of strong poisons and dubious benefits. Why would anyone buy them at all? It is unimmersive and makes no logical sense.
And the reason for all this is due to the algorithmical nature of how potion effects are set at creation. And if you change the input, something somewhere will break.
Classical Alchemy Overhaul nerfs alchemy. Hard.
User testing notes show that:
Experience grind:In order for my analysis to make sense I need topreface with the amount of experience needed to level alchemy. While the original mod claims to have reduced the grind of alchemy whilst nerfing its ability to break the economy, it unfortunately fails to do what it set out for. By reducing the value of the potions to not make them economy breaking, it has made it so that you barely level up alchemy at all in practice. I’ve included an image with my analysis to show just how many potions are required to level.
The Poison of Weakness to Shock with values of about 285 on average were obtained leveling from 52 to 70. It required nearly 1000 potions to
get to that level. Which is quite astronomical. That was with all the perks that were available prior to that leveling period. The recipe used was Void Salt and Bees. Both two items that are not regularly available, but that was one of the better combos I could get.
This leads to the conclusion from a metagame perspective to pretty much never try to actively level alchemy. The sheer amount of ingredients,
and the rarity of them to boot do not make it worth the time to try and level the skill. You would get much better gains power leveling one of the magic skills, killing some bandit camps for money and paying a trainer.
This grind for leveling remains true as well for the early levels. At the early levels, you only have access for the most part to the lower level ingredients such as the ones made available near Whiterun. Their values were so low that you need to make 100s of potions just get from level 15 to 25. With the mod, the skill has become way too grindy, and resource intensive in my opinion. This initial problem leads into the next problem with the balance of the mod.
Perks:The first thing that struck out to me was the availability of the perk that allows you to discover the effects of all the ingredients. With the mod, you must wait till level 50 and invest 3 perks into it. While thematically sound and checks out logically from a role play perspective that you can’t get the most info out of your ingredients until you gain more experience in the skill it poses many problems gameplay wise. But first why do I think this skill is so important? The main reason is that it feels terrible not being able to know what potion I will make. I think the requiem devs understood this and that is why the perk is available very early on in the game. Since I cannot get the perk early with this mod, I would as a player be forced to memorize the ingredients, while doable isn’t something I would actually try to do or I would look up all the effects of the ingredients and have that open elsewhere. It is a change that again thematically makes sense, but gameplay wise does not flow. What’s worse is that you can’t even eat a bunch of the ingredient to discover the other effects even if you wanted to. The only way to discover the effects is to throw a shot in the dark and hope you hit on a potion combo. With that being said, not being able to know all the effects of the ingredients easily would compound with the fact that you are stuck in that state for a very long period of time. As prefaced before, you need astronomical amounts of resources to even get to level 50 in the first place. So you are left there feeling terrible not knowing what the ingredients do for a very long period of time. All the other potions in the screen shot that aren’t poison of weakness to shock were potions created at various points before level 50. It was starting to take so long I decided to level using the console to see if perhaps the values improved enough at the higher levels to speed up the leveling. That was not the case.
The availability of the other perks also needs to be smoothed out. Normally their level requirements would be fine, but because the xp gain is so abysmal, you have this problem where you are training alchemy for a long period of time where you cannot improve yourself in any meaningful way because the perk level requirements are too far from each other or the perks don’t help you at all. The first grind would be getting to 25 so you can discover at least 2 effects and take the first upgrade to your elixirs. Then after probably 400-500 potions of above 50 value you can get to 50 probably and you get your next round of upgrades. That is a long time to not be speccing anything into alchemy especially given that you cannot easily get these ingredients that would make a 50 value potion.
Economy from a meta gaming perspective, alchemy is nearly useless in terms of making money. If that is the intent for early game then I would say that has been achieved.
Now if I had to play with this mod and did intend to use alchemy in some way, I just wouldn’t. The sheer number of resources needed relegate the skill to being a purely training skill in my opinion. The only times I would ever use alchemy is when I pick up key ingredient combos that lead to decent potions and that’s pretty much it. If that it the overall intent then I suppose it succeeds, but in my opinion relegating a skill to this state is not balanced at all.
This feedback to the basic port from Skyrim LE to SE was what really made me start to think on how one could start to make "Alchemy fun again" without breaking the game and making the whole game unfun.
As I am personally into immersive gameplay I am using the Wildlander modlist as base, and I made some notes to myself as follows:Current testable version is a straight up update of R-CAO from the LE mod. With all its good things and its flaws.
The current thinking is that the mod nerfs Alchemy too hard and we will have to have a holistic approach to solve the issue.
The advantage of Wildlander is that as a modlist it has at least two other mods that interact well with with Alchemy.
- Hunterborn high forage skill allows the player to learn ingredient effects without a perk invested in Alchemy. At least up to three ingredients.
- Spell Research has its own alchemy / "Magical Chemistry" system that can lorewise be used as base effects with magnitude in the alchemy system AND as ingredients in recipes directly.
This means that we have several possible crafting stations that can be used to create “alchemy” potions and wares.
1. Mortar and Pestle variants. (Station and portable)
2. Spell Research Alembic.
3. Cooking pot.
4. Bakery (Hearthfire)
5. Meadery/Vats (Hearthfire)
6. Character crafting menu (Campfire(?) crafting menu)
7. Character disassembly menu (Hunterborn Scrimscaw)
Previous alchemy overhauls have only (afaik) used Mortar and Pestle or cooking pots. And CACO has added a secondary menu called Retort as a selectable choice at Alchemy crafting station.
Notable mention is still the two mill variants that have been used to crush bones and gems. Same with smelter (R-CAO).
Wildlander have 7 options out of the box Where 5 are readily available at all times to the player (1, 2, 3, 6, 7).
This would allow for a more holistic approach where "magical chemistry" could be expressed in different ways.
The main issue seemed however to be around price of a useful potion. Shop bought potions are all standard strength at standard prices that fluctuate based on speech level, perks and such (and possibly mods that affect trade and barter). It was also here a novice alchemist would go to buy ingredients and sell their wares of dubious actual value. If you nerfed the prices (for example setting value to zero) you also limited experience gain (as this is based upon the value of your potion). Unless you created a script that handled this (nod towards Agd25's alchemy mod) in one way or another. Which create compatibility issues.
What if there was a proper way to create standard shop potions? That had nothing to do with the wacky alchemy formula?
Enter spell research chemistry.
Spell research allow the player to use a cauldron or an alembic to dissolve ingredients and potions down into their constituent base effects. You can then use these effects to either learn about how magic works (to research spells), or you can use them to create stronger|weaker versions of themselves, or combine them into ingredients (standard strength alchemy ingredient, or fire/frost/void salts) or items (paper, ink, etc).
We had there a complete chemistry system that worked well. What was needed was the immense effort and time needed to create the recipes for all the standard potions (and more) and make them craftable in the alembic.
This I have now done. It took a long LONG time. And I hope I will never have to do anything like that ever again.
With that in place I now needed to decide on perk structure and requirements for getting them.
What is included is a first testable version.
I kept (and sometimes nerfed further) ingredient and values from R-CAO. This means that the criticism on the grindiness of levelling alchemy is still true.
However. You can from first perk use spell research to craft the first and second standard potions using the cauldron and the alembic. And with Spell Research convenience add on mod, you will gain alchemy experience doing so.
This means that you can roleplaywise be an apprentice PROFESSIONAL alchemist that can use herbcraft to create all the potions you know and love/hate, but use "proper" alchemical equipment (represented by the alembic. As retorts and calcinators are not part of Skyrim) to create pure standard shop potions.
This even allow for a complete zeroing of value of "herbcraft" potions (but that is not done in this iteration) if one so wishes.
So now you can roleplay and sell shoppotions for money the same way NPC's can, and use your homebrews to distill alchemical reagents that are hard to find in nature.
With that done I started looking into the perk trees.
In this iteration I have tried to revert the alchemy tree back to Requiem roots, but kept the requirements for taking an elixir to take a perk point for mutagens.
You will also only have to take two perks to get all ingredient effects and (in this iteration) access to all 5 levels of standard potions at alchemy level 25. The exception are Superlative potions that you need the level 100 perk to get.
To get the level 100 perk you need to take the immunization perk which also require a mutagen. I know I know. That may change in future updates. But I did not want to wait anymore before I released the mod.
So where are we now?
For those who want to only play the classic version, then use only the one main esp.
But if you want to test out the innovations and attempts to strike a more holistic balance, please use the mod as intended with all optional esps.
What we need most now is actual playtesting and a conversation on a path forward.
I hope you will enjoy the mod as it is, and if you have suggestions, feedback and bug reports, please do not hesitate to comment or report them.
Have a nice game.
Plotinuz
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