In Oblivion it was kind of annoying since there were times when you could pick up all the ingredients from the flowers and others in which you couldn't.
I didn't like it, and I think that if it is based on chance, at least make it based on your Alchemy skill, as if your knowledge in alchemy makes you know which part of the plant is the most important for your potion, but sometimes you might accidentally cut a useless part or ruined the part you need, and if you have no experience at all, then it is based on chance, you might get the right part, you might not.

Also I think that the more advanced you are in Alchemy, the more you can recognize if you picked up the wrong part of the plant, this way for example if you pick up http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Oblivion:Alkanet_Flower, if you are good in Alchemy you'll have more chance to get a chloroplast extract which would give you Restore Intelligence, Resist Poison etc. and less chance to get the Alkanet Roots which would give you negative effects.
If your Alchemy is bad, on the other hand, but still above above Novice, you'll have more chance of getting the roots than the chloroplast extract, but you'll know the different effects of both (and like in Oblivion's Alchemy, the better you are at it the more effects added).
If you are under Novice, you'll just get the Alkanet Flower with no differentiation, so you 1) won't know what effect it would give you, and 2) might get a good effect or bad effect all controlled by Luck or an equation.

Also for Alchemy, what about adding recipe books or single recipes (if they are very unique), they would be expensive but some obtainable with quests, they would reveal all of the ingredient's (or ingredients') effects (either high alchemy, or a lot of money), but you will still need Alchemy for the plant parts to get the right effect.

So you can buy a recipe that talks about how to make a Light potion:


As an Apprentice you won't know Alkanet Flower gives you light, so now it would be known, but as an apprentice although you'll know you need Watermelon seeds and not Watermelon juice, you won't know that you'll need chloroplast extract from the Alkanet Flower and not its roots.

Does it make sense?
Do you think Alchemy should work that way?
Because it makes sense that the more skilled you are in Alchemy, the more knowledge you have about plants.

Also, what about an Alchemy mini-game?
or at least the chance of failing to make the potion at all (explosion and you lose health, or poisoned, or just failed), or maybe got the wrong result (instead of potion that gives you Light, you get a potion that give you Resist Paralysis or negative effects on yourself)

Share your opinions

i agree with your aclhemy based skill ingredient picking because the more you know about the different ingredients and the flora the better you are at obtaining it.


and i dont want any alchemy minigames, i agree you should be able to fail at low levels but at 100% you are a master of alchemy and always do it right, or perhaps extra benefits for because of your awsome skill.


and id love to have recipes, it would help a lot since there are plenty of potions to make and this way you wouldnt have to alt tab to serach for it on the wiki.

tough not all of the potions should be covered, the stronger a potion is the less likely a recipe exists for it.

Oh, plx. For the love of God. No minigame!

I think that alchemy was quite good in OB, But they should not make poition making instant, unless you find a pack of instant tea :rolleyes:
Poition should take a small amount of game time to brew, one problem in OB was I would fill my Inventory with ingredients, then open the alchemy screen and make so many potions that I instantly jumped 20-30 levels in alchemy which is not really imersive. There should be a system where you always have make a poition, but at low level or without the correct recipe you that poition would be bad\sour and have negative effects, or even be toxic\partially toxic, and the chance of making a 'good' potion increases as your level in alchemy increases.
Maybe as your skill level increases you also get more info about the potion you are making, not just the effect, but maybe the weight of said potion, there was nothing worse than ending up with 25 pumpmellon (even if the ingredients you used wern't Watermellon and Pumpkin) potions weighing 5 each and being overburdend suddenly.
Recipes in books or quest rewards would be a great idea, with very powerfull potions, almost impossible to find\aquire with out one hell of a fight, or great expense.

No minigame, no heads or tails failure.

The basic thing is that when I say "make a restore fatigue" potion, I expect to get a potion, not have my ingredients disappear into the void. I don't necessarily demand I get the maximum potion skills + gear allow for every time at skill level 5. But I should get an actual result. If you insist that I should still randomly get significantly underperforming potions at Journeyman rank, I'd disagree.

Alchemy, like other skills, should be based on the knowledge particular to the skill.
The more proficient you are at it, the better your potions will be.

Alchemy should become a more usefull alternative to magic spells for a pure Knight or Stealth type Character, therefore they should add more poison effects like Disease or even add a new disease system like in MW to be able to make poison potion's with different disease, some rare disease could be deadly within a minute and while we're on it why not include different poisons from different sources, e.g. a Frog, Snake, scorpion poisons and poisons from different plants all with their own unique effects e.g. - 15 hp till you use a poison cure or die + some side effects like the one in Fallout 3 when you got a crippled Head.


I'm also suggest that Alchemy should be more of a Science and when speaking of Science i don't like the idea that you can make potions on the fly everywhere even in the deepest wilderness, my suggest is that there should be a alchemy lab in every town where you can make all potions even the high level potions (depending on your alchemy skill) you still could make low level potions with your mortar while you are underway.

i just wish they made a distinction between harvested plants and unharvested ones so that I don't go running to the same plant for the nth time.

I would love a minigame that determines the efficacy of your potions/poisons. Hit the 'sweet spot' and the potion works at maximum power.

I lean towards 100% ingredient retrieval. The reason is purely simplification. And to prevent frustration, albeit minor frustration. Yes, it more REALISTIC to have a chance (due to the quality of the plant, the knowledge of the character etc.) BUT I'm also a proponent of playability over realism where appropriate...

To compensate for the 100% success rate of harvesting ingredients, the designers would be responsible for an appropriate distribution of alchemical properties in ingredients - rarer ingredients would be derived from rarer flora, and have more desirable properties. By appropriately allocating the abundance of flora, and the properties they hold, you will erase the need for a chance-based harvest.

Also, the chance to fail while making a potion (and enchanting, for that matter) that existed in Morrowind should be kept out, for similar reasons.

Alchemy, Other, Other, other being Morrowind (or at least Morrowind as I recall it).

By Alchemy, however, I mean that at a skill below 25 you have a chance at failing, and at higher skill levels you just have a higher chance to collect several ingredients at once.

You can see one or more effects of an ingredient depending on your skill (and no effects if your skill is low), but if there are effect that you can't see that would still get into the potion they should, but still remain hidden in the potion description.

Potions should be able to fail sometimes, but not "whoops ingredients gone lol", but a random negative/positive effect added (depending on the kind of potion you're making). Perhaps ingredients could "disappear lol", but I think that should for a large part depend on your tools, not your skill.

Alchemy skill for picking flower and mushrooms and such. A master alchemist should be able to find rare ingredients more often, and a beginner alchemist should have the chance to fail.

For potion/poison making I don't want the chance to fail, but I want a chance to really screw up the potion you tried to make. If your skill is really low, there should be a good chance that your potion gets a lot of bad effects... but not something that turns it into a good poison.

Potions and poisons should be the same thing. You should be able to use any potion as a poison, and the other way around.
A good alchemist should also be able to make explosive and corrosive potions that can be used as throwing weapons (or you can drink them, lol).

Similar to what you described with the recipes, where a known formula can be used to create a known potion from unknown ingredients, Morrowind offered a system where you could create a potion with ingredients even if you do not know what those ingredients do. You could create a potion with one, or more unknown effects, combined with known effects.

The one major floor with this is if you have played the game as an alchemist then so long as you can remember the recipes yourself subsequent playthroughs will reap the same rewards.

This system, combined with yours, would allow the novice player to buy a recipe, follow it (without knowing exactly what the ingredients do) and produce it (now knowing what the potions effect is). It would be a slight risk drinking it or not, as you A) Wouldn't know if you 'made a mistake' and B) Wouldn't know if the recipe was trustworthy/listed all possible side effects. Adding the possibility of the player making a mistake and not knowing solves the problem that comes up in Morrowind.

100%. You have to be seriously challenged to fail picking a flower.

Oblivion.** They should take a long hard look at Alchemy Advanced, and incorporate those features. I wouldn't mind more ingredient slots either. Also, flat values for ingredients (ie. Restore Health magnitude is the same for every Restore Health effect on ingredients), normalized potion weights (so the exact same potions stack instead of 13 weighing 0.9 and 6 weighing .08 being two different stacks). Additionally, I'd like to see more ingredients in general (mods will help with this, but I'd like to see more of it by default. I also think Beth should look at Q More and Moldy Ingredients, and apply that to all perishable ingredients.

No mini-games, no failures.

100%
O
not

By default you should be able to visually see what you've harvested already, like mods did for Oblivion.

An empty vial required for each potion. Common sense.

Why the hell do you need alchemy skill to pick up plants, Use your two hands i voted 100% on that.
The Alchemy skill should be used while making potions.

Idk about ideas of how to do it but in Oblivion alchemy was my favorite thing to do. I sure whatever system they choose or if it's the same I'll be happy.

How about this. When you are at a high alchemy level you learn of extremely rare hard to reach ingredients to create potions with permanent affects. And how about having ingredients show up on your compass or on the local map when you access it when at a similar high level.

I like these ideas. More Ingredients in general and then giving the option to put more into the potion for a greater magnitude of effect.

But I really like the idea of certain ingredients haveing a higher magnitude of effect.

Like say one flower will give you Restore Health effect but you'll need like 2-4 of them to match the effectiveness of a certain rare flower that can do that magnitude with just one.

I like the idea of recipes. How about this: potions can have all the possible effects even if you're a novice in alchemy. However, the higher effects sometimes don't show up. So if you try to create a potion with an effect that you can't yet see on the basis of a recipe, you won't always succeed. The higher up the effects are, the more chance of the effect not showing up. But if an effect is only just out of your reach in one ingredient, and already available in the other ingredient there should at least be 75% chance of succeeding. It allows you to get very useful and strong potions early on in the game, while still encouraging gaining skill in alchemy. Then at novice, you wouldn't be able to identify any effect of the ingredient. Then for each level you go up, one effect is added until at master you can see them all.

Some other ideas:

If you use three ingredients with the same effect, the effect becomes stronger.
Dispel should be a neutral effect. If it's paired with negative effects, it's part of a poison. If it's the only effect, or part of a potion, it acts as a positive effects.
Apparatus shouldn't only be used for boosting. One of them is used for getting effects you don't yet know of more reliably. One is used for decreasing the duration of the potion/poison while increasing the immediate effect. Of course, the shorter the duration, the lower the total effect. A 3pts for 10 seconds poison should become a 10 pts instant at most.

i say for the potion portion....,you make a potion (regardless) but based on alchemy, INTEL/LUCK it's anything from useless to highly potent.