My character had been collecting Alchemy ingredients for about thirty hours or so, and I finally decided to use some of them to increase my Alchemy skill. I believe I used Lavender and Tundra Cotton to create Resist Magick potions.

I didn't keep a perfectly exact count, but I believe it took ~40 potions to increase my Alchemy skill from 24 to 25. Now, I could activate the Thief Stone to help, and I will. But even with that, this takes about 4x longer than in Morrowind or Oblivion, and the ingredients are more expensive and/or much more difficult to gather in large numbers.

Am I missing something, or does Alchemy pretty much have to be increased by buying training now unless you have a huge chunk of gold to buy thousands of ingredients with?

Bumping... I've heard that creating multi-effect potions or particular effects that give more skill (for some mysterious reason) makes leveling Alchemy go more quickly. Anyone?

I'm thinking this needs a mod, it's a bit silly that crafting skills are now an MMORPG-caliber grind.

Alchemy seems to be an exception, I leveled both Smithing and Enchanting pretty quick by spamming Iron Daggers and enchanting them with every sub-Grand gem I had in the bags at that moment, but Alchemy takes at least 10-15 potions for each new skill point, and that's at ~50 or so. I don't even want to know how slow it gets later on .

Man, I wish I were increasing my Alchemy with just 10-15 potions per skill level. I guess, what, I just have to try combining every ingredient to see which potions give more than a tiny sliver of skill progress?

Meanwhile, most other skills are easy as [censored] to level. This is incredibly lame. I'm going to start trying to figure out how to mod skill gains.