Alchemy is in a very bad place

Let me preface by saying that creating weapons and melding them is just fine and dandy. In fact, without the ability to do this, nobody would ever pick up alchemy and I would be dead broke. The oils are somewhat useful, too.
With that being said, here are my main concerns with alchemy consumables:

1. Potions and ethers are too weak in general. By the time you have access to the next tier of potions/ethers while leveling up, your HP and MP pool will have far surpassed their intended usefulness.
   Solution: Increase maximum cap across the board, especially for the high-end ones like elixirs. A 500 hp heal is less than a regular cure at level 50.
2. Why are poisoning/silencing/blinding/paralyzing potions in the game? The only useful potion in this category is the sleeping potion which lasts a respectable 20 seconds. All of the other ones have such short durations for very mediocre effects. The silencing potion lasts a whopping 1 second.
   Solution: I don't know here... maybe they're just for giggles. Giving them too much power could lead to abuse.
3. Potions and ethers drop in abundance across the game. They're in every other quest reward, available from vendors, and drop from dungeon chests. It boggles my mind that hi-elixirs, x-potions, and x-ethers can drop from the story dungeons. These are supposed to be the ultimate alchemy achievements, yet can be farmed by anyone taking a casual stroll through the dungeon. It costs an exorbitant amount of resources to create just one set of 3 hi-elixirs, but you can gather several from a Castrum Meridium run if you're lucky.
   Solution: Either don't make the high-end potions drop in dungeons or drastically reduce the cost of creating one by removing clusters and voidsent blood (costs philosophy tomes) from their recipes. X-potions and x-ethers are going for less than 1,000 gil on my server because of Castrum Meridium.

And of course, the big one...
Nevermind that hi-elixirs are a 2-star recipe which requires an immense amount of gear costing hundreds of thousands of gil to create. Nevermind that it costs clusters to create. Nevermind that the HP and MP gains aren't even that good. The thing that hurts the most is that it takes 1,125 Allagan Tomestones of Philosophy to create 3 Hi-Elixirs.
These can be bought for a few thousand gil on the market because they drop in dungeons. The ultimate, most powerful potion an alchemist can create can be obtained by any random group of adventurers strolling through a casual story dungeon.
What. The. F.


Source: http://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/commen..._improvements/

Silence in general works differently than it did in 1.0/ffxi. You can think of it more as a stun-deal for caster mobs. Just wanted to point that out, everything else I sort of agree with.

Due to your #2 point.



I find your lack of imagination disturbing.

Blacksmith has it worse.

Yea it's in a corner in Ulda'h that's like not even easy to get to. If there wasn't an Aetheryte it would be in the worst place ever. I can't stand running to the Alchemy guy.

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Originally Posted by Buddhsie

Blacksmith has it worse.

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It's just really silly that relics are extremely easy to obtain and even easier to upgrade to +1, making any other weapons in the game completely pointless. Why do 2 star crafted weapons even exist? Can use the GC 50 weapon to beat titan with, it's only one less damage than Ifrit's. There's no way of fixing this though, they can't just make relics harder to obtain, and making them equal to HQ 2 star melded weapons would hurt relics as well.

Wait..


This is just Alchemy?? Yoshi said he didn't want to make crafting needed at all! Just grind your dungeons and enjoy your vanity Crafting AF!

Yoshi Killed Crafting for the AK/CM grind, please look forward to it!

This needs to be seen!

They've made just about every craft useless, except for perhaps the joy of being able to meld all your own materia. Which is also pretty much pointless by end game. I can't even look forward to crafting my own crafting gear. Why bother? I could just as easily grind a few fates to pick up good items for crafting from GC. It's a pretty sad state of affairs.

Yeah I'm definitely feeling crafting is mostly worthless. At first i was so psyched, leveling my armorer up was quite a lot of fun. Now? I realize the pointlessness of leveling armorer. Even with good materia melds the gear isn't as good as Darklight or AF+1.

I think the posters in here saying it's no big deal because all crafts suck don't understand the magnitude of this problem.

The only money making synths are between lvl 10-30. Maybe once every week when I'm bored I'll make 60 HQ mega pots that take a few days to sell but that is still only a lvl 43 synth. The 3 relic weps alch can make are flooded beyond belief even compared to the goldsmithing ones so the undercutting has destroyed the profits there.

What is the result of all this? I CAN'T EVEN SPIRITBOND GEAR because the viable synths don't net enough xp. My alch is now just an ingredient bot/melding bot. The potions in this game are terribly weak and imbalanced and they ALL SHARE CDs.

@Ahlen.. are we looking at the same pieces of gear? With melding and HQ all the crafted 70 gear is better than any Darklight gear by far.

AF+1 gear is Ilevel 90, and that takes weeks of farming per piece, 5 months to get all. There is no comparison from crafting yet.

If you want to see, you need to see HQ versions which Databases like XIVDB don't show.

Also, we go through tons of potions for our Coil runs and spend thousands on Mega-Potions.

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Originally Posted by DJPr3tty

Also, we go through tons of potions for our Coil runs and spend thousands on Mega-Potions.

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Mega potions are ok, 500 hp is decent but the shard cost is too high and they're still too weak. All x-potions aren't worth their cost and none of the mp potions are ever worth using, the amount of mp restored is pathetic.

I definitely agree, although the problem is shared between a lot of crafting classes. My goldsmithing is nearly useless, except for the +CP gear around level 30, which is worth 2-4k gil. Alchemy has been 99% useless, except for making a new weapon for my Scholar every few levels. I was going to level off hi-ethers for a while, and made about 100 before I actually realized it costs 9 shards each time I craft a set of 3. The price of hi-ethers would only barely cover the price of shards, and that still leaves the main ingredients cost/the cost of my time farming those ingredients.

I would say that potions need a severe buff across the board, and they need to stop being given as frequently as rewards. I had about 40 hi-potions that I had never used once before I was even able to make them on my Alchemist, and same with hi-ethers. Also the SHARED COOLDOWN between potions NEEDS to go away. I can understand potion/ether/antidote sharing a cooldown, but NOT stat buffing potions or debuff potions. And that is another point right there. Buffing potions duration is entirely too short. The time it takes to use it is hardly worth the bonus. Either make it a 30 min buff with less stat gain, or make it last about 1 minute, not 15s.

I am pretty sure that the inflated philosophy prices is SEs way of getting rid of any excess items you could buy in 1.0 for 50kish a pop. Then again, I may just be giving SE too much credit. Either way it is pretty stupid that the 2 star items are such a pain in the ass to make, especially the cooking and alchemy ones.

Armourer has it worse than all of you. Blacksmith and Alchemists can at least sell the weapon for A relic reborn. Also blacksmiths make a lot of the crafting off hands.

Couldn't agree with OP more. What once seemed promising now feels like a completely fruitless labor. The only reliable way I've found to profit is to make items that are used for a repeatable guildleve and sell those. Even half of those can be bought from a vendor. Orz.