People need to speak up more for Alchemist buff.

[Moirear]

I regularly pop mega-potions in Coil, especially on turn 4. Not that I make serious gil off of it, but being able to make them for myself and for my static party members is very handy.

If they're HQ the CD is only like 4.5 minutes instead of 5, which is still really long and kind of ridiculous. HOWEVER it's nice as a dps because it's usually just right that way so that I can pop a potion, then Raging Strikes, then another potion, and then Raging Strikes to burn through the different phases of turn 4, and in combination with food, not even be all too geared for it.

That said, a lot of the curative potions and products are just bogus. 2 stars and philomat items and they don't even give you a full-HP or full-MP effect, just some measly chump sum of points. Absolutely silly. It's no wonder that nobody in their right mind would pay a lot of gil for this, but the effort in making them versus their effects is completely disproportionate.

On that note, maybe people could work around the feeling of "needing" a BRD in a lot of harder endgame scenarios if some of the potions were actually worth a damn, like a 2-star potion that could actually completely re-fill a WHM's MP bar. Maybe then someone out there might actually spend some serious gil for that kind of potion, or at least enough to justify the worth of the mats that go into it. Just saying.

[Reiryuu]

I think a full heal on health and/or MP is a little too much. Cap removal, I feel, is good enough and if they increase the levels of crafting later perhaps they could add a full heal pot at a really high level of alchemy if they ever decided to do it. I feel buffing alchemy is much better than giving people an echo buff in Binding Coil though.

[Riko_Futatabi]

Please add a recipe for Cordials!

[Moirear]

I think a full heal on health and/or MP is a little too much. Cap removal, I feel, is good enough and if they increase the levels of crafting later perhaps they could add a full heal pot at a really high level of alchemy if they ever decided to do it. I feel buffing alchemy is much better than giving people an echo buff in Binding Coil though.

2-star potion. Requires materials bought with philosophy tomestones, or roughly 1k+ gil each. Has a cooldown of several minutes, refills like 500 HP or MP or both. And on the MB, nobody will (rightfully) pay more than 500 gil for it, maybe more like 100 gil. Even better, make it even more worthless by having it drop in random chests. Sounds legit.

Seriously though, I don't see how making that kind of potion actually refill a significant (500 points is a drip in the bucket and basically worthless) amount of HP, or MP, or TP... is "too much." With the huge cooldown it's not like people could rely on it as a crutch all the time or replace other players and their respective roles. If it could actually refill several thousand points, even if only over time, maybe people would actually use it, and it might have value. But compare the value of philosopy tomestone materials used in gear, and that gear, with ALC potions. 125 philosophy tomestones a pop. Every time, whether it goes into a garbage potion nobody gives a damn about, or a piece of gear that tends to be better than Darklight gear.

Absolutely ridiculous.

[Hiruke]

We spoke with the Item Lead who brought up a few points about medicines.
Currently items were designed to be used sparingly, and as a result the re-use duration is set longer. We don't want to create a scenario where players are expected to regularly have a whole host of healing items taken to each activity, nor a situation where players in a healing or enhancing role would not be necessary solely because of items.

Food is designed with a different duration in mind specifically as well, because the concept of these items are quite different.

I liked how food/medicine was used in FFXI much better than in FFXIV. In FFXI, just about the only medicines you used often were poison potions (when pulling large packs of mobs that AoE slept your group) and echo drops (for similar situation but the mobs cast silence), and those were mostly used in Dynamis. Other medicines were NOT widely used, but were extremely potent in helping you defeat encounters that you were having a really hard time with. They were also relatively expensive to buy. In FFXIV, all medicine is so pathetic I don't see why you would ever use them, ever, for any reason. If you're having a hard time with something, I seriously doubt medicine is going to help at all.

For food, if you didn't use food in FFXI, you were a joke. In FFXIV, the food is so weak, it really only appeals to min/maxers. The only time you might want to seriously consider food is Turn 5. Nothing else even remotely comes close to having you need food, whereas in FFXI if you didn't use food you had a serious problem on your hands.

Of course, the supply/demand of the entire economy of FFXI was much better than in FFXIV as well. Example: In FFXI, medicine was rare and potent. In FFXIV, medicine is extremely common, and pathetically weak. In FFXIV, everyone can easily gather/craft/farm ANYTHING. FFXIV needs to think a little less about making everything super accessible, and a little more about making things require skillful play to acquire (such as having to defeat/avoid monsters when mining, having important crafting materials come from encounters similar to BCNMs that folks have limited access to, is NOT something they would do anyway even if they didn't want the crafting materials*, and is difficult to accomplish).

*This is why the tomestone of philosophy crafting items are total garbage - Everyone, EVERYONE gets ATP, all the time, forever, just through the course of normal play. That's great and all, right up until you want to imagine you want an economy of any sort. The kind that would make people even vaguely able to afford ludicrously priced houses, for example.

[Arkghyom]

They need to reduce those horrible CDs. There is no point in making pots if they're going to have 1,000,000 min CDs because they're situational.