Alchemy is in a very bad place

[Shiyo]

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/

[Baxter]

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.

[JustinianKaiser]

Due to your #2 point.



I find your lack of imagination disturbing.

[Buddhsie]

Blacksmith has it worse.

[Benzareli]

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.

[Shiyo]

Blacksmith has it worse.

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.

[OrionInerghem]

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!

[Shiyo]

This needs to be seen!

[Hed]

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.

[Ahlen]

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.