So I made myself a real sneaky type character, intending to rely on stealth, daggers, light armour and alchemy as my primary skills. All well and good, and I spent plenty of time picking flowers, experimenting with potion combos, making up useful new potions and leveling up my skill (including perks), and then lugging around way too many kilos of potions. Only to find that with the current setup for potions and poisons, it's all a bit too much effort, and 99% of the time I really couldn't be bothered actually using any of them in a fight. It also feels quite gamey in the way it rewards constantly abusing the paused menus, and it really breaks the flow of intense fights as well.

So my proposal is not to make alchemy stronger or weaker, more complex or more simple, but just less tedious. The same rough effect for fewer mouse clicks, and less breaks in the flow of combat. So here's some ideas, based on what I guess will be possible and impossible with the CS. The balance may well need significant tweaking for these changes, but it's hard to tell without trying it in practice. I have no intention of adding any new ingredients or new effects or any other sort of "alchemy expanded" sort of thing - I'll leave that to someone else.

The cumbersome UI is the first problem, though it's well outside anything I could do anything about, I think. A semi-translucent quick-access menu for potions, with appropriate filters, would probably be the ideal solution here. I've seen some nice mockups in the UI thread, so I'm sure our talented UI modders will soon give us something more workable here.

Potions

Healing potions - deliver healing over time, perhaps 10 seconds. Total amount of healing for created healing potions increased to compensate, perhaps 50% or even 100%. This will of course significantly weaken the efficacy of using healing potions as an infinite health bar. If you've waited until you're down to a smidgen of health, you're too late. If you're fighting an enemy that's damaging you faster than you're healing, then maybe you should run away. The aim here is to make healing potions less of a "panic button" and reduce the stop-start type of combat it engenders. And to bring it more into line with the healing spell in Restoration.
I have no idea whether this would interact with regeneration potions and fast-healing items; not overly fussed either way, to be honest.

Restore magicka/stamina potions - again, provide a somewhat larger total benefit but over a bit of time (again, perhaps 10 seconds). I feel that a ten-second timeframe for these might actually make them more useful, to sort of match the rate at which they deplete with use. My experience with these potions is limited though, so very open to feedback.

"Resist x"/"fortify x" - I'm inclined to double their duration, if not more. Enough so that you're unlikely to be worried about drinking another one mid-fight. It would be fantastic if someone could mod the UI to actually show your potion effects and how long they have left as well, because it's currently very unwieldy.


Maximum number of active potions at once: Again, may not be possible to separate potion effects from magic effects in general. But it would be nice to limit the currently very easy potion spam.
The alternative approach, which might be easier and better, would be to initiate a quick drinking animation whenever a potion is consumed so that the player can't attack, block or use another potion while the animation proceeds (probably 2-5 seconds) - or at least play the animation when the player is actively in combat, so that there's a risk/reward aspect, and so that you can't chug ten potions at once.

No eating food during combat. Fairly self-explanatory, right? It's conceptually ridiculous, and it promotes the same fiddly stop-start combat that the current healing potions do (as well as tediously ransacking every barrel around for its apples). Food is not terribly useful for healing right now anyway - I think its main use will come with whatever Primary Needs mods people make.

Poisons

Making poisons last. I wonder whether damage health/magicka/stamina poisons ought not to last for more strikes - so that there's no temptation to laboriously re-poison your blade every strike. The "poison lasts for twice as many strikes" perk in the alchemy tree leads me to believe this should be possible. A side-effect of this would be to make daggers (with their swift speed) more useful in combat. My suggestion would be that poison lasts for 5 strikes (or five arrows), ten with the appropriate perk. I would further suggest a restriction on using poisons in combat...the poison will still give an early and powerful edge, and it's one less thing to break the flow of fighting. Not really the sort of thing you can really do in the heat of battle anyway, is it? A less severe alternative would be no poisoning in combat if enemies who have detected you are within a certain range, though this opens up the possibility of a tedious "fight, run away to poison, run back to combat, run away to poison, etc" style of play.
This may also require that selecting a new poison while another is already in effect "overwrites" the previous poison (with a confirmation dialogue), so that new poisons can be selected after short battles from which there's still some poison left.

Make damage health/magicka/stamina potions deliver damage over time by default (again, probably ten seconds). Essentially switch over the "damage health" effect with the "lingering damage health" effect (and for magicka and stamina too). Damage health is the "easier" and more common potion, but I figure a poison that deals all its damage immediately is a rarer and more useful thing. The strengths of the two damage types would have to be rebalanced, but that's okay. Technically, it would be nice to be able to just edit the effects of the two magic effect types without changing anything that references them - but I have no idea whether a seperate magic effect is used for potion effects, and this would be problematic if potions and e.g. traps were referencing the same effect. I would rather avoid editing the individual ingredients if possible. I have no problem with editing the existing "store-bought" potions.

So the overall aim with poisons is that you only poison once per battle before the action starts (so you're never pausing mid-combat), with a stronger overall effect from that given poison; the tradeoff being that you need to have prepared slightly beforehand (sneak helps here, as it should), make multiple hits and survive long enough for that damage to accumulate.

Potion making:

Remove or reduce the relationship between potion value and xp for levelling up. I would like to level up primarily from potions I make for my own use, rather than potions I make for their high value. In particular, increase the xp for making poisons, since they level a character up very slowly. If possible, I'd also be inclined to give xp for failed combinations (at least the first time you try it), to reward experimentation. I'd also reduce the skill requirement for the experimenter perks by 10 each, they're currently so high that only very high-level characters or people who grind alchemy will ever see the higher effects.

May not be possible: a third ingredient with the same effect gives a bonus to the strength/duration of that effect. To promote using a given number of ingredients to create fewer high-quality potions rather than many weak potions.

A basic alchemy sorter. There are satchels at the alchemy stations in each of the homes. A minor edit to give a dialogue that lets you give all/take all ingredients without having to go through each individually.


Anyway that's the basic idea, the actual capabilities of the CS when it arrives may invalidate half of those or open up entirely new options so who knows?

I like all this (especially a return to healing over time potions...unlimited insta-heal potions feel cheap). A couple of thoughts/possibilities to add:

1) Maybe allow for an unlimited number of simultaneous potion effects, but add a potion imbibing animation? If it takes a couple seconds to drink a potion or poison a blade, you won't be able to chain chug them when you're toe-to-toe with something.
2) Since alchemy equipment is now furniture, I'd really like the ability to use alchemy tables as ingredient/potion chests, and create potions from the ingredients stored in the table. This eliminates having to store them somewhere else, then take all, then use the lab, then re-store what you don't use. And it just makes sense anyway.
3) A minor point: it would be great if the effects (discovered or not) for any selected ingredient always showed when making potions. Currently, if you have two ingredients selected that share an effect, there's no way to look at the known/unknown effects of other ingredients without deselecting one of those other two ingredients. This makes experimentation more tedious than it should be.

Personally I really like how Witcher 2 does alchemy. Potions have to downed before you even enter combat, the effects last for 5-15 minutes, and your limited in how many you can drink and have active at once. Witcher has no insta heals or pausing of combat for potions. If you take out all instant heals/stam/magicka, instead bump up effects like fortfy health, improving one-hand damage etc instead. Makes potions more viable. Witcher also goes with the idea that potions will increase some stats, and decrease others, thats already there in Skyrim. Just a few minor tweaks and I think alchemy can alot more fun, up there with enchanting in effectiveness.

I was thinking of adding a balance mod that made it so Alchemy went even slower by making potions, but you could gain Alchemy skill from harvesting, with the idea that in a ~30 minute playsession of harvesting then making potions you should come out with a bit more Alchemy skill gained. Raising skills buying ingredients and such is pretty darn boring but it's pretty effective and the quickest way in vanilla.

Yeah I think that's probably the better plan. I'd probably only do the animation in actual combat though, I think, so it's feasible to drink a couple of potions from one trip to the menu before starting a fight (unless I could figure out how to do some sort of potion queuing system). Anyway based on the previous games, this should be quite feasible, and there's already a drinking animation there anyway.

A good idea, though I was hoping not to actually alter the alchemy tables themselves just for compatibility's sake. Should be quite possible though. Hopefully someone will also make a portable alchemy set mod as well (a la the portable bedroll mod).

A very nice idea, but I'm way out of my depth with the UI stuff. Definitely something worth suggesting in the UI overhaul threads though.

EDIT:


Yeah not a bad idea at all, actually. I think one of the earlier games did that? Morrowind maybe?
I like that it would nix ingredient buying to gain levels, as well. Hopefully it wouldn't make flowerpicking an even worse grind though.
Given that each individual potion would go a bit further with this mod, I was considering raising the cost of ingredients as well (though for compatibility's sake I would rather not edit any individual ingredients)

Oh, another thought: the perk tree really needs some rearranging. Experimenter is basically useless by the time you can afford it. It should be moved down to immediately after Alchemist, and the skill thresholds should be lowered. Personally, I'd never take the skill anyway, but I definitely wouldn't given the prereqs.

Green thumb also should be moved IMO. To my mind, it's totally essential, both to leveling the skill and discovering effects. And it's odd that you have to take Poisoner AND Concentrated Poison to get to it.

edit: these may also be beyond the intended scope of your mod. I'm not certain either makes alchemy explicitly less tedious. They just address what I see as spots where the skill could be improved.

The only problem with editing perks is the huge scope for incompatibility with "perk rebalance" mods, which I'm sure will spring up. And they'll most likely make those exact changes, because you're right, they're too hard to get to for the type of perks they are.
If I muck with alchemy perks, I'll just do it as a separate .esp, I guess, because I would also love to see Experimenter become easier to get to.

I like the idea of potions being a panic button rather than something you use before a fight. I've beaten the witcher 1 (haven't played 2 yet, shame on me). I like those mechanics too, but for this game I'd vote for something more like diablo 2 where a potion can be used as a panic button, but depending how dire the situation is you will want to use a more valuable potion with a higher regen effect. I.E. drinking a minor healing potion while fighting diablo and 30 of his minions probably isn't going to do much to increase your chance of survival. Drinking a superior awesome potion will though because it gives you much more healing within the same time frame..so you can make more mistakes.

Potions healing over time, potion-drinking animation, or both... would be great! It feels so cheap, just pausing and instant-healing.

Or at least adding a limit of drinking a potion every X seconds. I admit i find myself downing some 10 potions at once sometimes, and i tend to wonder how my character does it in a split of a second.

Great game but really I don't think it would be right in Skyrim. Witcher 2 you have defense such as Quen (magic shield that does damage), Axii (mind control), Yrden (magic traps), Aard (force push basically) and even traps so that you can avoid being hurt. Skyrim doesn't have any of those abilites and combat plays out much differently. Now if they had a dedicated bar for potions like in Diablo II were we could have something like 8 potions in it's own bar with the first 4 available as panic buttons that I would prefer.

I would loveeeeee to have the dedicated bar for potions...and the translucent "heal bar" behind the health bar to show how much healing your current potion is going to yield when it's done. Both are UI mods though so I could see them conflicting with other UI mods. It would be worth UI modders puttin in though if we could convince them.

Regarding the dedicated bar idea, there was a great mockup that someone made in the UI thread that separated "favourites" by type (weapon/magic/shout/potion I think), which looked really good and strikes me as a pretty nice solution. Leaving that to the UI modders though.
EDIT: http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1275750-modding-the-gui/page__view__findpost__p__19383813 is the post with the mockup.

Been ages since I've played Diablo, so I can't really comment on how it worked there, but I do remember health potions being more of an "infinite health bar" than I cared for. On the other hand, while I'm certainly inspired by some aspects of the Witcher/Witcher 2 alchemy models, I wouldn't want healing potions to be only something that's useful if you take it before/near the start of a fight (that's what regeneration potions are for, and they fill that role just fine, though I'm tempted to make these less uncommon). At the same time, a style where you stand toe-to-toe with an overly tough enemy, take two blows and go down to a tiny level of health then pause to drink 5 potions halfway through his next swing, then rinse and repeat is the sort of thing I want to get away from. Rather a real "panic button" where you discover you're in over your head, and drink one or maybe two and then go more into survival mode for the 10-15 seconds it takes for the full effect to kick in, and either go for the kill or run away and rethink. And of course, stronger potions would be qualitatively better than weaker ones by healing more health/second and more total health for a single animation, rather than effectively just being more efficient weight-wise. But really, I guess I would like to move more to a model where the optimum approach for maximising combat effectiveness in tough fights is generally via buffing potions rather than just healing potions.

Exactly this would be awesome. And poisons is a big potential here as well.