I've spent some time pre-planning my perks for my Cleric build, and the only crafting tree I wanted to perk out was Alchemy. Now, I only chose 3/3 Experimenter and 1/1 Snakeblood so I could reach 1/1 Purity... but I started thinking, is it worth it? My Alchemy skill right now is painfully low, and all the potions I have with "negative" side effects are very minimal. If I didn't take Purity, I'd have 5 perk points to put elsewhere..

While we're on the topic, is 3/3 Experimenter worth it? Is it hard to find out all 4 ingredients via making different potions?? I could just go 1/3 and still reach Purity..

How negative are the side effects at maxed Alchemy? Are we talking a small hit to stam/magic or are we talking I could paralyze myself for 10 seconds?

Keep in mind I don'tmake poisons on this character, so the flipside of Purity is to be ignored.

Thanks!

Edit: Nonsensical colors and format to hurt your eyes

Edit 2: If I could add glitter text I would

They're still quite minimal at max.

I'd say it's worth it, especially for a cleric.

You can ignore "experimenter" if you use any guides to help find recipes.

I would say Purity isn't mandatory either. The negative effects really are quite minimal.

If you want to get as much RP experience out of it as possible however... then you may want to discover your own recipes and purity certainly does have benefit.

However....

If you don't look up potion recipes online then the perks are worth it. If you look up recipes online then the perks are virtually worthless.

Not worth it at all.

You can instead just get/learn more ingredients, then only make ones
without negative stuff in the first place (especially by the time you'd be that far in the tree.)

But I guess if you WANT to make those, for some reason, its not a waste of a perk point.

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I'm on the xbox 360, wished I'd have known more about heavy armor before going 4/5 in it. That is
just WAY over the top, even without "matching set"(which I thankfully did not waste a point in.) Now I'm
like 1200 plus in ANY heavy armor, with the cap being 570. But it did give me the freedom to stop
wearing my daedric I had at lower levels, I've ran around in legendary double enchanted imperial stuff
before getting bored of that. Now I'm in the four piece wolf armor, you buy from that Eorlund or something,
after being bored of the look of blades armor.

Not being able to drop points/reskill seems like a huge oversight to me. Like it would be fun, at level 72
and being bored, to be able to go back and do light armor/that tree instead (since I'm sure people
are way over 570 in that as well.) Dragonscale actually looks good, while some heavy armors
are so bulky. However, my female character would probably just end up wearing legendary
forsworn stuff...

Purity can be useful, but using online recipe lists and so on can largely make it irrelevant.

Experimenter I found almost entirely useless, even without lookups, I end up IDing most effects by casual experimentation with mixing my leftover ingredients after making useful potions.

Well are you roleplaying or are you not? Purity is purity. What kind of a clerica re you if your potions are mixed with poison and other impurities. No way.

I would say experimentor is useless, even if you do not use any source of information I find the trail and error method fun.

Purity it depends on of you want to make either potion or poisons and you have no desire to mess around with finding the right combination of ingredients, the plus side to the criss cross of the positive and negative effects is that any potion with more effects sells for more regardless what the effects are.

If you want them for personal roleplaying reasons go for it.

I do wish it was a toggle. Some of the more expensive potions can only be made if you haven't taken purity.

One other thing to keep in mind is that there are several potions that can only be made if you have the purity perk.

I wish for this as well an option to choose what effects to have or the option to not alter it at all would be a great addition.