First, a specific question: How do I use poisons?
More importantly, I'm having difficulty understanding the usefulness of alchemy. I understand what it does, but where I have a problem is that, okay, let's say I figure out what goes in a potion, and it's a useful potion. Gathering enough ingredients to even make more than one of them seems to be quite a pain! I mean, with smithing I always have armor and/or weapons to make and/or improve (though I haven't gotten to a level where I can improve magic ones yet), and I can generally find what I need. The same with enchanting. it just seems the cost/benefit of becoming a master alchemist isn't really there.

Ehm, are you only staying in the cities? There are tons of plants out there, some are rare, that is true, but many ingredients (mushrooms, mountain flowers) are so vast.

With alchemy i can make a poison that causes 90 dam and makes the target 50% slower and 35% weaker to further poisin attacks. safe to say my freind that it only takes one shot from my bow tipped with one such poison to take down all foes bar a elder dragon (even thats on its last legs after the hit with sneak critcal)

Actually some poisons could be considered overpowered (ppl like this word around here). So yeah alchemy is very useful and rewarding.

I'm curious to know how many arrows get the poison if I poison a bow? Is it one? Or two or five? Or is it every arrow I fire within X number of seconds after applying the poison? Or, can I poison my bow when I enter a dungeon and know that my first X number of shots will have the effect?

Can anyone shed some light for me?

My problem with Alchemy is how do you get experience? Is there a trick? I have alchemy still at 19 and just made like 20 potions and the level progress bar maybe moved a couple of pixels at max.

An easy way to get the skill up is to just go into an alchemy shop, buy all the ingredients, make stuff with them, and sell off what you don't need. You'll make a profit AND get awesome potions out of it.

OR...just pay a trainer. There's a number of skills in the game (like speech) that are difficult to get up in normal use.


You get one hit per poison applied (Two if it's concentrated I think, and double if you have the right perk).

The trick is that the experience is based on the price of the resultant potion, cheap ones barely make any progress.

Some tips here: http://elderscrolls.wikia.com/wiki/Alchemy_Tips

Only one arrow per poison unless you have the alchemy perk that makes it last two. Same for swords: 1 hit per poison.

Oh, that explains it, thank you.