» Tue Jun 12, 2012 4:36 am No, the first perk you pick up (at 20%) is Alchemist. If you get that, you can also buy Physician at 20%. Then you can get Benefactor at 30%. If you buy those three AND get your skill up to 50%, THEN you can buy ONE LEVEL of experimenter, which gives you half of the effects for an ingredient, assuming its not something super rare you'd rather not just eat. The next two levels come at 70% and 90%.
It is (in simple mathematical terms) exceedingly unlikely you will discover all ingredient effects through experimentation alone, and fairly silly to spend multiple perks to learn them at a point where you have likely made hundreds of potions.
Even knowing all the effects already, and just trying to have my character "demonstrate" them so they show up in my list when he's using an alchemy lab, is fairly hard.
My number one request for a game mod would be the ability to have your character acquire knowledge of ingredient effects by some new method. Maybe every time you train, you'd be told one (hopefully one you don't know) at random. Maybe you could buy / find books which list of all the effects for a specific ingredient. Maybe it would just be a flat out cheat. Whatever - anything would be better than the "eat and mix" thing they have going now.
Why? Because in game alchemy should be about figuring out decent potions to make and then doing so and raising you skill, not about puzzling together hidden information. Or at least, there should be the OPTION of skipping right to the good part, as the other crafting skills allow.
Imagine if with smithing, you had to "invent new weapons" by randomly wasting ingots and leather until you produced something useful. Or if you couldn't disenchant anything, and just had to throw away soul gems at random until you figured out how to produce an effect. Yuck. So why with alchemy?
It is (in simple mathematical terms) exceedingly unlikely you will discover all ingredient effects through experimentation alone, and fairly silly to spend multiple perks to learn them at a point where you have likely made hundreds of potions.
Even knowing all the effects already, and just trying to have my character "demonstrate" them so they show up in my list when he's using an alchemy lab, is fairly hard.
My number one request for a game mod would be the ability to have your character acquire knowledge of ingredient effects by some new method. Maybe every time you train, you'd be told one (hopefully one you don't know) at random. Maybe you could buy / find books which list of all the effects for a specific ingredient. Maybe it would just be a flat out cheat. Whatever - anything would be better than the "eat and mix" thing they have going now.
Why? Because in game alchemy should be about figuring out decent potions to make and then doing so and raising you skill, not about puzzling together hidden information. Or at least, there should be the OPTION of skipping right to the good part, as the other crafting skills allow.
Imagine if with smithing, you had to "invent new weapons" by randomly wasting ingots and leather until you produced something useful. Or if you couldn't disenchant anything, and just had to throw away soul gems at random until you figured out how to produce an effect. Yuck. So why with alchemy?
Funny how we all like different things. I would actually like something as you describe for smithing and enchanting (if it were done right), although I think your idea for learning a new random effect for a potion through training is a good one.
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