Alchemy is poorly designed

Gameplay Professions
1

I understand the immersion and intent behind experimentation, but the implementation isn’t fun.

It’s possible that I’ve just had incredibly bad RNG (Which in and of itself is frustrating) but to spend thousands of gold on materials that I spent hours farming to experiment leading to the experiment to fail is just poor design.

The first step to experimentation (which you have to do to discover new recipes) is you have to Neutralize your previous crafts, or potions you find throughout the region. You must Neutralize 5 potions per craft. This allows you to craft Coreway Catalysts which you need 2 per Experimentation. On top of that, to experiment you also need to spend 20 herbs. This is all fine, I guess.

The real kicker is that you can do all of this and then utterly fail at your experimentation. I understand prices are inflated at the moment, but ~30 herbs (5 potions + 20 to experiment) is currently around 500 gold for just rank 1 herbs. Not that this is a ton of gold, but to spend 500 gold only to fail your experimentation and have a net zero gain is the frustrating part. To add insult to injury, you then have to wait 15 minutes before you can gamble your mats again.

There is the “Formulated Courage” craft but you literally have to drop 30 knowledge points into Alchemical Mastery before you can craft it.

Now, one failed experiment is frustrating because you just wasted your gold on a net zero gain as previously mentioned, but to fail multiple times (despite dumping early points into Alchemical Mastery) consecutively really starts to build frustration. Please, fix this for future implementations. It’s not fun.

5 Likes
2

While I think the experimentation system is a horrible idea, at least we are not stuck with some stupid version of the Altar of Decay…

3

I’d be glad to have the alter back over experiments. At least it was in 1 location and we knew where to go. With experiments is 100% RNG and it isn’t in favor of the player.

4

It’s been 3, maybe 4 days? of Meticulous Experimentation without a discovery.

This system was terrible in Dragonflight, making craftable courage is a bandage to cover up the poor design of the overall system. It means the only people who can actually skill up are the people who have the money to literally burn up. Making almost every recipe from discovery is an abysmal design. More should have been on the vendor, like for Thralls sake, you have an RNG chance of getting mana potions, a key consumable, which is normally a low skill recipe you learn not long after healing potions.

I’ve dumped enough points into Alchemical mastery (40) where the only sub-spec missing is orbinds, and as far as I can tell, only the first point and the 20 point node on mycobloom lore is left for me to increase my chances of discovery.

I do not know what else I can do in order to get more recipes at this point.

Experimenting feels bad. Flat out. You feel like you’re wasting a large amount of materials with little-to-no return on investment, you have to destroy a bunch of your crafts in order to get the catalysts to do it in the first place, and the explosion and debuff is a slap on the face to just complete the whole “feels bad” experience.

I get that frictionless game experiences aren’t generally fun either, but, seriously, whoever did this, didn’t learn from the same mistakes in Dragonflight, and, no one tested this enough, or flat out disregarded the feedback on game feel.

So, anyway, time to complain daily until it sinks in and we get enough changed, again, to make this feel like less of a waste of time and money.

also ffs, meticulous should just be 100% success, it’s a 24h cooldown, the name of it implies we’re taking great care, give us that much, one recipe a day. It’s eating up my acuity that i’d rather stockpile to use towards tools.

4 Likes
5

100% agreed; I’ve had two of my 24hr experiments blow up in my face and easily 30+ ‘wild’ experiments too. I’ve only learned 2-3 total recipes during this time.

This feels awful, and if my guild didn’t need raid flasks I’d absolutely be switching to another profession because I’m tired of burning expensive mats for zero benefit.

1 Like
6

Depending upon how many you go thru, they may need to be ready with some of their own stuff. The flask cauldron requires 40 artisan’s acuity, with the potion one requiring 80. And they only have 40 uses, down from 120 in DF. Meaning you will need on average 2 to 3 times as many per raid session. Maybe later in the season when we are not going to be needing that artisans stuff from our own needs we can use it on this.

7

Yep.

I have spent literally every CD on Wild Experimentation being blown up. And now I am getting blown up back to back on Meticulous Experimentation and being locked out of a 24 hour CD with nothing to show for it. Like okay some RNG is okay but this is us being given a broken slot machine and asked to keep putting money into it as if that will fix it somehow.

Whomever designed and implemented this system should feel bad and genuinely needs to reconsider what they are doing with their life.

3 Likes
8

All professions are now poorly designed.

9

aw yus alchemy is broken. transmutation wink wink.