What does it take to make one at max rank? I have 100 alchemy skill and decent gear (not bis).
If someone could point me to exactly what is needed, I would GREATLY appreciate it.
Well, you need the recipe - Centaur 13 for the Haste/potions one and Vald 14 for the Vers/phials one.
They have 275 difficulty. This is what your total modified skill has to get to to guarantee 5 star.
So, assume 100 base skill, not too hard with Alch once you push through all the exploding. +10 for the rare mixing rod, +6 for the rare hat and +6 from the rare robe.
Then we look at the trees. You can get +30 from the appropriate potion or phial mastery for the stone you want to make, then +25 for the Lore below that and +5 from the first bonus in that wheel. The last bonus also unlocks the Illustrious Insight option for the stone.
You can also get +50 from the Alch Theory base wheel.
So we’re up to 232 (after allocating 105 skill points specifically for this task). Using Illustrious Insight on the craft (50 mettle to make) gives us 30 more so we’re up to 262.
Now at this point if you are a Goblin with a natural +15 Alch skill you laugh and realise you can guarantee 5 star with no more work. In fact you could have stopped 2 points earlier and still been good.
If you are Kul Tiran, your +5 to all has you at 267. Annoyingly close but you are really still in the same boat as everyone else. You need an Inspiration proc.
Inspiration is unfortunately an all-or-nothing gamble. You have a chance of getting a big plus to your skill but if it fails you get nothing. It could be argued it would be better as a sliding result, especially in situations like this where you may only need a few extra points, but it is what it is.
So I guess you want to max your chance of Inspiration. There are two things you can buff on Inspiration, the chance and the amount. You don’t need to worry about buffing the amount because you only need a few extra points, so, all in on the proc chance.
5% base. 38 from the rare hat (each 10 points gives us an additional 1%). 35 from the Mastery and Theory points we already took. Putting 30 more knowledge points into Inspiring Ambience gets us 60 more Inspiration. 20 more points into Chemical Synthesis lets us make and use Brood Salt, which we can add to the recipe since we filled the Phial Mastery wheel, for a further 40 Inspo. 24 from Draconic Inspiration enchant on your rod. I’m sure I’m forgetting something, but that is a total of 197 Inspiration which gives +19.7% chance on top of the base 5% so almost a 25% chance of being Inspired and getting a 5 star instead of a 4. For an outlay of 50 further knowledge points bringing the total of those spent to 155 (my alchy has obtained 72 so far this expac to give you an idea).
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Thank you very much. This is exactly the answer I was looking for!
Now, I wish there was a way to respec my knowledge points 
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