I think this should be looked at again. Alchemy has all of it's usefulness siphoned out of it as of now. Every element can be cast on weapons now, except lightning and acid I think.
Lesser varnish: 1d4
Flame Weapon: 1d4
Darkfire: 1d6
Frost Weapon: 1d6
Sonic Weapon: 1d6
Strong varnish: 1d8
Greater varnish: 1d12
How is this useless? Also are you aware Stoneskin and Greater Stoneskin are now X/+4 damage reduction rather than X/+5?
There's 3 greater varnishes available, fire, ice and negative. Negative you will never get enough to have a good inventory of to make use. 80-85% of the server is immune to either fire or ice or both. Anybody worth their salt in pvp will have high immunity items to elemental damage. You literally have to go to hell to get the greater ice and fire essences, and you will pull maybe 2-3 ice and 3-5 fire in your group if you share and this takes hours. The +4 magic varnish being applied to an enchanted shield or armor does next to nothing, is it worth burning on an enchanted weapon, nah it's not. Better off making ammunition with the strongest essences.
Greater stoneskin is now +4, so? You can cast it on others, which makes it infinitely more useful than before. I didn't mention anything about these spells, premonition still can't be cracked. All I'm saying is you should give the greater magical varnish +5 to give the craft at least something in it's arsenal. As it is now just a support craft for making ammo and enchanting, which is bugged out.
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Don't forget the fact that alchemy is available to ANYONE. That means non casters gain access to a large portion of the caster library as is. I see no reason why it should be made better than the actual spells. It wasn't before the change and I doubt we'll change it to be in the future.
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It's not available to everyone though, if you don't have the stats or time you can't pursue it. What do you mean you get a large portion of the caster library as an alchemist? You're thinking of herbalism. Which works two ways, cause casters get access to healing and other caster libraries not available to them. The reason to consider giving the +5 back is to balance the scales. Give the craft one sought after item. Nobody buys varnishes, I've spent days selling items and that's the one craft nobody buys anything from.