[DroneRanger]

So I recently have been working on making a Troll  Bear-Shaman that's a healer/tank, and I was wondering about Alchemical Preparations and how to best utilize them. From what I've read in the Core Rule Book I'm not really sure that they are worth it. So can any of you chummers give me some advise on the pros and cons of using Alchemical Preps?

[zarzak]

My understanding is that generally speaking no alchemical preparations are worth it.

[firebug]

Short answer:  No, they come out as generally worse than Sorcery in nearly every scenario due to restrictive and unclear mechanics.

Long answer...  Lemme copy and paste it.

Where are you seeing 4 Potency at most? I mean, 6 dice is likely to get 2 hits, but that's fairly likely to get fewer hits. Even with my not so amazing 14 dice, I am fairly likely to get 5+ hits. I can always reroll the super important high force spell with Edge if I need to. The Potency time limits are not that bad, as 8 hours before a run is not terrible. It is a thing to deal with, I grant you that. Drain is also sort of annoying, but 4 drain is not impossible to deal with when I have 11 dice to resist. Also, if it's still stun damage, I might be able to nap it off before a run. It is still a pretty annoying thing to deal with.

Two hits is the average of six dice--  It's "fairly likely" to be higher or lower, but that's the most common outcome.  You can use Edge, but then you're using Edge for one mediocre spell...  My point is that you'll likely hamper yourself if you try to be a combat alchemist as your focus.

Here's the thing about the potency time limits.  The hours before and between you'll need to use for resting.  Five Drain from a F6 Command Lightning Bolt isn't bad, but using the Fireball preparation will be tougher.  At F6, you'll probably end up with 3-4 Stun from drain (8 DV, 12 dice on Drain Resist would average 4 hits).  With 8 dice from BOD+WIL, that'll take one or two hours to rest off.  For every 3 drain you actually take, that's an hour of rest needed, and unless you're doing relatively low Force spells, you're likely to take drain.  And lower Force spells (4 or below) thus last a shorter period of time and have much smaller dice pools (a F4 Preparation is likely to have a dice pool of 7 to cast with...)

So assuming you're doing things at least at F5 (where you're likely to get at least 9 dice for the prep to cast with, which is still kinda low) and with your list, most things will cause around 6 Drain, of which you can probably expect 4 resisted.  The potency will probably be 4, so they'll last 8 hours.  Assuming you don't mind taking the wound penalties (and for simplicity, assuming they don't impact your preparations) you could make about...  Eight preparations?

8(number of preps) x 2(average drain) = 16 / 3(stun recovered in one hour) = 5.3(hours needed, approximately).  This leaves you a bit less than 3 hours for travel time and what have you before you start losing preparations.  If say, the job is like 15 minutes away and everybody's already fine to go and you can work up right until the job starts, you could get away with about 11 preparations.

Which is a decent number of spells I suppose, but they'll all be less effective than if a sorcerer used them (with a higher dice pool, and taking 2 less drain per, meaning 0 on average) and completely locked in.

This is what I call "The Alchemy Problem".

The better your preparations are, the less and less of them you can have, and the bar starts much lower than it does for sorcery.  Currently, the "benefit" of alchemy has enough built-in drawbacks that the other drawbacks of alchemy just drown it out.

Alchemy is the Technomancy of magic.  A more difficult way to do the same thing (as Sorcery or decking, respectively) but worse, unless you figure out a very niche role for yourself or a specific trick.

[Hobbes]

Sorta.  You likely have other things you can spend the skill points on and no Alchemical Preparation is "better" than Spellcasting.  *IF* you have a couple of points sitting around it's not horrible to throw two or three at Alchemy, specialize in Contact Preparations and take one (maybe two if you start with 10 spells) Preparations.  IMO Increase Attribute [Intuition] (cast at force 5) and Improved Invisibility (cast around force 3) are decent choices.  Deflection, and Combat sense aren't bad.  Couple of the Detection spells have possible uses. 

Like I said, handful of skill points if you have some left over.  Not horrible to dabble in buffs that can be handed out to the team.  But Spellcasting, Summoning, Binding, Counterspelling all should be at 6 before you consider Alchemy.  Perception, Assensing, and Stealth to some level are also usually more important. 

Occasionally useful with minor investments. 

 

[Marcus]

No. It is an epic waste of resources, do not take the skill, do spend spell slots on it, forget it exists.
The buff model which is the standard defense is throughly impractical if you look at all that's involved. Until it gets revised/clarified/Errataed it should simply be left to NPCs.

[ScytheKnight]

The biggest issue is that you can't play an Alchemist like you would a Sorcerer. Straight up combat spells just aren't their forte, however they can be quite good at battlefield control.

[firebug]

Personal passive buffs are okay, as they don't give sustaining penalties, allowing multiple Increase Attribute spells.  However, they becomes irrelevant when a Sorcerer initiates once and gets Quickening.  Maybe use of a lot of Manipulation and Illusion spells could work even if the spells come out as crappy versions of themselves, but then the issue just becomes "I only have so many preparations with me..."

[Whiskeyjack]

I encourage you to just take spells instead.

[Jayde Moon]

A good Improved Invisibility Preparation + a good Stealth Preparation can give you a boatload of 'unaware' attacks until the enemy can figure out what's even going on and dispel it.

[Facemage]

I agree with Hobbes here. My character have increase intuition and increase agility (to shoot, sneak and move more better). Increase body is also an option.  You can also create increase intuition potions (touch trigger) and give them to your team mates.

If you do not want to wait unless you have powerful power focus, an alchemy focus F6 is also possible and quite cheap (only 12 (or 18?) karma if I remember correct). With it your alchemy spells are approximately as good as your ordinary spells after char gen. You need to have also increase willpower and maybe increase other drain stat (if it is not charisma) to be able to create preparations with 5 or 6 drain.

I think that quickening does not replace alchemy because you cannot quicken spells targeted to your friends. Moreover, I think that 1-2 quickened spells is the maximum. Otherwise you might loose a lot of karma whenever you have to squeeze through wards (or in high bc environments). I think that quickened F12 spells do not work, because you cannot practically mask them with extended masking (need very high magic), and you can loose lower force spells whenever you go through wards.

If you use alchemy, I recommend to create with excel or other programming language the small program, which throws the dices for you.

If you select
A: Magic
B: Skills
C: Attributes
and want to create a pure mage/mysad without any side archetype,  you should have enough skill points to select alchemy:

Stealth skill group 5
Spellcasting: 6 (+2 combat/manipulation)
Counterspelling 6
Alchemy 6 (+2 touch)
Binding 6
Summoning 6 (+2 spirit of man)
Automatics 6 (+2 machinepistols/smg/assault rifles)
Perception 5.

[firebug]

Touch Trigger is very very poorly described and there's a lot of reasons why putting a preparation into a bottle or bag wouldn't work if you go by how a touch spell works...  Also I swear I recall hearing that liquid mediums aren't applicable for preparations but it doesn't say so in the book.  But, the reasoning is, a preparation is a magical thing that has an effective range of touch.  Touch spells and any powers that have a range of touch (and any "touch attacks" like shock gloves, but that's different) do not need to physically touch a person's skin--  If they did, they'd be nearly useless in combat.  Instead, it's about auras intersecting.  Logically a touch trigger prep would be the same, meaning that simply a bag or bottle wouldn't be enough to stop someone from activating it when they held it.  It's about internal consistency.

An alchemy focus is only available at F4 during creation unless you take Restricted Gear to get an F8 focus.  But the extra dice doesn't matter--  Look at my post; the dice pool of the user doesn't make a difference.  If you have 30 dice at Alchemy and make a F6 Prep, it will most likely be Potency 4 (due to limits and the prep rolling 6 dice) and at most 6 and roll 10 to 12 dice when activated--  Not better than a sorcerer.  If you increase it to say, F8 preparations, you begin to start really getting hurt by drain and will likely go into a run with only four or five preparations (unless you don't mind starting with half your Stun track full).  Also, as the Force increases, the prep rolls more dice to "resist" and thus less of your net hits count...  So on and so forth.  You can literally have an infinite dice pool for Alchemy but unless you're burning Edge every roll, it doesn't matter because the limits and opposing rolls are what hurt.

Also, yes, you can quicken spells on your allies.  You can quicken literally any spell with a duration of Sustained.  You can buff all your allies, you can have some pet hellhounds that are buffed out the ass...  You can easily quicken a lot of spells considering there's no limit and it can cost you only 1 Karma per spell.

If you really really try you can find some use of some alchemy, but it's not worth the investment when spells and sorcery is so much better.  Having to buy the skill is one thing, but then you need to buy a focus for it to be even almost not terrible along with buying and learning spells as preparations.  It's not like someone spending 12 Karma on Pistols 3 and picking a gun off a dead ganger.

[Facemage]

Those touch trigger rules are only houserules. And if your table restricts the trigger, use command trigger.

You can buy easily F6 alchemy focus later ( it is not mandatory, only an option). F4 is useless.

If your drain resistance pool is 19 (or even more) which is very easy to get by sustaining increase willpower and increase charisma/logic/intuition with focused concentration and spirit of man/sustaining focus. You can on average quite safely make F6-F7 increase intuition preparations. The drain is only  4-6 depending the trigger. If your dicepool is 8+6+6 = 20 you get on average 6-7 successes, which means that your potency of the preparation is 4-5 (without reagents and even more with them). The dice pool total is 10-12 which is good enough, because the theoretical best maximum is only +4 to any attribute.

The karma is so scarce and valuable resource that I do not want use any point to help my friends by quickening spells for them (but I have alchemy, which is enough). Moreover i think that the aura of the spell is with the caster, so when he go through the wards, the spells in friends may collapse (and eventually will, this is mathematical certainty). Because technically it means that you have more than 1-2 quickened spells.

[Whiskeyjack]

Personally I've never found the Increase Attribute spells to be anything other than "nice." As in, nice to have but not essential by any stretch.

[Facemage]

Yeah. but the alchemy strategy needs both increase drain stats spells. And I think that big spirits also. If you try to summon F6 spirit, it is possible that the drain is 6-8 (very bad luck). Try to resist it with your 11 or 13 dices.

And if your magic is 7 or 8 and you try to summon F7-F8 spirit, they are essential spells.

[Whiskeyjack]

Because I know how easy it is for a high CHA Mage to ruin the challenge on runs by alpha striking 8 Force 6+ spirits (and create an Initative order nightmare in the process), I just flatly just don't do that and am not sure why someone would. One can do plenty of work with "just" one or two F5-6 spirits.