Alchemy? Worth it?

[jWTFz]

I see that there is a lot of disagreement around about the worth of the Alchemy skill.

Personally, I found it pretty useless until I got to level 3 chaos magic and I saw spells costing 20 crystals to update.

Ofcourse, still just finishing the pirate lands so perhaps crystals are more plentiful later on? or is Alchemy necessary for the survival of the mage? (I don't want to update every spell, just the few good ones like Ice Snake, Bless and Weakness, but it still seems prohibitly expensive to do so)

[Shd]

In my opinion its worth it (50% discount at lvl 3) if you planning to use some more powerful ones later (will not name them because it is a kind of spoiler), but even in pirate lands there is possibility to get spells like Target, Sacrifice etc... (spell names can be innaccurate because i am playing russian versin :grin:)

[Hazimel]

I have the same concern.
I agree that Alchemy is surely useful if you want to upgrade many spells, but I think I don’t need all spells, I only need probably the 4 most usefull chaotic spells, and 1 or 2 spells from Order and Distortion.

[kennec]

later on mayby u need to change your playstyle and use different lvl 3 spells.

as for me as mage lv 21 i with heavy invesment in fire spell to lvl 3 i have found an area wich is extremy difficult for me. most demon mobs have fire resistance so i cant nuke em at all.

i think alchemy can be worthwhile but its to early tosay for me in my game. i have not taken it couse i went for higher magic asap.

the heawy spells cost 10 -30 crystals to learn and saving 50% of them can be good.i have about 130 atm with 3 spells to lvl 3 and few learnt. planning to learn resurection to lvl 3 and mayby haste, dragon arrows for the elven archers wich are superb at my game lvl.

remeber in elven lands u will encounter that shaman that had that giant turtle as prisoner. if u pick right dialog with em u get like 15 crystals for free.

[Daedalus]

i have lvl 3 alchemy; it is expensive but since i'm a mage and mages live by their spells i thought that it is a worthy investment, haven't really regretted it so far.

I've also heard people say that some spells are really expensive crystal when you get closer to the mid and endgame so i don't think it's worthless to get a 50% reduction in scribing costs

[Shd]

Even with lvl 3 alchemy from beginning there is no possibility to upgrade all spells :). Answer to this question (to get or not to get alchemy) depends on your playing style.

When i did play on easy difficulty then my thoughts was "i don’t need alchemy". When i played on impossible difficulty, then at lvl 18 i understood that alchemy is "must have" (and sooner the better), because there you cannot use just 3-4 offensive spells to win with minimum or even zero casualties. You need to neutralize enemy ranged units (hypnotize, shackles, fear etc.), slow strong melee packs (slow, trap), make attack enemy your strongest unit (target) etc, etc, etc. In that case you need to change tactics almost on every enemy pack to win them, so you need variety of spells :)

[fell]

Later in the game most utility spells are pointless. Why slow a pack when you can outright destroy it? Best way to neutralize a stack? Kill it. All you need is Fireball/arrow/Daemon gate to 3. Sacrifice 3. And then a non fire based Area attack and single attack for things with fire res.

Everything else is pointless.

[megakill]

Played as Warrior, but used a few combat spells at lev 3 and phoenix at lev 3 as well.
You don't need all spells (really depends on your style), but every continent brings new surprises, like resistances to specifc spells, etc...

[Shd]

Later in the game most utility spells are pointless. Why slow a pack when you can outright destroy it? Best way to neutralize a stack? Kill it. All you need is Fireball/arrow/Daemon gate to 3. Sacrifice 3. And then a non fire based Area attack and single attack for things with fire res.

Everything else is pointless.

Try to kill stack of 280 demonesses in one or 2 spellcasts (to save archers to be teleported in the middle of enemy), or, for example, 500-600 imps (2 shots of area fire damage), or 5k-6k forest fairies (high speed unit). Try to kill large stacks of alchemists,cavalry etc, etc etc...

It all depends on your playing style, difficulty and acceptable casualties for you. In easy and normal difficulty i agree with you (offensive spells are enough). But not in hard or impossible (if you dont want replenish army every 3-5 fights in castles or by using sacrifice) :)

[Gatts]

Tricky is that when you power is magick - you have to level the spells as soon as possible, but for instance Fireball or Firearrow will be only backup spells (or not used at all) later on, but see how many crystals they consumed... not to mention how many crystals will consume the more expensive spells (geysir )

And buying crystals from 100K, 200K, 300K... is like... well didn't I had 25 M few seconds ago?

What did I miss as Paladin at most? Crystals - How to save them? - Alchemy

So if you plan to make carreer as mage - Alchemy is a must (or you need to calibrate what spell you add to your spellbook also what spell you want to upgrade) so it can easily happen : "Hell, Would I just have this spell on max level!"

[Tibster]

The importance of alchemy grows exponentially with the difficulty level!
The only time u dont really need it is easy!

[Gatts]

The importance of alchemy grows exponentially with the difficulty level!
The only time u dont really need it is easy!

Well I missed it even on easy - but the reason was that I played it first time, the UPGRAGE button didn't show the future upgrades and I was eager to know all be properties of all spells (still wasn't successful ;) )

When I realized that ressurection for Paladin works only till level 4 creatures, I was sure that Mage can ressurect even LVL 5 creatures... how mistaken I was :(

Great about this game is that even as I played for fourth time I still found some spell I didn't get previously (now when I checked with the manual, I know em all, finaly :-) )
When speaking of dissapointements - Slow has not mass effect... gosh...

[Archlord_James]

Early on u dont need it but as soon as u decide to get level 2 magic and start upgrading some spells u better max this spell out if u want to be FLEXIBLE in the late game. It is nice to have A LOT of level 3 maxed out spells so u can try all kinds of different thing and change your strategy when you need to. Alchemy allows you to get more spells upgraded to level 3 A MUST imo. How boring would this game get if u only cast 3 or 4 spells all the time. I like to mix it up sometimes direct damage, sometimes debuffing, sometimes buffing my army. The game also throws some curves at you with magic immune dragons, creatures immune to fire, or physical, or or magic damage, so u want to have options to deal with anything. Alchemy one of the best skills imo.

[milo]

Suggest holding off investing in anything unless you are certain you will want it. Twice I have wasted runes in tolerance so I could use demonesses with elven she fighters and twice I have ended up not doing this. If you plan on going the maximum spell damage root and boosting intelligence over everything else, many of the unit buffs will be redundant.

[Gatts]

Again - as all - it is about planning.

When you play impossible you start only with few crystals (20 or so) and I would not wonder if you would need more for the same spell upgrades (but for 80% I am sure that the price is the always same)

Planning is:
You have few runes of magic and mind - you could add them into alchemy, or chaos magic/ which one want choose?

At the beginning you have very few spells and even fewer are worth upgrading... so you won't save that much with alchemy, but will be more effective with upgraded chaos magick. BUT... But you may have level 3 chaos magic, spent all your crystals on fireball, you will find ice snake... hell! Darn! - where to get crystals now? You get hardly enough crystals to get ice sanke on second level, and you find fire rain... DARN! DARN! :P In such csae you would love to use more runes in achemy sooner...

Is Alchemy usefull? TOTALLY !
Is it usefull when you brainlessly use all your runes in this skill at the most earlier game stage? I would say NOT.

I just say : thank you for this great skill... and add : I will use it for my benefit, wisely.

[Dorkus]

There are only a handful of spells that are worth upgrading, imo -- mainly direct damage spells. The other useful spells in the game -- phantom, slow, blind, etc. -- are just as useful or even more useful at low levels as they are upgraded. E.g. before I realized that you could always cast down a level, I cursed myself many many times for upgrading phantom and blind, because the higher level versions of those spells cost significantly more mana.

[Metathron]

In my last game as mage, I maxed alchemy early on and upgraded a whole lot of spells (but certainly not all) to 3rd level. However, I ended up frequently using only about a dozen: battle cry, bless, resurrection, dragon slayer, demon slayer from Order; slow, precision, geyser, magic shackles from Distortion; fireball and flaming arrow (later made obsolete by fire rain), doom, and poison skull from Chaos.

Of course, that's not to say that the other spells are useless (though some certainly seem so...last hero - what the frell?), just that they require a different tactic.

[Smash]

Try use last hero with 1 troop and Armageddon :). Working?

[Metathron]

Ah, I see!

Buuut...when do you actually find yourself in such a situation? Having to leave the rest of your army far away and divide it up among castles due to only 3 slot reserve in castles. Meh, seems like a bother.

[Smash]

First you have six in Darion.
Second why Armaggedon Mage would bother with rest of army in the first place? :)

[Metathron]

Hehe!

Unfortunately, in my last mage game, armageddon was the only spell I did not get. But I heard people saying it's not worth the mana needed to cast it in proportion to the damage it does. How does it scale in comparison to, say, fire rain (my favourite direct damage spell)?

[milo]

My end game mage does around a maximum of around 11000 damage with armageddon, fire rain max around 10000. Many armies have fire resistance, black dragons are magic immune except for armageddon so it can be incredibly useful, especially when enemy is split into many stacks such as battles in castles.

[Gatts]

Hehe!

Unfortunately, in my last mage game, armageddon was the only spell I did not get. But I heard people saying it's not worth the mana needed to cast it in proportion to the damage it does. How does it scale in comparison to, say, fire rain (my favourite direct damage spell)?

Well - it works on black dragons... so this may bring some new strategy points towards armageddon - like Milo stated

[Xargon]

Concerning alchemy: Having played the game on normal as a mage, I would say alchemy is very useful if you are playing for the first time, as there are a lot more spells which can be really useful than you might think judging from the first playing experiences (where direct damage spells are usually your best choice). I ended up using spells like teleport, helplessness (-60% defence can be devastating on lvl5 creatures of enemy heroes), magic spring, stone skin, phantom and others I don't remember right now. If you want to have a wide variety of spells and be able to try out different tactics for yourself, go for alchemy. It's not like you won't have enough magic runes to max out your other desired magic skills anyway. If you are powergaming, or don't plan to learn and try out many spells, alchemy will be useless.
[Note: At first, I did not consider alchemy to be that useful because I had a heap of crystals and just a few spells which seemed worthwile - however, in midgame I found more and more potentially useful spells and crystals came in at a lower rate. Your supply vanishes rapidly when upgrading spells like hypnosis, resurrection, demon portal or similar.]

@milo: 10k damage sure sounds nice - I assume you had a pretty high intelligence (plus that fire amulet and the dragon cloak, probably)?

[Gatts]

I always try to first get nice level of Higher magic (at lest one level) and based on what spells I get (is quite randomized) at least one school of magic to 3rd level (sometimes it does more depend on what other RUNES I have...:) )

All this time (see above) I just write to spellbook/ upgrade the MOST needed spells - I try to keep theirs number to minimum (like only 8 spells in spellbook, 3 or 4 maxed - mostly maxed means second level only :) )

Than when I have at least one level of Higher magic (as the second level costs 5 magic runes less I can afford it too) I start investing to Alchemy - but I max it right away - :

First now when Alchemy is maxed - I start to really dig in and analyze my actual and possible future battle strategies (luckily I do not need to mess with adventure spells - there are none like that in KB :) ) I always bear in mind that I MAY come accross cooler spells - I alway pray for armageddon in dwarven mines... nearly never I get it :) ) so I always keep at least 35 magic crystals around...

Always explore all dungeons - you never now how many crystals you can find there - even if you don't fight with too strong enemies.

Basic math - you can upgrade double so many spells - even max them - normally on Impossible without Alchemy - gosh - you would have to do HARD THINKING to get across good spell book