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)