Beghn responds to some of the potion/poison problems

[Morie]

http://eqiiforums.station.sony.com/eq2/board/message?board.id=a13&message.id=265

[Arilin]

awsome... descriptions AND having pristine poisons being more than 1 use?!

i dont think he was correct with the mastery level being on the potions and poisons.... as far as i can tell, there's only the minimum skill required to use the item, and no mastery

still a great day for alchemists

[Kentamanos]

I wonder if the number of charges will compensate for the difference in price between crafted poisons/potions and merchant bought ones.

[Niami DenMother]

Reprinting the text of Beghn's response, for those who read our forums, but don't yet have the game (and thus can't log onto the SOE forums). Beghn's responses are in blue.

Issues:

1: Potions and poisons have no description of what they do. Despite the reasoning behind implementing them this way this makes them extremely difficult to sell. Players do not want to buy items if they have no clue what the effect will be and the broker gives us no way to not the effects for shoppers. Heck, without knowing what they do we don't even know which ones to make - there are only dozens and dozens to choose from.

I just finished up with the descriptions for all of the potions and poisons so they should provide more information on what they do soon.

2: Broker does not list potions and/or poisons as their own category. All of our items other than skill ups are lumped into miscellaneous. Even if potions and poisons had descriptions players would find it very difficult browsing what's for sale to see what they wanted since you won't know the name of the potion you want until you've used it.

Not really my field of expertise but I'll ask if this is something that we can add to the broker system.

3: Item color coding is viewer centric. When we look at a potion or poison it may be gray or blue or red or whatever to us... but how do we know what level range of buyer it's good for (and therefore how to price it)? Sure, if it's green, blue, white, yellow, or orange to me I can make a rough guess... but what if it's red or gray? I'm not a scout so I have no idea what level range I should be pricing the various poisons for... they're all red to me. I can't go pricing a poison suitable for a level 15 at 1gold no matter how hard it is to make...

There is a displayed mastery level for the items that you make. These are the skill level at which someone would get the full effect of the potion and poison.

4: Finished Item "quality" seems to not be working. Some say the quality is supposed to reflect how well the poison or potion works. Testing has shown they work the same despite quality. Others say higher quality is supposed to simply produce more units. I've crafted many potions and skills to tier 4 and still only had one item result.

Were changing from potions and poisons being stackable to having specific number of charges. The higher state that you achieve when making a potion or poison will provide more charges.

[Lange]

Khalysta of the Scout's Sanctuary sums up the only concern regarding these charges well:

Unless you are planning to do something like in eqlive where a shaman could take multiple 1 dose and combine them into a 5,10 20 dose potion/poison please leave them as stackable. Having 20 uses would be ok on one item but in beta when they had 3-4 charges this was pretty annoying having all that bag space taken up. Myself and most of the scouts like to carry things in stacks and quantity so 20 charge = good but 2-4 charges is annoying and just clutters up your bags so please keep that in mind

For example:
Posions X : pristine quality makes a 4 charge vial. Regular quality makes a 3 charge. The alchemist could then build a 20 charge Posion X by combining the 5 pristines together. The end result is it saves bag space and it is something people like because they can buy one and then they are ok for a few days. They can also buy 2-3 different 20 charge poisons and use those without having to worry about carrying many smaller charge vials.

Another plea is that if you go to a charge system you need to tell people how many are left which is something that wasnt done in beta and I don't believe shows right now either