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I Hate Apothecary
Apothecary has always been painful and tedious, but after returning to the game and experiencing transcendent Herbalism with gloves for the first time, I hate Apothecary. I realize this has been brought up before, but I perhaps it is time to revisit the worst skill in the game.
1. For those without experience with Apothecary and/or Herbalism, Herbalists can fill their daily quota in about half an hour, perhaps less if they are are blanket harvesting and not being picky. No triggers are required, just one command to harvest everything in the environment. Apothecaries can fill their daily quota in, well, it depends because the amount of of parts you get from an animal ranges from 10 to 1. Then factor in the time to travel to, find and kill these animals, plus the time it takes for them to respawn, and it could take several hours.
2. Announce post #3092 added herds of a few animals, and this made Apothecary slightly less tedious. I still hate it. Notably missing were stags, frogs and snakes. On a side note, this change actually nerfed the scalpel; now its only use is to increase the daily harvest amount whereas gloves still get decreased balance to harvest.
3. Comparing economic potential, Apothecary and Herbalism are worlds apart. First, Apothecary requires casks to sell whereas Herbalism does not. To sell everything but purgative, an Apothecary needs to spend 560 credits for 14 casks. (To put that in perspective, that is 2.8 million gold at 5,000 gold per credit or roughly $190 USD.) Next, an Apothecary makes a refill of an elixir that sells at, say, 10 gold, whereas an Herbalist makes 10 pills at a time, which also sell for 10 gold each. In other words, an Herbalist sells one preparation for 10 times the amount of an Apothecary, or to put it another way, an Apothecary has to do ten times the amount of work as an Herbalist for the same amount of gold. Then using these rough numbers, Apothecaries need to sell 20,000 (40 credits at 5,000 gold each) refills (at 10 gold each) before they break even from their cask purchase, while Herbalists are making gold from their very first pill. Lastly, I do not even figure the use of gold/silver or ice/ashes into these calculations because at current commodity prices, it is not worth it.
In conclusion, given the ease and speed of harvesting plants, the ability of pills to be sold directly from shop caches without artifacts, and the fact that one preparation of Herbalism creates 10 times the amount as Apothecary, I hate Apothecary.
So, here are some ideas how to make me hate Apothecary less.
1. The fact that some animals only give 1 or 2 parts is, in my opinion, the most egregious part of Apothecary. It hardly matters that there are herds now or an entire snake pit -- you still have to find and kill each one of those animals. Snake oil is the worst of all. Each snake gives ONE vial of oil, and not only is this used in health, the most common elixir, but it is used in Herbalism as well. Want to use your daily quota for snake oil? Have fun killing 2,100 snakes. In Reanimation, we had the idea of slices. Males did not just give two testicles and females just two ovaries, but several slices of each. In fact, this already exists in Apothecary; you do not get a single boar heart but several slices. This needs to be extended throughout Apothecary. Every single animal should give you 8-10 parts, no exceptions.
2. Make herds of every animal.
3. Now that the scalpel balance decrease is pointless, have it do something else. For example, perhaps the normal roll for animal parts is 5-10, the scalpel can make it 8-10.
4. Give shops a fluid cache and fully refund casks. (While you are at it, do the same for scroll racks. It is kind of insane that some mercantile skills can sell their goods freely while others require sizeable credit investments.)
5. Why does one preparation of Apothecary make one refill and one preparation of Herbalism makes 10 pills? I understand it is because one refill of elixir is 50 sips, but when one refill and one pill sell for the same price, this distinction is pointless. Let one Apothecary preparation create 10 refills, or meet in the middle and let it make 5 refills and let Herbalism create 5 pills at a time.
6. Integrate Apothecary more into Herbalism. If Apothecary is going to be time-consuming, tedious, unprofitable and worthy of hatred, make Herbalists depend on Apothecaries more. Put an Apothecary ingredient in EVERY pill, or at the very least, in the most common such as anabiotic, antipsychotic, opiate, et cetera. At the same time, get rid of all Herbalism ingredients in Apothecary. Herbalists have it easy enough already.
7. Change the Silver and Gold skills to be in line with the current economy. As it stands, these skills are useless and only further increases the time consumption of being an Apothecary.
Phew, I feel better getting that off my chest. Now I am going to make an I HATE APOTHECARY pin and mail it to every single person in the game because I hate Apothecary.
1. For those without experience with Apothecary and/or Herbalism, Herbalists can fill their daily quota in about half an hour, perhaps less if they are are blanket harvesting and not being picky. No triggers are required, just one command to harvest everything in the environment. Apothecaries can fill their daily quota in, well, it depends because the amount of of parts you get from an animal ranges from 10 to 1. Then factor in the time to travel to, find and kill these animals, plus the time it takes for them to respawn, and it could take several hours.
2. Announce post #3092 added herds of a few animals, and this made Apothecary slightly less tedious. I still hate it. Notably missing were stags, frogs and snakes. On a side note, this change actually nerfed the scalpel; now its only use is to increase the daily harvest amount whereas gloves still get decreased balance to harvest.
3. Comparing economic potential, Apothecary and Herbalism are worlds apart. First, Apothecary requires casks to sell whereas Herbalism does not. To sell everything but purgative, an Apothecary needs to spend 560 credits for 14 casks. (To put that in perspective, that is 2.8 million gold at 5,000 gold per credit or roughly $190 USD.) Next, an Apothecary makes a refill of an elixir that sells at, say, 10 gold, whereas an Herbalist makes 10 pills at a time, which also sell for 10 gold each. In other words, an Herbalist sells one preparation for 10 times the amount of an Apothecary, or to put it another way, an Apothecary has to do ten times the amount of work as an Herbalist for the same amount of gold. Then using these rough numbers, Apothecaries need to sell 20,000 (40 credits at 5,000 gold each) refills (at 10 gold each) before they break even from their cask purchase, while Herbalists are making gold from their very first pill. Lastly, I do not even figure the use of gold/silver or ice/ashes into these calculations because at current commodity prices, it is not worth it.
In conclusion, given the ease and speed of harvesting plants, the ability of pills to be sold directly from shop caches without artifacts, and the fact that one preparation of Herbalism creates 10 times the amount as Apothecary, I hate Apothecary.
So, here are some ideas how to make me hate Apothecary less.
1. The fact that some animals only give 1 or 2 parts is, in my opinion, the most egregious part of Apothecary. It hardly matters that there are herds now or an entire snake pit -- you still have to find and kill each one of those animals. Snake oil is the worst of all. Each snake gives ONE vial of oil, and not only is this used in health, the most common elixir, but it is used in Herbalism as well. Want to use your daily quota for snake oil? Have fun killing 2,100 snakes. In Reanimation, we had the idea of slices. Males did not just give two testicles and females just two ovaries, but several slices of each. In fact, this already exists in Apothecary; you do not get a single boar heart but several slices. This needs to be extended throughout Apothecary. Every single animal should give you 8-10 parts, no exceptions.
2. Make herds of every animal.
3. Now that the scalpel balance decrease is pointless, have it do something else. For example, perhaps the normal roll for animal parts is 5-10, the scalpel can make it 8-10.
4. Give shops a fluid cache and fully refund casks. (While you are at it, do the same for scroll racks. It is kind of insane that some mercantile skills can sell their goods freely while others require sizeable credit investments.)
5. Why does one preparation of Apothecary make one refill and one preparation of Herbalism makes 10 pills? I understand it is because one refill of elixir is 50 sips, but when one refill and one pill sell for the same price, this distinction is pointless. Let one Apothecary preparation create 10 refills, or meet in the middle and let it make 5 refills and let Herbalism create 5 pills at a time.
6. Integrate Apothecary more into Herbalism. If Apothecary is going to be time-consuming, tedious, unprofitable and worthy of hatred, make Herbalists depend on Apothecaries more. Put an Apothecary ingredient in EVERY pill, or at the very least, in the most common such as anabiotic, antipsychotic, opiate, et cetera. At the same time, get rid of all Herbalism ingredients in Apothecary. Herbalists have it easy enough already.
7. Change the Silver and Gold skills to be in line with the current economy. As it stands, these skills are useless and only further increases the time consumption of being an Apothecary.
Phew, I feel better getting that off my chest. Now I am going to make an I HATE APOTHECARY pin and mail it to every single person in the game because I hate Apothecary.
2
Comments
You also don't need to spend real life money on anything since you make 20 credits a day through milestones, plus whatever other gold you raise and can buy credits off of market or through (guild/city/friends/strangers).
If you're not making enough gold, up the prices on refills. Or sell something else that has a higher profit margin when they've come into your shop for your cheap refills.
Maybe there are some problems with apothecary but boy is this all over the place.
Here, I will attempt to simplify for you and leave it at that. To make 5,0000 anabiotic to fill your shop cache and sell at 5-10 gold each, you need 500 birthwort, 500 yarrow and 500 madder. Harvesting this can be done in a single day (with gloves) and would take about 20 minutes since you only have to go to two environments. Add another five minutes to prepare it all, and you have 5,000 anabiotic in less than 30 minutes. To make 5,000 refills of health to sell at 5-10 gold each, you need 10,000 boarheart, 5,000 snakeoil, 5,000 claw and 5,000 horn. This will take you 12 days (with scalpel) and require you to kill 7,000 animals (assuming you get ten parts from every boar, lion and stag, which is impossible), requiring so many hours I cannot even make an estimate. Then to top it off, you have to buy a cask to sell your elixir. (Yes, you have to buy a cask unless you want to squander those countless hours you spent killing snakes.) And again, I am not even considering the use of gold and silver because it is too expensive to be profitable. So yeah, Apothecary has some problems. I hope this summary was easier for you to understand.
Either make it a little easier for Apothecary or make it harder for Herbalism. I personally am for easier.
Gold in Spinesreach is 400 gold per commodity. Gold turns 1 refill into 20 refills. When I was first attempting to fill a cask (after dropping 40 credits more), I made 1140 refills out of materials + 20-25 gold comms (I don't remember exactly I had in my inventory due to trying to make sure all I needed was not in my cache).
At the price of gold, that is 8k-10k for the 1140 refills. Some went into my cache, so let's say we're working with 1100 refills for sale. The average price of health on shadow tether is 8 gold. If it only took the latter, that means all of my hard work was worth a profit of 800 gold, or worse, cost me 1200 gold, meaning I am operating at a deficit.
Now, gold/silver/ash/ice is not used because it is accepted that they increase the cost to a point of herbalism/apothecary to a point to be unsustainable. Here is the thing, though: In total, there are around 10-15 lions, 10ish toads (unless you maybe do Tcanna, which not all can), 100 rats in hordes (one tail per rat), 35-40 mugyik (including herds and 2 testicles per herd), very limited eagles, and then the snakes where you can find them (which do give 1 oil or 2 skin per snake). IF no one else is gathering and/or bashing these areas for gold/xp - Snake Pit is a common bashing area, Ollin is common bashing, Morass is uncommon but still done - you can gather 20ish legs per morass dive, 40-70 oil per snake pit, and maybe 80 testicles. Then... you wait. Because unlike plants, which do have their own grow timer and global amount, there are not 20,30,60 rooms each able to guarantee at least 1 mob per room to give us to collect.
At the end of the day, herbalism, apothecary, and toxicology can all be considered pure profit due to no cost in the gathering process, but apothecary and toxicology have inherently added costs, be it casks/rundlets/barrels (while not costing credits, there is the crafting cost, the license cost if you can't find a woodcrafter, the danger of losing x amount of fills because no one is buying and the rundlet/barrel decay, having to replace the rundlet/barrel every time it is emptied), or simply the battle over mobs versus the ease of gathering plants.
TL;DR: Bring mercantiles to a baseline to their comparable skills. Forging and Enchanting should be somewhat comparable, same with herbalism, apothecary, and toxicology.
(Web): Abhorash says, "Nerds."
(Web): Abhorash has left your web.
Alela's Affirmations
(Disclaimer: I actually like Apothecary)
1. For those without experience with Apothecary and/or Herbalism, Herbalists can fill their daily quota in about half an hour, perhaps less if they are are blanket harvesting and not being picky. No triggers are required, just one command to harvest everything in the environment. Apothecaries can fill their daily quota in, well, it depends because the amount of of parts you get from an animal ranges from 10 to 1. Then factor in the time to travel to, find and kill these animals, plus the time it takes for them to respawn, and it could take several hours.
3. Comparing economic potential, Apothecary and Herbalism are worlds apart. First, Apothecary requires casks to sell whereas Herbalism does not. To sell everything but purgative, an Apothecary needs to spend 560 credits for 14 casks. (To put that in perspective, that is 2.8 million gold at 5,000 gold per credit or roughly $190 USD.) Next, an Apothecary makes a refill of an elixir that sells at, say, 10 gold, whereas an Herbalist makes 10 pills at a time, which also sell for 10 gold each. In other words, an Herbalist sells one preparation for 10 times the amount of an Apothecary, or to put it another way, an Apothecary has to do ten times the amount of work as an Herbalist for the same amount of gold. Then using these rough numbers, Apothecaries need to sell 20,000 (40 credits at 5,000 gold each) refills (at 10 gold each) before they break even from their cask purchase, while Herbalists are making gold from their very first pill. Lastly, I do not even figure the use of gold/silver or ice/ashes into these calculations because at current commodity prices, it is not worth it.
1. The fact that some animals only give 1 or 2 parts is, in my opinion, the most egregious part of Apothecary. It hardly matters that there are herds now or an entire snake pit -- you still have to find and kill each one of those animals. Snake oil is the worst of all. Each snake gives ONE vial of oil, and not only is this used in health, the most common elixir, but it is used in Herbalism as well. Want to use your daily quota for snake oil? Have fun killing 2,100 snakes. In Reanimation, we had the idea of slices. Males did not just give two testicles and females just two ovaries, but several slices of each. In fact, this already exists in Apothecary; you do not get a single boar heart but several slices. This needs to be extended throughout Apothecary. Every single animal should give you 8-10 parts, no exceptions.
2. Make herds of every animal.
| Wings - Tasur'ke, Attica (lake)
| Claws - Vashnar, Mamashi (lion)
| Sacs - Snakepit
| Bone - W/E Itzatl (mesias)
| Tail - Fengard (rats)
| Feather - Pash, Tcanna (eagles)
| Fat - Morass (beaver)
| Testicle - W/N Tundra (mugyik)
| Scales - Djeir, Riparium, Dome (fish)
| Leg - Morass, Attica (lake)
| Powder - Entities (v25671)
| Heart - Ollin, Three Widows (boar)
| Skin - Snakepit
| Intestine - Scidve (dugger)
| Tooth - Torston, Dun (crocodile)
+---------------------------------
Lions can be found in the Mamashi grasslands as well, and in the Dun valley.
Mesias can be found in the Liruma scrublands.
Rats can be found in Rotfang.
Beavers, both singular and families, can be found in the Vashnar resort.
Frogs can be found in the Vashnar resort as well.
Boars can be found in the Aureliana forest.
And as a side note, there are herds (or basks) of crocodiles in Dun.
Snakes and fishes really can be found everywhere. I haven't hunted eagles myself, so no idea if they are elsewhere. Entities, I think, are only located in the fissure, duggers in Scidve and mugyiks are lokated in the Northern and Western tundra.
The market is flooded with elixir/salve/pill producers. So unless every player agrees to never go below X gold price for Y elixir/salve, you'll always have overarching reduced prices. Quite frankly, if I had a shop I would undercut everyone and sell elixirs/salves for 3 gold apiece because it would sell. This would in turn cause everyone else to drop below 3 gold or meet me at 3 gold for their stuff to sell. So that profit argument is invalid.
As far as activity, I see nothing wrong with making something require a bit more attention and spend a little bit more time doing something. In this era where things are just 'gimme gimme gimme' and 'quick quick quick', having something take a moment is rather refreshing. Sure, you can't build an AFK kill script to bash the mobs and harvest them like you can with Herbalism but that's ok because the mob respawns for both herds and individuals are actually pretty quick.
And if the argument hasn't been made yet.. You don't get experience from harvesting. You do from hunting though.
"nazetu115759" a Nazetu eusuchian.
"horde1168" a horde of twenty rats.
H:5727 M:5627 E:116% W:113% B:100% Ess:180% [sdb eb lr][None][Huanazedha] 01:45:39.099
Always has been hordes of rats in Huanazedha.
Without having the gardener gloves artifact, I can harvest 1100 plants in a day. To fill a shop cache with say.. anabiotic, while not using ashes/ice, it would take 500 of madder, yarrow, and birthwort. That's two days of harvesting to make 5000 of one type of pill that are usually gone within a day.