Quote from Barumotoshin;1143580:
Alchemist are able to do HM and elite very effectively...maxed Alchs of course...
[Image: http://puu.sh/4hNHZ/4055054261.png]
I'm going to do my best to be neutral here, and as serious as possible.
I'd like to see this kind of description of very effectively. I do realize back in the day, due to lower skill damage and golem OPness, that alchemy was "da shizzle". However, with all kinds of better enchants, talent boosts and reforges available nowdays, that's simply not the case.
Most skillsets as of right now eat hardmode for breakfast and polish off elite for lunch. Puppets, range, melee, and magic all have one-shot room clearers. Not once have I seen an alchemist in person that's even able to effectively take down hardmode mobs, and I would speculate that a totally maxed and combo carded/reforged alchemist as of right now would probably be just at the level of taking down elite mobs fast, and that's giving some credit and speculation because i'm not doing the calcs.
Alchemy just doesn't have that room wiping ability. Just like how you won't see people maining fighter very often, you don't see many people maining alchemy very often. In a way, you could compare alchemy to fighter in the fact that it's a very good secondary skillset: The weakness being that it doesn't have the AoE and "laying down the pain" capabilities of the main skillsets, but compensates for that by massive single target dps (for fighter) /excellent support and crowd control abilities. (for alchemy)
Now, unless you can snap cast a crit heat buster with increased aoe on the entire room without needing to use water cannon or flame burst or whatever to charge it up, you're simply not going to be doing hardmode or elites effectivly compared to other skillsets. Is it
possible? Yes, of course it is. Could you do it
decently, like Tropa described, if you were pimped out the butt? Indeed. Can you room wipe with the best of them? No. Not even close.
The best offensive use of Combat alchemy as of right now would be SS for flame burst, or stunlocking mobs.
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After the update, alchemy will receive a well-needed buff because as of right now, there's no way of sugar coating it - they blow pretty badly at combat compared to other skillsets (even though fighter sucks at anything more then 1 vs 1 at least you can OHKO mobs with each individual chain.) So it's improved in that respect and in a way, reflects the talent update giving stats to a degree (By making more stats available, or alchemy based on stats in this case, and making content easier). Odd comparison, or you don't understand it? That's okay, it's just what I think.
Alchemy will become much more effective at clearing hardmode and elite mobs. (I believe that these are the standards that most people work by, whereas I personally compare skillsets and my damage to MA and lord mobs) Which means that for most content, alchemy will be pulled in line with other skillsets to wiping missions, which is great. It will still lag behind a little bit if not utilized properly due to the lack of massive AoE (So for example, shock spam combined with flame burst and water cannon), but you can fix that by using your head a little, similarly to guns.
When it comes to harder content, alchemy still suffers from the same problem as fighter - it falls back to being a secondary skillset. This is not a bad thing - Alchemy always has been one of the most versatile skillsets for support, it fulfils that roll excellently and i'm glad it does, and i'm always thankful for one good support alchemist in a harder run party.
However, when compared to Act 7, Crash shot, Lance charge, or even an endgame shooting rush, it falls short in the damage and party play areas.
To better explain what I mean, here's my take on the skills:
Barrier Spikes: Excellent utility but heavily situational. Shines in situations where the amount of time spent setting up barriers actually pays off - Chaining thunder in Peaca, in that FUCKING GOP ELITE BOSS ROOM. It's not worth it generally to set up barriers in normal rooms/missions/circumstances - using it to try and facilitate use of any skillset with heavy load times is in general a waste to the party and slows members down while waiting for you. The weaknesses of other skills should be mitigated in other ways that are more conductive to parties - AoE pets, coverage by party members, or just plain charging faster. Come the Zero update, things won't change due to the mechanics and use of the skill - If either hp or reflected damage is increased, it will just increase utility in the areas barrier spikes are useful, which is always good.
Elemental Wave: This looks to be a very promising skill. It looks to be essential for any kind of alchemy offence and boosts alchemy's already formidable support capabilities by way of increasing shock radius, buffing Frozen Blast and making it practical against most mission mobs, and giving golems the ever-valuable taunt. The main weakness is the fiddliness with the gauges from what I can see, either requiring you to use Golden Time or switching between flame burst and water cannon - The latter meaning you could be losing out on damage depending on the situation, but you should gain back more overall from using elemental wave. There's not really anything negative to say about it - it plays a large part in the overall buff to alchemy, both offensively and supportively, and for that I don't think anyone can complain.
Flame Burst: Probably the more potent of the two primary combat skills. Classic flame burst, there's not really anything that can be said about it that hasn't already been said. Works best against clumps of mobs and in certain scenarios. It's more disrupted by party play then disruptive to it, so you do need to take a back seat while using it or work in well with your party. Gets quite a nice buff following Zero, but still won't be wiping rooms out left and right like crash shot, act 7, or lance windmill. Pick and choose your fights.
Frozen Blast: Frozen blast has always intrigued me as a skill but upon enquiring about it when I was a new player it became quickly apparent why it's not used very often - CP based success rate and quite a large drop-off. Even if it was faster, it's simply too slow to be used in everyday rooms with the exception of those certain mobs such as blinkers and stuff, which can be remedied by a high power skill to the face. On the situations where you WOULD want to use it, such as on bosses and in Martial Arts, the success rate is either too low or non-existent. I can only speculate as to whether or not it saw more use back in the day before you could even room-wipe Peaca, but as for now the usefulness of it is really limited. This changes to a large degree with the introduction of elemental wave, basically making it a defence/protection cutting Ice dragon that stacks with uppercut and bone dragon, making it useful for both lord mob spawns and bosses alike. Overall, a strong utility factor when combined with elemental wave, but otherwise nothing to write home about.
Golden Time: Click every 180 seconds for free elemental wave.
Heat Buster: The fireball of Alchemy - and for good reason. Hits pretty high, taking a massive 45% of your current stamina to max skill damage after the zero update. Considering that I myself can already hit 2k stam in trans without even trying, that's pretty damn scary, and it does have a decent splash range. On top of that, I know an alchemist personally that can do 10k busters in mission. That said, I referred to it as the fireball of alchemy for a good reason - It takes a good while to charge up. Now, I'm not convinced by all this talk of vivace and stuff like that, the charge time by using other skills is simply too long and once again suffers from the curse of "everything in the room being dead". In fact, it's pretty much analogous to fireball even after zero - with 7 second fireballs and all. If you can pull it off, especially with an elemental wave, great. You're going to do a decent chunk of damage.
If you can pull it off, seeing as everything else will pretty much already be dead in anything that's not belvast hostages or MA. Also has a nasty tendency from what i've seen to spread the splashed mobs everywhere, meaning you have to be careful with how you use it. I've seen the 70k wavebuster figure quoted a bunch of times as support for it but keep in mind that max damage isn't everything or else guns would be seeing no use and combo card fireball would be master race. Crash shot, Act 7, windmill, etc, can all pull the overkill instantly on rooms. Situationally useful as an offensive skill, especially in combination with elemental wave, but not worth planning around and certainly isn't going to propel alchemy towards being a "dps" powerhouse. Not until we get snap cast for alchemy or back to back usable heat busters.
Hydra Transmutation: Great DPS, bad burst damage. Again suffers in most missions due to the "already dead" factor. Cutting MDef and MProt as well as passive damage is great support in tankier things like MA finals or Belvast Hostages. It suffers from the same curse of barrier spikes in that it seems very situational - Generally, the stronger the mobs, the more useful DoT becomes. I don't really think that you can say anything bad about this for content that you can't steamroll, it's great support.
Life Drain: I'm honestly not sure if this becomes usable without damaged HP come the zero update, so I can't really comment on that. Obviously if it could, it'd be a lot better. Armour piercing rounds at low damage, great for Passive Defences or immunity bosses but suffers from the same situation as Heat Buster. I can't really say more without any more information.
Rain Casting: Long setup time, top notch aggro control. I'm not sure how this changes after the zero update. Suffers from "Everything already dead" factor though. Great in Peaca Int and MA though.
Sand Burst: Useless as of right now. Great utility after the zero update with aggro dropping, but I can't really comment on that because "Target's aggro will drop after blindness subsides" is too vague for me. Aggro drops permanently? Aggro drops until a different aggro state is encountered? Assuming that aggro drops permanently, Sand Burst could become a staple skill during harder missions such as Convoy/Belvast, or on things such as boss round of MA. Otherwise, your time could be better spent using other skills. Shares a situation with Hydra in that the more powerful the mob(s), the more useful this seems to be.
Shock: Excellent for the master title. Shock's always been great for non-mana ping crowd control in most combat situations, and it becomes better after the zero update in the way of less cooldown. (40 seconds to every minute can be spent in a state of shock). It's Rain Casting Jr, but that doesn't make it much less useful. Shares the same traits as Sand Burst and Hydra in that it's fairly useless in normal rooms though.
Summon Golem: I really don't have much to say on this apart from it seemed to be good back in the day, but it sucks now. Golems die quickly and don't do much damage. From what I know, it appears this doesn't change after the Zero update with the exception of elemental wave golems - which I honestly don't know much about either. This could be great, this could be bad. I don't know enough to comment about it.
Water Cannon: I know many alchemists that will swear by this skill but I honestly believe that it's inferior to flame burst. Single target damage at range with knockback. Seems kinda like a slower, more inferior firebolt. I'd easily nominate this for one of the most useless skills at the moment, simply for the lack of utility and the disruption to party play with absolutely no payoff. It lacks killing power and the knockback is about as disruptive as a low-level character's smash, potentially pushing a mob out of the range of an actually useful skill. Flame burst may do lower damage per tick then a full water cannon, but it'l outdamage water cannon at the price of being a little more unweildly (Unless you can kill the target with a single hit, but that's like int/adv mobs). I honestly think this skill is the bastard child of firebolt and sand burst as it stands right now. Charge time is slow and it's just all around a bad skill.
That said, it's better after the zero update. Chain Cylinder becomes 100% and has a cooldown of 9 seconds or something, meaning that you can actually do somewhat decent damage with it now in hardmode and elites. However, it's still much worse then CC firebolt and very slow and unweildly, and disrupts your party. This holds especially true for harder missions where monsters either have mana ping and you make them bounce/punch party members in the face with Instinctive reaction or are just too tanky and you push them out of the way of someone's super dooper skill. It is still not the holy grail of combat alchemy though and I would only personally recommend it to charge elemental wave, if your teammates and you knew what they were doing and if you were totally maxed so the the damage wasn't *that* bad - or simply all three at once. I have no love for this skill and it could effectivly be summed up as an inferior smash. As i've said many, many times - Once this thing starts reliably one-hitting Martial Arts Boss round mobs, then i'll reconsider my stance on it.
Wind Blast: Great utility and fun to play ping-pong with mobs. Shouldn't be used as a serious skill without great care and knowledge of what you're doing, but it's certainly a good way to keep mobs off party members, and your own, back. Zero makes it more spammable, so more table tennis for all.
In conclusion:
I'm sorry if you came here to see me mindlessly hate on alchemy because of my posts in other topics, but that's simply not my honest view on it. My view on alchemy can be summed up as top-tier support but lackluster damage leading to it being an excellent secondary skillset, but extremely bad as a primary skillset. With the introduction of the Zero update, it's primary damage-dealing functions will receive a very much needed buff allowing alchemists that arn't completely maxed to take on most day to day things effectively, but it will still fall short in the offensive department at endgame content. The support function of Alchemy come zero will be incredibly buffed, and I eagerly await that.
Quote from Tropa;1143582:
After the update though, knowledgeable alchemists will be efficient in almost all game content.
As support, yes.
Quote from Silverkun;1143596:
It looks like Gensokyou has summed up what was in my eyes the entirety of the problem with magic. So yeah it gets way better. Sadly, the cast speed fix apparently came with Diva in KR, so we may not get it for a while, but at least it is probably coming. Still, it's true that even if the cast speed fix wasn't implemented, you could at least spam cc+4 firebolt.
The speed cast reforge is far superior to the firebolt max on a cc+4 firebolt wand from the calcs i've done so far, but we're still missing a few things so it's subject to change.
That is the main problem with magic in current content, though - It's just too slow. You can literally have a room cleared multiple times over and the room done before someone can finish casting a spell - that's no exaggeration. Back in the day, people could afford to wait for mages to finish casting and hold off the mobs because their damage was so low - that's simply not the case now. Magic is only dependant on stats to a small degree, so it was bound to suffer the same fatal problem as alchemy. With magic attack now directly affecting the base damage of the skill and magic attack being more common from int, as well as increased casting speed, that issue is now addressed and magic is more or less pulled in line with other skillsets, if more situational and requiring greater care.
Also, from what I remember hearing, after the Druid update you will be able to move around with your int magics already charged (but not casted) for free, and Spell Walk (Moving Casting) is just for allowing you to move while you are still charging your skills. However, I still have no indication of whether the free movement after charging is a bug or not... Is that still a thing on the KR servers? I hope so... Because that would be very very nice.
I've heard nothing about this and i'd love to hear a source.
On another note, Gensokyou, what was the third "endgame" talent- oh right, puppetry, how could I forget... Lol.
Punner master race.
Quote from Blassreiter;1143602:
Yeah, even right now Alchemists aren't as shabby as many people think. But of course current Alchemy is about the same as the current Magic.
Alchemists are not shabby at support. They never have, they arn't, and they never will be - alchemy will pretty much always be the king of support unless they release a skillset PURELY for support. (And no, cleric doesn't count. It sucks.)
When people say alchemy sucks, they are usually referring to alchemy's offensive potential, which is what matters during most standard content. At least, that's my take on it.
And I don't think that anybody can deny that alchemy's offensive potential as it stands sucks.
Quote from Syr;1143608:
As stated before, magic just suffers from impracticality due to the somewhat long cast times, even though its damage is quite high. I haven't seen many alchemists around my server, so I don't know the extent of the damage it can do in HM/Elite compared to magic. I know the skills have faster load times along with chain cylinder xP
Comparing damage and damage side by side (Although that's comparing apples and oranges), magic grossly outclasses alchemy.
But that's not a fair comparison, because alchemy's strength is support.
Quote from Silverkun;1143627:
I guess the damage penalty from having less balance as a human melee user is not really substantial?
I used to think it was a big deal until I saw the balance calculations a while back. It's not as big of a deal as people make it out to be. Certainly not something to lose sleep over if you have, say, 70% balance compared to 80%.
Archery and Puppetry gain a lot of balance from weapons/skills though, so it doesn't matter.