Balancing a game with many skills is often a difficult undertaking. Developers try to prevent a skill from being too powerful by including limits to the ways where you can boost a skill or they might make leveling a powerful skill a hard or grindy task. Playtesters will try the play the game and see where the limits lie. They can help with finding the the ways in which the game is unbalanced. In Morrowind, the alchemy skill is the one skill where the balancing has simply failed as the skill to way to powerful. In this article I will explain the many reasons why Alchemy is very overpowered.
First the leveling. In Morrowind you have two ways of leveling your skills. You can either practice your skill by doing something that boosts your skill, alternatively you can buy training to level up your skill points by one. In case you didn’t know how leveling works, the principle is very easy. On level n you need n points to level up your skill. So at level 5, you need 5 points to level up your skill. At level 24, you need 24 points to level up your skill. So what gives points in alchemy? Creating a potion succesfully gives 2 points. Eating an ingredient gives you 0.5 points. At level five you would need to make 3(=2.5 rounded up) potions succesfully or you could eat 5/0.5=10 ingredients. Fortunately, the cheapest ingredients cost 1 gold so you can level up from level 5 to 6 for a grand total of 10 gold. Eating your way to lvl 100 would cost you about 5000 gold. Still sounds a bit expensive, right? Don’t worry, it gets better.
Let’s look at making potions to increase level and also try to recoup the ingredient losses. Let’s work with a batch of 100 potential potion creations with 100 Crab Meat and 100 Small Kwama Eggs, both costing 1 gold each. This batch will cost 200 gold in total. Hopefully we can make enough potions to recoup some of these losses. What are the chances of making a potion? SuccessChance = (Alchemy + (Intelligence / 5) + (Luck / 10)) * (0.75 + 0.5 * CurrentFatigue / MaximumFatigue). For simplicity’s sake, consider bad Intelligence and Luck at 30 and a full fatigue bar. This reduces the the formula to SuccessChance = (Alchemy + 9) * (1.25). At level 5 we would have a 17.5% chance. At level 30 we would have a 48.75% chance. Sounds a bit low right? Let’s do the math. How much is a potion worth anyway? BasePotionValue = (Alchemy + (Intelligence / 10) + (Luck / 10)) * MortarQuality. Using an Apprentice’s Mortar and Pestle at MortarQuality 0.5 we get the following value: BasePotionValue = (Alchemy + 6) * 0.5. At level 5, this means a potion is worth 5 gold. At level 30, the same potion is worth 18 gold. Let’s put all this data into a table to give a better overview of the Crab Meat and Kwama Egg batch example:
| Level | Expense | Income | Result |
| 5 | 200 | 87.5 | -112.5 |
| 10 | 200 | 190 | -10 |
| 15 | 200 | 330 | 130 |
| 20 | 200 | 471.25 | 271.25 |
How did this happen? How is it possible to turn a profit at level 15 of a skill? The answer is very simple, when your skill goes up both your chance of making a potion and the price of the potion goes up. As the price of the potion has nothing to do with the price of the ingredients it always pays financially to use the cheapest ingredients as it does not affect the price of the potions. Who can we sell the potions to? All alchemists, pawnbrokers and general salesmen. This means that a lot of Mages Guild members are now your own personal piggy bank. You can train your skills basically for free at anyone who accepts your potions as many ingredient sellers replenish their ingredients after you buy them.
You might be already convinced of the fact that Alchemy is overpowered. But we’re not done yet. How powerful are these potions anyway. Let’s look at a ‘Restore Fatigue’ potion made from Crab Meat and Kwama Egg. An expensive “Exclusive Restore Fatigue” potion restores 80 points of fatigue for 5 seconds. This sounds great, but we can compare this with our own fatigue potions.BasePotionStrength = (Alchemy + (Intelligence / 10) + (Luck / 10)) * MortarQuality / (3 * EffectBaseCost). With Intelligence and Luck at 30,MortarQuality at 0.5 and Restore Fatigue BaseCost at 1.0 this can be reduced to BasePotionStrength = (Alchemy + 6) / (6). At level 30 this means a restore of 6 fatigue per second. How long does the potion last? BasePotionDuration = BasePotionStrength * 3. A potion of strength 6 lasts 18 seconds! This is quite good. With a journeyman’s Mortar and Pestle, you get 12 fatigue restored for 36 seconds! This is so much more useful than the regular potions you can buy at the shops or find in caves.
Ok, so the potions you can make are not only financially a good idea, they are also way better than store-bought potions. We’re done now, right? No, one last thing. Remember that everything regarding Alchemy is partially dependent on Intelligence? This dependence is what turns Alchemy from an overpowered skill into a broken skill. Why? Because all these calculations are not based on the base Intelligence but on the modified Intelligence you have. What is the difference? The base Intelligence is the Intelligence you have based on your Attributes. The modified Intelligence is the base Intelligence with all modifications like damaged Intelligence or Intelligence boosts. This can be exploited by creating ‘Fortify Intelligence’ potions, consuming these potions, and then do Alchemy again. This creates cycle of potions getting better and better, while your Intelligence gets higher and higher. This trick can easily be used to get Intelligence in the thousands. You can use this Intelligence to create ultimate boost potions, super powered spells and 100% enchant chance.
Alchemy is overpowered? Yes it is.
