So, one of my first characters in the Tamriel world was an Alchemist. It was a custom class, one that focused on the Alchemy skill with a side helping of magicka and some minor skills in One-Handed.

To me, the Skyrim perk tree for Alchemy seemed weak. So I started up a little mod that tweaked the heck out of the Alchemy skills to increase the potency of created potions. Most mods out there that tweak magicka didn’t really seem to touch the Alchemy skill.

I won’t lie and pretend I had balance in mind as so many perk tweaking mods do (and then proceed to make life a living hell if you actually rely on those skills coughstealthrebalancedcough), especially for high levels in the skill. It just seems to me that if you’re a Master Alchemist (or Master Anything really) you should be able to make legendary items. Since it’s a perk tree, alchemy will be pretty much the same if you don’t invest in the perks, but the idea behind it is to make the potions more useful than 2 seconds of freaking invisibility, for example, especially when starting out with Alchemy perks, and by the end, being able to do amazing things with the ingredients. I got really tired of having a billion useless potions in my inventory that weren’t worth selling.

To that end, I restructured some of the default perks, combining the perks dealing with beneficial potions into one set of perks, and creating a new perk with the leftover.

Instead of making the healing potions super strong and the other beneficial potions somewhat strong, it makes everything a little bit stronger in general, but the overall boost to healing potions is slightly less than what it is in default. I thought it was a good sacrifice to make. Poisons get an extra boost as well.

The leftover perk went into a boost for skill-based potions, so your smithing potion should work just a little bit better.

I also added some high level perks to increase ingredient gathering, my thinking is that an experienced alchemist would know how to use more parts of the plant, and unless my memory is totally failing me, that had been one of the added effects of gaining Alchemy skill in Oblivion.

From Oblivion, I really missed the ability to create two potions at once, so I added that back into Skyrim, too, placing it at the higher end of the skill tree.

A truly exceptional Master Alchemist should be able to do these things, I’m reasoning out. You hear the stories of what Alchemists and Enchanters can do in lore, but you never get to do them yourself. Likewise, I feel if your enchanting skill is at 100 and you’ve got all the perks you should be able to reconstruct the Staff of Chaos.

The mod itself is in an alpha stage, as I am not quite sure if I tweaked the skill potions properly, but testing it out should prove interesting.