Alchemy Replenishment is a lame mechanic?
I recall at the beginning of The Witcher 3 in the White Orchard prologue I was excited that I could run around and collect various plants, and even made it a heavy focus to go from farm to farm picking all the flowers and bushes I could, stocking up on buckthorn when I went down underwater.
This all quickly came to an end as even though you find new diagrams for new potions and potion upgrades, the ingredients for them were all readily available... in chests... in shops... the loot is everywhere, the purchase price of ingredients is negligible next to the sheer availability of money in the game (which is another problem altogether). The real problem though is potion replenishment. Even if you never buy alcohol or never loot villager's houses, you will end up with an enormous supply of the stuff making replenishment a non-issue, just get out of combat, meditate, and back into the fight.
I personally feel this cheapens the whole game to a degree, potions are no longer this super valuable resource you need to stock up on and hoard the ingredients for. All the hundreds upon hundreds of carefully placed herb spawns in the world go to waste because you're never really incentivized to go collect herbs in the wild, there's never really a need past the prologue. You spam potions like crazy, you will only ever visit the alchemy page when you have a new potion to brew, never to restock ones you've used up.
I'll admit the idea is great on paper, replenish your potions automatically is awesome for people who don't want to mess with menus constantly, but the way it's implemented just feels lame, you would think that after diluting your potion stock with alcohol for the 50th time that there'd simply be no potency left in it, and bombs? What does alcohol have to do with bombs? Also how are we replenishing a stock of something we completely used up? There's logical inconsistencies present that I can forgive if it makes sense for the gameplay, which I suppose it does for a casual player but then it should scale right?
What I mean is that potion replenishment should be fine on normal difficulties, but what about Death March? How much more brutal would that difficulty be just by removing potion replenishment where you had to be very careful about which battles you took potions in, and had to brew each one from scratch. Of course the potion inventory limit might need tweaking as well since it's very design is based off the replenishment mechanic, you ought to be able to stockpile them, but if used up, it's gone.
So CDPR, please consider in a future patch or Enhanced Edition either rebalancing alchemy to make herbalism and hoarding ingredients actually worth it or remove replenishment on harder difficulties.
I recall at the beginning of The Witcher 3 in the White Orchard prologue I was excited that I could run around and collect various plants, and even made it a heavy focus to go from farm to farm picking all the flowers and bushes I could, stocking up on buckthorn when I went down underwater.
This all quickly came to an end as even though you find new diagrams for new potions and potion upgrades, the ingredients for them were all readily available... in chests... in shops... the loot is everywhere, the purchase price of ingredients is negligible next to the sheer availability of money in the game (which is another problem altogether). The real problem though is potion replenishment. Even if you never buy alcohol or never loot villager's houses, you will end up with an enormous supply of the stuff making replenishment a non-issue, just get out of combat, meditate, and back into the fight.
I personally feel this cheapens the whole game to a degree, potions are no longer this super valuable resource you need to stock up on and hoard the ingredients for. All the hundreds upon hundreds of carefully placed herb spawns in the world go to waste because you're never really incentivized to go collect herbs in the wild, there's never really a need past the prologue. You spam potions like crazy, you will only ever visit the alchemy page when you have a new potion to brew, never to restock ones you've used up.
I'll admit the idea is great on paper, replenish your potions automatically is awesome for people who don't want to mess with menus constantly, but the way it's implemented just feels lame, you would think that after diluting your potion stock with alcohol for the 50th time that there'd simply be no potency left in it, and bombs? What does alcohol have to do with bombs? Also how are we replenishing a stock of something we completely used up? There's logical inconsistencies present that I can forgive if it makes sense for the gameplay, which I suppose it does for a casual player but then it should scale right?
What I mean is that potion replenishment should be fine on normal difficulties, but what about Death March? How much more brutal would that difficulty be just by removing potion replenishment where you had to be very careful about which battles you took potions in, and had to brew each one from scratch. Of course the potion inventory limit might need tweaking as well since it's very design is based off the replenishment mechanic, you ought to be able to stockpile them, but if used up, it's gone.
So CDPR, please consider in a future patch or Enhanced Edition either rebalancing alchemy to make herbalism and hoarding ingredients actually worth it or remove replenishment on harder difficulties.
