A Land Far Away

Seems to me that the easy accessibility of potions, especially curatives, in ALFA1 was part of what made clerics so strong, since they didn't need to heal and could concentrate on buffing most of the time. This was also my experience in PnP 3.5.

So far in ALFA2, my cleric has been spending most of his spells on healing. I'm sure this has been parsed by the people who designed ALFA's balance, but it would be nice to hear some thoughts on this matter.

Spontaneous Conversion has become my best friend.

Potions are really emergency solo fare, in my view. Regular play is with a cleric in the party, or in my case, a bard, who heals almost as well, if a level behind.

Go the bard!

Clerics aren't powerful when they aren't constantly having to enter combat, but ive been abused many times for advocating less combat and more other stuff, so i suppose that is a hopeless ideal

There will be a Tyr priest in Rivermoot selling potions soon

Rick7475 wrote:There will be a Tyr priest in Rivermoot selling potions soon

I believe there already is one.

Uh, what I meant was that easy access to many potions is a problem. In TSM it is not the case at the moment, and I think that is good. It means that as a cleric you have to save your spells for healing, and only buff in exceptional circumstances.

I'd have to really disagree about potions helping clerics. Potions are redundant for clerics. They are also really expensive, especially anything more than a CLW. The sky would have to be falling before I'd ever really use one.

I'd argue they are for more a benefit to a wizard or a fighter type with no healing abilities.

Potions....easily available in ALFA1?

If you were rolling in the cash, I guess. I never was.

Without "use on other" potions the dead would be stacked even higher, given that the first aid kit is a DC 15 roll (and heal isn't a class skill for anyone but cleric types) and not everyone can cast cure light wounds.

In ALFA 1, when I was playing a cleric, my healing skills were *never* in demand.

If someone could please tell me about this easy availability of potions in ALFA1, I would much like to exploit this. I'm currently playing in a party with an average level of about 10, and I think we have about 4 Cure Moderate Wounds and 6 Cure Light Wounds potions between the five of us. None of us currently have any Cure Serious or Cure Critical potions. At this point, these potions are basically good for stabilizing people who have dropped into negative hit points. Cure Light Wounds is about 50 gp, Cure Moderate is about 300, and it gets more ridiculous from there.

Perhaps in the "old days" when uber gear and wealth were plentiful, this might have been the case. At the present time, when a character being at average wealth is relatively wealthy, potions are by no means easily available. The only real means of acquiring significant potions is by recovering them from encounters, and if your encounter is dropping a Cure Critical Wounds potion, there is a good chance you used 2 or 3 potions of varying strengths over the course of the fight.

That being said, I have found this to be no impediment to the ridiculous strength of the cleric class in the hands of someone with a decent concept of spell management.

The availability of potions has everything to do with who your DM is and what your server is. Perhaps you have a DM who thinks that all sentient creatures should carry potions. Well, then you're liable to get more potions if you have a weapon with a high crit multiplier or a friend with a bigassed sneak attack, and fewer potions if you're a bunch of modest-strength fighters with longswords. Similarly, massive gold awards on a server where there are no permanent magic items more powerful than +1 weapons seem fairly likely to be spent on consumables (especially if crafters of more powerful items are hard to get a hold of, work slow, or don't like "adventurers")

I personally haven't played on a server with either large quantities of potion drops or large gold drops in about two years (and I recall NC1 being dangerous by day and completely insane by night)

Twin Axes wrote:In ALFA 1, when I was playing a cleric, my healing skills were *never* in demand.

Experiences may vary. When I played a cleric, my healing skills were ALWAYS in very high demand. Right now my regular party lacks a cleric, so we pretty much run on potions, and the good ones cost crazy money.