Beginner's Apothecary Guide

[NobodyCares]

Potions can be very useful in game, at least in my experience. Most of the beginner potions are going to add +10 to a stat for 5-10 minutes. If you compare that to level 5 gear, you're talking about being able to add a bonus comparable to two or three pieces of armor that all buff the same stat. Want to heal? Beginner potions will give you a quick recharge of +250 hp if you know where to get the materials. Overall it appears that Mythic intends apothecary to be the number one utility crafting skill. If you don't want to invest a lot of time in raising it, you don't have to: every merchant who sells apothecary supplies sells enough materials for you to grind out restoration potions.

What you need:
Every potion has 3 basic components. First you have to have some sort of container. The basic container is a used glass vial, which costs 5 brass at a vendor. You also need a main ingredient, these can be purchased at a basic vendor as well. Vendors in the low-level towns will have elvish parsley for recovery (heal over time potion) and bear claws for strength. There are also some intelligence materials I believe. Bear in mind that as you progress in level, the quality and type of ingredients vendors provide will change. Finally, you have three slots where you can add additional components. When first starting out, don't waste your time adding anything other than cloudy water. Again: until you get your skill to 25 adding anything other than cloudy water to your potions is a waste of materials that will be helpful later. Simply put, you don't yet have the skill to make more than one potion at a time, and you don't have the materials to make potions that last longer than 5 minutes.

How to get it:
There are two gathering skills that contribute items usable as a main ingredient. Butchering will give you main ingredients as well as some ingredients with varying miscellaneous effects (stabilizing effects appear to be the most common). Cultivating will allow you to grow plants and fungi which can then be used to create potions. Which is better? Well each has its benefits. Butchering is great because if you know where an animal spawns you have an unlimited supply of an ingredient, provided you are willing to farm long enough to build up your stock. However, butchering's strength is also its main weakness: you have to have animals to butcher, which means higher-level components will not be available right away, even if your skill would be high enough to harvest them. Cultivation is the more peaceful alternative to butchering. I've found that every monster component has an equivalent plant. But it's worth noting that each skill point you want to raise in cultivation will take approximately 90 seconds. Butchering an animal has a duration of 5 seconds. This means that while cultivation requires nothing other than seeds, it takes much much longer to raise skill in cultivation compared to butchering. However as far as I can tell butchering has nearly nothing to contribute to dyes; I am reluctant to comment any further on this because my experience with dye-making is non-existent.

How to get good potions quickly:
Here's how I did it, which may not be the best way, but it got me to making some good potions after about 15 minutes of skill-raising. First off, you're not going to be able to use any green ingredient you have until your skill is at least 25 (this may change, I'll explain more later). Your best bet for getting skill from 1 to 25 is to simply figure out what potion will benefit you most from the ingredients available at the vendor, and then just get enough materials to make this potion 25 times. Remember you only need the main ingredient, a used glass vial and some cloudy water at this point. After buying 25 of these three items, open up your skills by pressing 'V', then select apothecary from the top of the alphabetized list under the general skills tab (it's the hammer icon on the far right).

The Apothecary Screen:
As you can see, apothecary is pretty intuitive once you know where to get ingredients. The screen has 5 slots, with each one clearly marked as to what goes there. On the right side is a little bar which you can pretty much ignore. What you want to pay attention to is the text at the bottom which will read one of three things: 1. This potion is unstable (will definitely fail) 2. This potion is volatile (may succeed) 3. This potion is stable (will definitely succeed). At this point, every potion you make will be volatile. That's okay, because that's the best you can do with only cloudy water**.
Here's where WAR crafting deviates from other MMOs you may be familiar with. As far as I can tell, each main ingredient has a set 'stability value'. If the items you have in your three additional slots do not provide enough stability to meet that required 'stability value', any attempted potion with that ingredient will always fail no matter how many times you try. As a correlate to this, any potion which is volatile but succeeds will always succeed and produce a potion.

**: Volatile potions have a small disclaimer stating that they may produce a negative effect, but at the time of this writing the chance of this happening is negligible enough for it to be ignored. I have used scores of volatile potions, and have yet for one to backfire and produce a negative effect.

This is just my first run through my guide, originally developed for the members of my guild. Please excuse any minor errors I might have overlooked, as I will be the first to admit this is based solely on my personal experience in the beta an what little information I've come across on the internet.

[Vanquish]

How about scavenging? Is it worthless when having apothecary as a crafting profession?

[nalgae]

Originally Posted by Vanquish

How about scavenging? Is it worthless when having apothecary as a crafting profession?

Scavenging gets you stabilizers (cloudy water for example) and main ingredients such as leeches (instant heal potions).

[NobodyCares]

Scavenging is helpful, but I was reluctant to write about it because, 1. I have no experience scavenging for apothecary items and 2. it does not appear to contribute any main ingredients other than leeches.

[Condorrr]

Good info there!

which one would you prefer for long term use Care's? Cultivation or butchering? little of both? and i think the full version would allow us to use all of those skills right ? or limited to 3 to 4?

[Mcblobbicus]

Scavenging gets you Leeches, ticks and troll Spit for healing potions, fleas for energy potions, daemon Whiskers (from Daemons obviously...) for wisdom potions, furs from Yhetees for elemental resist pots, husks from Spites/Dyrads for thorn potions, Grave Dirt from Undead for Spiritual resist potions. And as stated before you get water from it too. I probably missed a few things...but it's not THAT useless.

I like Scavenging with Apothecary, but you do get starved for additional ingredients, and the vendors ones seem a little dull to me. I also think you get Ogre spit later on for snaring potions.

[Arioch]

You can use 2x Cloudy Water to gain yourself a stable potion.