Apothecary (WAR Profession)
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| Guides: Tier 1 • Tier 2 • Tier 3 • Tier 4 | ||
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Apothecary is a skill that allows players to create "potions, lotions and powders." You don't need to be in a particular special place to use this skill, Apothecary can be done anywhere!
Basic How-To
To open up the Apothecary window once you have the skill, type "v" then click on the crafting tab, and then click on the Apothecary icon. Right now, you can't drag the Apothecary button onto the hotbar, we're working on that for next time.
Once a player has the Apothecary skill, he or she will then need some ingredients. In each chapter 2 location, there is a merchant who sells all the necessary ingredients to make low-level potions. (It's usually the same NPC that you trained the skill from.)
The first thing a player needs is a container, no crafting can be done without one. The Apothecary merchants in each chapter 2 location sell two containers: a Used Glass Vial and a Thin Glass Vial. You should start out with the Used Glass Vial first.
Apothecary containers have four slots. The first slot is for the "main ingredient." Really good containers can be hard to find, although PQ bosses now drop crafting items and sometimes have them.
Main ingredients are easy to identify because they have "Apothecary, Main Ingredient" in their tooltips. They also have flavor text that gives some additional basic information on what they do. Main ingredients determine what kind of potion you are going to make. However, main ingredients are very, very unstable.
To make the overall concoction stable enough to succeed, you'll need to add additional ingredients. These items have "Apothecary, Ingredient" in their tooltips. Some ingredients make concoctions more stable, some make potion effects last longer, and some increase the number of products made.
Experimenting with different ingredients will result in different potions being made. To start with, you'll need lots of Cloudy Water (it makes potions more stable).
When a main ingredient has been put into a container, the Un-stabilityometer usually fires up, it's the thing that looks like a thermometer on the right-hand side of the Apothecary window. The Un-stabilityometer will be in the "red zone," which means that the concoction is highly unstable. By adding additional ingredients (Cloudy Water is good at making potions more stable), you should be able to get the Un-stabilityometer into the green zone (stable) or the yellow zone (risky). Just because the stability of a concoction is risky, does not mean that it won't succeed , it might. It means that the concoction is right on the verge of being stable. Again, experimentation is the key. Don't forget to keep an eye on the Un-stabilityometer.
You will not lose ingredients if you fail.
Apothecary ingredients all have skill-level requirements. You won't be able to place high-skill-level ingredients into a container if your skill is too low.
There are enough ingredients at the crafting merchants to make all the lowest-level potions. After that, you'll need to gather better ingredients on your own.
Ingredients that make concoctions more stable are really important, since making potions is a constant stability battle! Luckily the starter stores have an unlimited supply of Cloudy Water. Eventually though, as your skill increases, main ingredients that you find will need better "stabilizers." Players with the scavenger gathering skill are very good at finding "stabilizers" on corpses, and most humanoids drop them too.
Once you've started hunting down higher-level ingredients, skilled potion makers will realize that they can start "designing" potions. For example, if your guild is doing RvR tonight, you might want lots of high-power potions, but don't really care about how long the effect lasts because you'll be dying a lot (sorry, but you will). Or, if you're planning on doing some solo PvE, you might want a potion that lasts a really long time because you're less likely to die.
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