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A thaumaturge in my party wants a mirrored shield so he can use it as his "Mirror" implement. His reasoning is the old medusa lore and the mirrored shield idea. Any advice or thoughts on this would be appreciated.

I get what your player is trying to do. The one thing I would tell them is that, first off, the mirror needs to be facing them. When they use the mirror, what they are doing is angling it and sending their reflection to the spot they see in the mirror.

Second, I would suggest that the first hit they get on that shield, they would need to spend time buffing it out to make it reflective again.

Third, the mirror shield is not flat, it is concave so it distorts the image it reflects and would be ill suited.

Fourth, the way I read it, and this is just my DM interpretation, it's not that you pick an object and make it your implement, you stumble upon one that just happens to become your implement. But that is JMHO.

Basically they want to min/max and, heck, I am not even against that. I would suggest if you allow them to have a shield AND a mirror or other implement, that you only allow a buckler as those are worn on the forearm.

IMHO, as a DM I would just allow the player to control the summoned creature. That way if they did do something that I thought wouldn't work, I would tell them before the action was committed. In that way, you are having the discussion BEFORE the action, not afterwards.

If a player commands their summons to do X and the DM has it do Y, that action is already spent in game, the player is pissed. In the end, this is a game that everyone is meant to enjoy.

In fact, if everyone in the game plays well, the DM could inform the player that the summons would be confused and a good player might do it anyway and allow the summons to be confused. This puts the power of the role playing and adding flavor to an encounter in the player's hand. You can even reward players for choosing compromising actions that enhance the game.

My take on the "you don't need to learn a higher level formula" means that everything you needed to make the higher level item was already in your original, 1LV formula. In fact it really isn't a 1LV at all, but as you progress in levels, you learn how to perfect the formula, tweak it as your knowledge grows.

I'm a home brewer. My club will have brew days where we will use the exact same recipes, ingredients, etc but the expert brewers will make a better beer.

Complete novice but my assumption with this feat is that it simply eliminates the action cost of converting a Versatile Vial into something else during a turn.

The confusing part is that is seems from the wording that you can ONLY do this for "bomb" like alchemy items.

Throwing more than one bomb typically is a waste, the value is gaining that extra action. So now example... 1)Move, 2)Quick bomb a enemy with a fire bomb, 3)Put up your shield