When people talk about the alchemist's strengths the thing that comes up most is your ability to prepare for problems.
Close, but not quite. The alchemist's strength is that they don't need to prepare for problems. Formulas are cheap and Quick Alchemy doesn't need to be prepared during daily preparations.
If the problem that you are trying to overcome is an enemy that you need to deal a lot of damage to, then a high level spell slot is going to do more damage, a cantrip can be used all day, and a full martial class can do both more damage and throw out Strike actions all day.
For other problems, alchemy actually does pretty well as far as I can tell.
Unexpectedly ending up underground where there is no light and no one brought torches or prepared the Light cantrip? One action to get a Sunrod.
An enemy ran from battle and now you need to track them down, but no one in the group is trained for that? Whip up a Bloodhound Mask.
The only character build that comes close to this is Wizard with Spell Substitution Thesis. But even that, it takes 10 minutes to swap out a spell, and costs downtime, money, and a successful skill check to learn niche use spells. Formulas cost a bit less money, and no time or skill check unless you are reverse engineering an item that you found.
So TL;DR, the effectiveness of Alchemist is campaign dependent. If the campaign theme is a dungeon crawl heavy on killing enemies and little else, Alchemist is not going to be great. An exploration or investigation campaign where the challenges are varied and unexpected, Alchemist is going to do a lot better.
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But, again, this requires a particular kind of player skill that most of us don't have but so much of. I certainly don't.
- You have to know what alchemical devices are out there that might help you solve various problems, so you know which ones to seek out.
- You have to know what all of your own recipes *are*, and the situations where they'd be useful, so that when Stuff Happens you can immediately mentally jump to whichever alchemical solution is immediately necessary.
- You have to judge well during your daily preparations how many of these "quick alchemy to anything" you're likely to need over the course of the day, and then judge in the moment if this is the time to use one of them.
There are reasons why the alchemist is widely acknowledged as one of the highest-skill classes, and possibly the highest-skill among them.
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But, again, this requires a particular kind of player skill that most of us don't have but so much of.
That is also very true and a good point to bring up.
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But, again, this requires a particular kind of player skill that most of us don't have but so much of.That is also very true and a good point to bring up.
Yep, more than most if not all spellcasters (especially given the legacy of many spells if experienced with previous editions). I'd be hard pressed each day to choose how much to devote to Quick Alchemy given its cost. I dislike wasting or starving for resources and I also prefer simpler PCs so my brainpower can focus on the outer obstacles.
Since it's that player knowledge that empowers the Alchemist to excel (and overcome its iffy reputation), those who want to play a straightforward Alchemist (i.e. just bombs or a mutagen-powered warrior) would often better find their concept in a different class taking MCD Alchemist on top. What they give up in volume of alchemy (which isn't so bad if not using Quick Alchemy), they'll make up for with that other class's chassis.
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Personally, while I find the alchemist itself to be a bit of waste of a party slot, an alchemist archetype on a better class can be very convenient. More than a few martials have feat slots to spare and can afford to invest in int plus int casters that do so naturally. You can access more than a few good items once the level 6 feat boosts your alchemy level to 3.
Silversheens, cognitive mutagens for your thaumaturge, drakehearts for casters or for that double stride, energy for free damage or resistances, even bombs in case you are both ranged and concerned about resistance. If you bother with the level 12 feat, you get some more stuff but it's not really necessary I think unless you really want mistform elixers.
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The flexibility can be quite useful, in my experience. While shroudb is absolutely correct that using Quick Alchemy to help your whole party is prohibitively expensive, sometimes being able to create the right thing at the right time is enough. A couple of examples:
My Bomber got hit by an effect that would have left him Clumsy 1 for the whole fight. He QA'ed a Sinew-Shock Serum and made the Counteract check.
Another time we had to parley with something in a conjured globe of water. QA'ed a Sea Touch Elixir to give our spokesperson a swim speed.
Quick Alchemy can also be great when you discover you need just one more of something. Sometimes reality just doesn't comply with your planning and you need one more Quicksilver Mutagen, for example. (Yes, I speak from experience there. :-P )
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The trick of this comparison is that alchemical items can all be bought. They take up some storage space, but by mid levels, a bag of holding and 100 gp of alchemical items can solve a lot of problems.
Luckily, scrolls work much the same way, you just need a feat or spell casting to make it work. Thus the important part of this comparison is still the top level items and spells that are too expensive to have in reserve. I think alchemical items tend to be a bit easier to use situationally than scrolls, at least in combat, but that is a pretty subjective position. Both are feasible for the right character. It is ironic how good a base class the monk is for any build that wants to use a lot of consumables.