If you're in need of out of combat healing, the best bang for your bucks are Scrolls of Heal I, or Wands of Heal I.
In combat, Soothing Tonic is not as interested as Elixirs of Life unless the fight is meant to last forever.
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Soothing Tonics are surprisingly useful in-combat, actually. Giving an ally Fast Healing alleviates the need for a recovery check, and actually gets them back on their (proverbial) feet easily. Had a few asses saved by them in Extinction Curse.
They died later in the dungeon, but that was from very, VERY unfortunate math rocks.
Calculating the number of hit points restored is not enough to compare Elixirs of Life to Numbing and Soothing Tonics.
First, you have to take overheal (and useless heal) into account. What's the point of healing someone who doesn't need healing? Elixirs of Life can be used in an emergency and as such will be most of the time useful. As Soothing Elixir needs 5-6 rounds to be "good", there's no way one can predict a character will fall in such a future. So the amount of overheal and useless heal increases to make Soothing Tonic worse on average than Elixir of Life.
But Soothing Tonic has another side effect: It will raise anyone who goes down. It's both super dangerous as you are increasing the chances of death of the character but at the same time if it's a character who doesn't need actions to get back in the fight (Monk with Kip Up) then it's a massive increase in efficiency. It's, in my opinion, the niche use for Soothing Tonic (outside the Perpetual Soothing Tonic given outside combat and as prebuff).
Numbing Tonic on the other hand is much more usable than Soothing Tonic during combat as you need to predict a much smaller amount of rounds. But it doesn't heal so you need to be sure the character will take damage at each and every round. Another asset of Numbing Tonic is that you get the first tick of damage immediately, actually healing twice in the first round if your ally is damaged in between your initiatives (you don't get this effect if you use it on yourself, so it's better to feed someone with it).
The last point is that both Soothing Tonic and Numbing Tonic asks for an early action (typically during first round). These actions are worth more than actions at the end of the fight. But on the other hand you can sometimes use them for prebuff.
So Soothing Tonic is super niche (even if at low level it can be quite worth it as characters tend to go down a lot and Elixirs of Life are not competitive before level 5 anyway). Numbing Tonic is hard to use: You need to predict that a character will fall at some point but not too quickly (as temporary hit points won't raise you to your feet) but is the highest bang for your bucks if you do it well. And Elixirs of Life stay in my opinion the bulk of your healing as an Alchemist due to their ease of use and the fact that you can use them multiple times on the same character unlike Tonics.
You are overthinkinking it about numbing.
The numbers are big enough and the full battle duration makes it a very safe bet that as long as you use them early on they will vastly outperform Elixirs of life.
Just 3 rounds of being hit already puts them ahead, and being hit in 3 different rounds in a fight is hardly a rarity, especially for melees.
You don't have to overcomplicate it with when/if you're downed or not, passive extra hp every round make it much harder to actually go down in the first place.
I think using them early on seems tricky though, unless you're fairly certain who will get targeted. And if they get hit hard before you can give them the elixir (as will often happen against a tough solo enemy) you may need the quicker burst to keep them from going down.
You don't have to overcomplicate it with when/if you're downed or not
You definitely need to complicate it with "if you're downed", otherwise your Numbing Tonic just gave out of combat healing. As it costs resources, it's an important question: Do you waste your resources or use them properly?
Especially when you add the fact that it's not a healing item and as such you produce less of them for each reagents (as a Chirurgeon, but these are the healer Alchemists).Just 3 rounds of being hit already puts them ahead, and being hit in 3 different rounds in a fight is hardly a rarity, especially for melees.
If you are targeted, 3 rounds is actually a lot. Most of the time a targeted character goes down pretty quickly. If you are not targeted, then chances are high that it's a waste of healing as you healed a character who's not taking much pressure.
So, I may "overcomplicate" things, but you definitely "undercomplicate" things. Just taking the numbers and stating it's better without taking anything else into account won't make for a valid comparison.
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I think you are over thinking this. I also think you are confusing numbing and soothing tonic.
I'm not. It's just that if you make useless healing (healing that doesn't prevent anyone from going down) you just reduced the need for out of combat healing. And Numbing and Soothing Tonics are both doing a lot more useless healing than Elixirs of Life.
To help with action economy the alchemist can use "heal bomb" to give out the regen.
Healing Bomb only works with Elixir of Life.
Someone at 10 hp left fights differently than someone at 100hp left.
Because they're at risk of falling. But before getting into the red zone they absolutely don't care about their hp pool.
Your reasoning that "healing only matters if you would have been downed" is 100% whiteroom math and of 0 importance to how the game plays.
I'll give you something that is 100% whiteroom math:
95% of the melee will be hit in 3 rounds in an average combat.
I play Age of Ashes in PbP, 4-man party, 2-martial frontline (pretty standard setup in my opinion). We are at the end of book 2 (level 7), and I've checked the last 6 fights we did: there's not a single of these fights where one of our martials (or non martials) ended up taking damage during 3 rounds. Not a single one. It looks like the 5% is very large. Taking damage during 3 rounds is in my opinion the exception. It gets more common at high level as fights tend to last longer, but even at very high level it's far from common (I don't even think it's 50% of the time).
at this point i'm just convinced that you and me play a different game, because our experiences are just so vastly different.
My experience is that most of the time a character goes down through the combination of 2 factors: Focus fire and (bad) luck. The case where a PC loses every round 20-30% of their hit point pool and goes down through this attrition is the exception.
But I also think it is impacted by the way the party plays. By valuing defense a lot (I don't say you do, but it may be an explanation), healing every one every round as soon as they take a pinch of damage, you increase the duration of the fights (by not dealing as much damage as a more offense oriented party) and as such generate more often the situation that you try to solve. And that's what I tend to read from your posts, especially when you state that "Keeping your melee healthy without worrying about them dying changes the whole flow of a combat.". It looks like preemptive healing instead of reactive healing.
I see quite a bit of attrition in my games. There was a lot of attrition in our Extinction Curse campaign. The only time focus fire was a real issue was the near TPK. Same with PFS... mostly attrition, not so much massive focused damage. In my experience at least.
Once it's available, Soothing Tonic is better for out of combat healing without a doubt, due to the more reliable HP return. The only thing stopping it from being a Chirurgeon's L7 go-to for Perpetual Infusions is that it's a 2nd level item.
For in-combat though, it's basically a buff, not a heal. It's just too slow. If I'm in a group with a L17 Chirurgeon who's out of the top-level stuff, I'll definitely prefer 42 HP all at once to 5 HP a round.
It's gonna be great for my shield blocking Mutagenist though. Wearing him down is slowly getting almost impossible. I currently foresee my 14th level Mutagenist as getting 2HP resistance to all Physical Damage (Invincible Mutagen), 30 temp HP buffer to start a fight (Greater Juggernaut Mutagen), 15 temp HP a round once that's blown through (Greater Numbing Tonic), Fast Healing 5 (Greater Soothing Tonic) and a certain number of Hardness 15 Shield Blocks (Greater Martyr's Shield).
Then at 15th it'll get somewhat ridiculous if I grab Troll Hide Armor and power it with Major Elixirs of Life. 8 rounds of 15 hp a round which stacks with the Soothing Tonic...