So I've been playing with this quintessence stuff for a little bit lately and
here are some thoughts I've had on it. First, I like the idea of it, being
able to enhance reincs is cool. Having the essences not be easy to get also
feels nice to me. Some of these bonuses are quite nice and having some rarity
is a good thing (IMO). In my limited testing so far I've gotten max of about
10% collection rate, using the active skill 'extract ether' when the mob dies,
but I've also seen as low as 5%. Granted, I've just started tracking this
data, and I don't know how things will even out in the future with more kills.

The frequency in which essence is spilled at mob death has also ranged from
about 5% up to about 9%. I'm not sure how much extract ether boosts spill
rate as I just started with my data collection. I will say though, having the
skill take 2 rounds to go off does slow things down a bit, especially when
there are multiple corpses in a room to harvest. Changing this to a 1-round
skill would be nice.

There are also some things which would make handling of these essences alot
easier, from a user standpoint. First would probably be to have an essence
canister that is large enough to hold all the essence types. Make it cost
a meg, I think its worth it to not to have to juggle canisters all the damn
time. Staying with the canister theme "store all essence' would be a nice
syntax to have on them, as well as the correct syntax to store and extract
essences shown when you "look at canister". As far as equipment needed to do
anything with the essences, lets have the ability to "label distiller as dis"
and then have the label show up in the short desc. I can't recall offhand if
the label command worked, or I had to use labeling at the distiller to get the
label on there, but regardless, it doesn't show in the short description. The
same goes for the refinery as well.

As I said in the first paragraph, I don't mind the essences being rarer items
to get, but could we get the fumble chance lowered on the distillation skill?
It really seems like you might need to have over 500 dex and wis to have
distillation not to be entirely aggrivating to use. As alchemists we should be
aware of the rarity and be careful in our handling of these precious
substances. As it is you have to spend alot of spell points and endurance to
get them to their purified state and then hope a fumble doesn't happen. I've
even tried using kata potions and still get the message about loosing alot of
material.

Anyway, tl;dr: cool concept, needs some polishing.

--Hair