Or, how to make nuclear hand grenades. Introduction Alchemy is the most powerful mechanic in Barony, hands down. It's also the most complex. In this guide I will not be explaining the basics of alchemy. What I will explain is how to utilize alchemy's mechanics to do the funniest thing (in my opinion) possible in this game: kill the magisters using Gatorade. Stats and Stuff First things first, let's talk about legendary Alchemy. Legendary alchemy, according to the game, grants the following bonus: Alembics never degrade. Brewed potions have a +2 blessing. Straightforward enough. But that's only one piece of the equation. At legendary Alchemy, these stats reach their maximum value: Potion effect damage: +300% Thrown potion impact damage: +300% Impact damage is the listed "potion damage" on a damaging potions tooltip. Impact damage is typeless damage, meaning it is unaffected by weaknesses and resistances. Potion damage is also unaffected by any base stat. I didn't understand this at first glance, but it's ADDING 300% of the relevant damage type ON TOP OF the base damage, i.e. it's actually a 400% damage multiplier. Lastly, at 100 Alchemy potions have a 100% duplication chance when combined with water. Blessing Potions As previously stated, legendary Alchemy gives all brewed potions +2 blessings. Damaging potions receive +5 IMPACT damage per blessing (this will be important later). You can bless ANY potion, damaging or not, with an enchant weapon scroll. Blessing scrolls will apply to the whole stack of potions. By this point you can probably tell where this is going. Putting It All Together, and Then Breaking It Okay, let's review. At legendary Alchemy, you do 400% base impact damage. Potions can be blessed for +5 impact damage per blessing. At legendary Alchemy, potions can be duplicated using water 100% of the time.Very good. Now for the fun part. Potions can be manually blessed. Duplicating a potion with water retains the blessing level for the duplicated potion. +5 impact damage multiplied by 400% equates to an effective +20 impact damage per blessing. Impact damage is unaffected by resistances. Now, if you play thoroughly (and I mean thoroughly, learning to level your Trading skill is a must), you can end up with a sizable amount of blank/enchant weapon scrolls by Hamlet, usually more than 10-15. You can get Enchanted feathers as early as the Gnomish Mines (extremely uncommonly), but if you carry the Blue Orb to Hamlet, you can get a guaranteed one from the Mysterious Merchant. If you manage to put yourself in this situation, the game is already won. But don't celebrate just yet, there's minmaxing to be done. Order of Operations If you've made it to this point, now's the time to make your unstable potions. I believe Icestorm potions are the best unstable potion, mainly because there are two recipes for Icestorms, the ingredients for said potions are easier to find and make, the difference between an Icestorm and a Thunderstorm is 15 damage, and the slow effect makes hitting consecutive throws easier. This 15 damage does not scale with blessings, it's the 5 damage difference in spell damage. So we'll be making Icestorms in bulk. You want to combine your available supplies such that you end up with acid, blindness, and mana potions. For acid, the best method is to utilize booze, as it is sold in the highest quantities. Combine it with sickness to make confusion, then confuse the booze to make acid. Sicknesses can be acquired in bulk by combining any useless potions (e.g. any non-base/secondary potion) which has the dual purpose of saving inventory space. You can also make booze by combining sickness or confusion with fruit juice. Mana potions are sold in bulk in shops as well, but can be made by combining fruit + cure ailment or invisibility + speed. Probably save your invisibility potions to make extra healings, though. Blindness potions are the least desirable to craft, but can be found in potion shops and fountains, so you'll likely have a small supply. Once you have all the Icestorms you can possibly make, bless the stack. You do this after making all your Icestorms because once blessed, brewing any more Icestorms serves no purpose. Different blessing levels, when combined, result in the lowest blessing level. At this point, water becomes more valuable than gold. If you're a Brewer or a crafty adventurer with access to bottles, you should be filling these the entire run. There are guaranteed sinks in the Haunted Castle, Hamlet, and Bram's Castle, so make sure to bottle as much as possible when you're there. It's not unreasonable to end up with more than 50 super-blessed potions by stage 35. The Payoff So why do all this? Personally, I found the act of killing the magister twins in 17 seconds on Hardcore mode to be such a transcendent experience that it made all the effort leading up to it immediately worth it. Other reasons you might find this worth doing may include: seeing a 500 damage number appear in a vanilla game, confusing the hell out of your adventuring party by out-damaging them with bottles of blue Gatorade, and watching cockatrices die to two thrown potions. Also, it's funny. Funny to perform and funny conceptually; the fact that this strategy exists, but I've never seen anyone else actually do it, or talk about doing it for that matter. The fact that Alchemy exists in this quantumly broken state, where it's fundamental overpowered-ness is perfectly balanced by the amount of effort required to actually use it. The fact that the Brewer, who canonically is just a wanderer looking for drinking buddies, is technically the highest DPS class in the whole game. The fact that this strategy takes 10 times the amount of effort it would to just duplicate 50 +2 extra healing potions and stab everything to death. also you could conceivably do this with sickness potions, but probably dont