In the recent feedback form I said it is the only not important at all item production building, this is despite consumables being impossible to get from Night rewards or Corpses, this feedback will attempt to explain my reasoning.
One of the appeals of the item production buildings is that you control the level of items produced, and can get items of a higher level than is available in the shop or from corpses, Consumables from the shop are a level higher than other items in the shop, so the level benefit production has is less useful for consumables.
Consumables also have the lowest sell price, meaning any items that you do not need provide significantly less gold than if they were items of a different type from a different building, so even tho producing passively saves you money over buying from the shop this is again a thing that consumables are worse than the other items.
There is also less benefit over seeing more consumables, not only is there more variety in armour maker produced items and trinkets, including variants there is also more variety in the weapons from their buildings, but consumables do not roll rarities, and so no extra stats, meaning a health potion from a production building is no better than from a shop, and seeing more of them doesn't increase the chance of seeing a better version, with other gear the more items you see the more likely you are to see a higher rarity or better variant, or just one with better randomly added stats.
The only use the Alchemist has is to build one on glintfein as your only item production building and not upgrade it just hunting for level 1/2 health and stability potions to help protect against the debuffs that appear a lot on that map
#The Issue with the Alchemist (potion production building)
west dragon
knotty vortex
Alchemist would be more viable if you discounted the build and upgrade costs relative to other production buildings
then it effectively becomes a level 1 potion producer that becomes a less efficient gold mine unless you're running production.
fluid solar
even if you do something funny like 7 Alchemists, 3 Gold mines would yield more gold than that
knotty vortex
I've considered upgrades like the ability to spend 3 workers to increase the bag slots of 1 hero, but it seesaws between being overpowered and not worth it
mental rampart
I feel the main problem is that there's just too many limited use case potions?
fluid solar
I think Alchemist can dish out Scrolls too, but it being limited uses, only specific builds use them
knotty vortex
The beers are certainly lacking for something with only 1-2 uses
fluid solar
I think Alchemist can dish out Scrolls too, but it being limited uses, only spec...
example of them being Blood Mages & Crit with Mana Collector