Hand of the Gods vs booksFollow

With the addition of the new fish to crystal recipes, I wouldn't advise anything but Chemicking first. You will most likely be using those recipes a fair amount. Not to mention all the other recipes that use Chemicking.

After Chemicking, it is somewhat of a toss up between Poisoning and Physicking. I took Poisoning first because I also leveled Botany which allows access to many of the plants to make the poison powders. Less plant materials are used to make Poison items than Physick items.

I don't have Hand of the Gods yet, but I don't see how you can level any craft effectively without having access to the training manuals. They have a very noticable effect on crafting success.

good feedback... I haven't gotten anything yet for alchemy and frankly the fish synthing recipes at my rank are less than appealing - I would rather save lightning crystals for weaving or giving to weavers than making crystals I can make with lightning shards... then again I am not a ALC that is hellbent on grinding levels, never have been - and I fish so I can get a lot of what I want.

Interesting to hear testimonials about Hand of the Gods. I may just have to go with that instead of a guild ability.

I think this depends a lot on what you're doing with your alchemy. I ranked up most of my ALC pre-fish recipes, so the books were very nice to have (especially poisoning for the Dart Frog grind). Hand of the Gods is great to have, but when I think about it, it only has so many practical uses. The biggest one, of course, is to save your ass during a synth when you have 10% progress left to get and only 5 durability. The ability is amazing, no doubt, since you can't lose any durability during the synthesis unless you get a chaotic element (even the element going unstable doesn't lose durability).
But back to my original point, if you're an alchemist that intends to be helpful/useful, then things like chemicking are very nice to have. If you're like everyone else and just trying to rank up, then there's hardly a point in buying books/abilities.

Although I do agree with the State Alchemist that this ability is amazing to have for this kind of situation, it should be noted that, at least in my experience, Hand of the Gods is very fickle about being available for me in a synth. Many times I've been put in State's position on another synth, with anything under 10 durability left. Whilst doing a combination of "Wait" and procing other abilities, Hand of the Gods never appeared, leaving me to do a Standard Synth with only 2 durability left and hope for the best. This may just be my horrible luck, but just a warning: Don't always rely on it in the end!

I actually often use mine at the beginning of a synth when trying to HQ something. Since synths are often easier at the beginning, you can get a few Bold Synths in with no durability loss and essentially be "starting" the synth with 20-30% progress.

As for the Touch Up idea, if I remember correctly, I had this happen to me once and it ended up not working that way. I still lost durability during a Touch Up. However, it was one time and I don't even remember completely, so it's definitely worth testing!

Edited, Mar 2nd 2011 6:51pm by ArkWeldwin

Well, with the frequency at which GMs are given now, I had no problem buying up my books, and have saved 15k GMs after the fact.

I'm currently R33 Alch, so I'm sitting on more than enough to grab Hand of the Gods when I hit 36.

Ultimately, it depends on how fast you're grinding Alch. If you're burning through the ranks faster than you're acquiring GMs, then save for HotG. If not, buy the books first, they will help the grind to R36 (and local leves) a lot.