Salmon Roe, Garlic, Nordic Barnacle

[WaywardZeppelin]

This potion is supposed to be the most valuable, and I know it is in the vanilla game, but it’s easily surpassed by Giant’s Toe potions of many kinds in my game. Is this due to USSEP? If not, what else might cause this?

[Hobo Misanthropus]

It might be. USSEP thought the Waterbreathing value was a bug, and had to be told directly from the developers that it was intentional to reduce the grind of Alchemy leveling. So it's supposed to be reverted in the latest patches.

[258789553873]

That Salmon Roe thing was a bug. It would appear someone put the wrong magnitude in for the waterbreathing effect, because the value was more typical of the restore magicka effect (or is it fortify magicka? can't remember, I rarely use alchemy), while the other effect had an insanely low magnitude that happened to be the magnitude that waterbreathing has in all other alchemy ingredients.

So yes, ussep fixed that. Besides, the resulting potions were worth so much you couldn't sell them to any merchant, which made it a bit difficult to get rid of them.

As for giant's toes, the magnitudes of all its effects are normal, it just has an extra script attatched to it that increased the value of all potions made with it (I think boar's tusk also has the same effect, and yes the two share effects so you CAN mix them and make insanely expensive potions).

Either way, its far faster to grind your alchemy by just buying all the ingredients from alchemy merchants and mixing them. The potions may not give as much xp, but it saves the excessive amount of time you would normally spend trying to find giant's toes and bear claws and whatnot. Without having to hunt for ingredients, you'll gain more xp per second doing the first method than the latter, by a large margin. Also, some alchemy vendors offer training, so you can use that to get some more skill points while giving them more gold to purchase all the potions you made. You can even exploit a glitch to re-set their inventory to get more ingredients off of them if you're willing to do that.

[WaywardZeppelin]

Well now I know not to bother with Salmon Roe and just use whatever other ingredients I have on hand, thanks.