Alchemist could be realy cool, throwing other potions like granades? damn right! Poisons? Yes please.
Imagine what kinda stuff you could do with that. Instead of having to use abilities, you could make your normal attacks have all kinds of effects based on the poisons.
Such as imagine having a poison that makes your enemy incorporeal, making him unable to participate in the fight, or have a poison that disintigrates his armor.
Imagine throwing health potions as a ranged heal, imagine having potions as a form of liquid. Like Acid or Water.
Imagine throwing a pool of healing potion on the ground healing anyone that stands in it, how cool would that be? Or a pool of fire resistance potion? Crazy stuff like that!
None of this is any different to what mages can do or could be made to do. Of course, an alchemist would have their own group of abilities, so when implemented it would be easy to differentiate them.
However, the conceptual differentiation is that alchemists are forced to craft their spells ahead of time. This adds a whole new crafting minigame that -- to me -- really seems more like tedious micromanagement than anything fun. Crafting a weapons and armour is kind of fun, but having to collect the ingredients and craft every potion for every action I want to perform in combat ahead of time sounds tedious.
That said, I fully support the concept of the Full Metal Alchemist variety of "alchemy". That looks fun.
