Potions had no cooldowns like in WOW and other games. You could easily solo most content that normally took 5 people just because of potons and or wands.

I was able to level my first char with a friend but my second we stockpiled 800 or so potions and just solod my way through until lvl 10 (much faster then if I had a good group of players without potions)

The problem wasn’t only that the potions had no cooldown but because the game was slow paced and heavily relied on the mana conservation but with potions being so readily available we could heal infinitly longer with them then we ever could with a healing class making healing trivial. (I started with a Cleric to heal but quickly stopped playing him for a Warrior that could carry more potions and kill everything on his own)

This took away from the gameplay and ruined the group aspect, you no longer needed to group up, in fact sometimes it was more of a hassle and timewaste to do so.

But there was a lot more issues with that game then just the potions when launched.

note: wands were limited to specific classes.

Potions in Age of Conan are moderately useful. They provide a very low instant effect, but then persist with a “regen” type effect for usually 60 seconds, which is also the timeout on them. Each of the three restorative potions (health, mana, stamina) are on separate timers, so you can have one of each going at once. These compliment the healing system in the game (which focuses on heals over time instead of burst healing), but at best will help you survive only a few extra seconds if not used very early in a fight. As the alchemy profession hasn’t yet been fixed in the game, buff potions haven’t been seen (outside of the food category).

In dofus there are several kinds of potions, meat, fish, bread, scrolls and candies. Healing items are required by every player, as healing without that aid is painfully slow. There are some function specific potions that are also pretty much indispensable for some builds, as with scrolls.

****Potions:

Healing Potions: The most usual kind, easily craftable, they recover a certain amount of hp within a range (from 20 to 50 for example, and higher level ones recover even from 500 to 1000).

Energy Potions: In dofus when you lose a battle you suffer energy loss, and when you run out of energy you become a ghost, if you are a ghost you’ve got to head to a Phoenix Statue to revive. But you can keep your energy high by using energy recovering items, most usual kind are potions. Extremely expensive for the average player, mostly used by high level players that don’t want to miss a minute of action (i make my ingame money with these haha).

Dyes: Some tailoring recipes require a special kind of potion to be crafted, there are several dyes that acomplish this, they are mostly a money sink for crafters. Hard to make, not that expensive because almost no one uses those recepies (there is better gear that can be crafted or dropped that does not use it)

Memory Potions: They are used to craft Signature runes, a material used by high level crafters that want to sign their work. Another money sink

Potion of Old Age: A potion used to craft energy potions and also used to craft Job loss potions (you can only have 3 jobs in dofus, for example if you are a Farmer/Baker/Alchemist and you want to become a Miner, you’ve got to lose one of the jobs, or because you hated it).

Transportation Potions: There is a small selection of potions that allow you to teleport, one for each aligned city (Bonta potion, and Brakmar potion), House Potion (allows you to teleport to your house), Recall Potion (teleport to your last saved position), Guild House Potion, and Guild Paddock Potion. Most people only use Recall and one of the Aligned Ones, but they are fairly inexpensive.

Spell Loss potions: Bought from a NPC at your class temple, they let you forget spells you’ve learnt and re arrange the points you used to level the spell up.

****Bread/Meat/Fish

Healing Variety: These ones heal but they do heal a fixed amount of HP, not a variable one.

Healing + Energy: There is no energy only food, but theres food that gives energy AND hp

Healing + Stat Boost: These ones heal and give a permanent boost to some stat up to a certain threshold.

****Scrolls

Spell Scrolls: These ones let you learn a new spell not avaliable to your class as-is.

Stats Scrolls: These ones give a permanent stat boost until a certain threshold, required for some specific builds, and a extravagant expense for normal builds (in the end if you scroll your base stats to the max, compared to a non-scrolled character, you are only a 15% more powerful and since the game has actual strategy a 15% is almost negligible). Most people are lured into this kind of scroll, so the price is really high.

Scroll of Spells: This ones give you a spell point (used to raise the level of your spells), useful but not vital, and damn expensive. (it is way better to plan ahead and raise your spells in a certain order)

Experience Scrolls: There are scrolls that give experience, drop randomly or they can be exchanged with npcs, but the amount of exp is negligible, no one uses them (unless you drop them)

Weapon Skill Scrolls: they allow you to learn a spell that lets you imrpove your abilities with a certain kind of weapon. They used to be really expensive but they upgraded the drop rate.

****Candies:

Healing.

Healing+Energy.

Specific: There are several specific candies that give you some vodoo powers, like healing more during battles, +100% exp won per fight, increased drop rate, etc… these are raaaare, non sellable, and they give bonuses for a certain amount of battles.

****Pills:

These raise the stat cap on pets (for example your pet gives +100 hp, but if you feed it a pill and it can give 105, if you feed them two pills they die)

****Pet/mount food

Enripsa Powder: recover hp to your pets.

Pet specific food: each pet can eat a certain range of stuff from seeds, to fish, to metal, to other pets ghosts, and they raise stats this way (there are other pets that do not require to be fed and have fixed stats, and others that depend of the amount of monsters of a certain kind you’ve killed).

Fish/Kaliptus Leaves: Dragoturkeys eat these to recover energy, they don’t lose hp but they lose a certain amount of energy everytime you use them. (they give bonuses similar as the ones given by pets but their stat bonuses are raised by giving them experience instead of food).

PD: I just realized how complex the whole consumables system was in this game :-p

I’ve also played WoW a fair bit so I’ll comment there too. At lower levels potions generally act as a “oh crap” tool to save yourself in a close npc battle or possible allow you to beat an extra hard npc that is just a little out of your normal killing range. However, in raids potions really act as a crutch to beginner raiding guilds (at least pre BC, probably still valid now too). When my guild was first learning Molten Core every raid member made use of fire resistance elixirs on practically every fight that required high fire resistance and everyone carried mana and health potions to extend their character just a little bit more. And it really made the difference in the beginning. Once we started to gain better gear raiding and also fire resistance gear sets, the potions became more optional and for emergencies only.

Wow also had the notion of pvp only potions, essentially potions that were extremely cheap, but could only be used inside a pvp battleground. The cost was trivial enough you would never think twice about using one in a sticky situation.

Healing potions are “oh crap” buttons in high end raiding. You take one when you’re down a lot of health and you have reason to believe that the healers can’t help you.

Mana potions are a standard form of mana regeneration. I assume that healers learning a raid encounter may need to chug a mana potion every time the cooldown is up in order to have enough mana to last throughout the encounter. Some offensive casters are also in that boat.

There are various more specialized potions, which fill different niches. Free Action potions remove stuns, for example. Ironshield potions raise your armor level — it’s typical for a tank to chainchug those in some encounters in order to stay alive.

Morale / Power: Very useful, crafted by Scholars, also given out as quest rewards and random treasure drops. They are level gated, so you can only use a potion of a certain power at your level, although there are crafting crits that are more powerful. Potions are on a cool down. I think just about everyone carries a stack of these, especially at higher levels, as they are a great “oh crap” item.

Hope Tokens: These are consumable items that give a short term Hope buff, useful in counteracting the dread of certain boss fights. Most high levels carry these, as high levels of dread pretty much hose you in fights.

Scrolls: These are items crafted by Scholars that provide a short term buff to melee/missile/tactical damage and avoidance.

Ailment Cure Potions: These are the weakest potions in the game. They remove certain types of ailments, such as disease, poison, etc. However, they are limited in power, so they will only remove ailments of a certain strength. In addition, they only remove one of that type of ailment. That means if you have several disease ailments on you (which is pretty much standard for a monster who does disease), you will only get 1 ailment removed. In addition, there is a cool down on the usage, so if you don’t get the ailment off you want, you are kind of hosed. They do have limited usefulness, especially the Fear removing potions, as for a Minstrel there are Fear ailments that completely bar my ability to heal (or do anything for that matter). If the potion gets off right, you’re a happy camper. If it doesn’t, you’re still hosed.

Of the above potions, I’m really hoping we get to spend some time on the Cure ones. The others are pretty useful, but I don’t know how much of a market there is for them on the Auction House.

Plus, there’s these annoying fear debuffs called “dreads” and “major dreads” (unrelated to the dread system) that remove, in the case of the major dreads, more than 200 will and fate, and over a hundred in the case of the dreads. This basically means that my total power (governed by will) is shot down to the bottom of the toilet, and my power and morale regen in combat (governed by fate) is all but nil. And, since will also governs out of combat power regen, it sends my downtime sky-high as well.

A lot of the boss fights have timed debuffs that can, in some cases, kill you when they expire. And even in non-boss fights, I often have timed poisons or wounds that on expiration stun me for 15 seconds, or root me for a long time, which means that they have to be removed.

So yes, at the lower levels, debuff removal potions aren’t very important. But at high levels, they’re well worth even 8 silver apiece.

And then of course, you have the athelas (healing) and celebrant (power/mana) potions. But those are harder to get ahold of, as the debuff removal potions can be bought at a vendor, while the athelas and celebrant potions are player crafted, or given out as the occasional quest reward. However, they’re still quite handy if you do have some.

I didn’t like the shuffle on my archer because it took so long. I’d be standing there for like a minute casting transfer and heal spells until I was ready to continue. Also recall that you have to have at least one full bar to start the shuffle efficiently, and without reliable drains, potions or healing kits would get my cycle going. It’s not like the potions were expensive… I wager the scarabs and whatnot cost more, actually.