Eurek the Alchemist is sadly useless...

Seriously...who does this? I like the idea of being able to make Summoning Rocks and Magic Rocks on Victoria Island - better than having to go to El Nath to buy them at reasonable prices!!! What do you say about updating Eurek so he's a little more useful?

 

It does, as well as having to go through that long chain of quests Alcaster has you go through. I think what is most galling about Eurek's request here is that you only get 5 stones. Increase the number of stones to like...I don't know...50? and people might use it. Steel Plates may be worth 10K a pop in FM, but they're the least difficult to acquire. The other options don't make sense, though, either. Yeti Horns, Lucida Tails, Zombie's Lost Tooth, Bain's Spiky Collar, and Cerebus Tooth are all in the Orbis / El Nath region - why wouldn't anyone just go through the trouble of that long quest line instead of collecting these items for 5 rocks at a time? Even Ghost Pirate Key and Buffy Hat - Ludibrium is close enough to El Nath to make a quick jaunt down the elevator is worth it. The Magic Rocks require a different set of items (except for Taurospear Horns and Kargo Eyes), but all the others require a different refined ore - like Topaz, Adamantium, and one even requires Mithril!! Mithril runs for 30K a plate - that's just WRONG...Only an insane person would use a Mithril Plate to acquire 5 Summoning Rocks. I don't know the figures, exactly, to make this economically comparable to Alcaster's set of quests. Suffice it to say, when considering your options of going through a long arduous quest set so you can always acquire cheap rocks from Alcaster versus small arduous processes to get rocks from Eurek, the balance is nowhere close to even. Eurek's should be just painful enough to make Alcaster may seem slightly tempting to do. As it stands, Alcaster wins without a fight.

 

Any NPC can do a quest - I'm talking about his secondary function.