Throwing holy water at demons should be buffed way over its current 2d6 damage, because it’s a fun interaction. Instead, it should severely weaken them, cancel them, stun them, and/or do a large amount of damage (perhaps 50% or some proportion of their max HP, possibly exempted for demon lords whose fights it would trivialize).

A radically different system from how alchemy currently works, known as “1 + 1 = 2”: no matter how many potions are in the stacks being dipped, only one from each stack is consumed, and two alchemized potions are always produced.

• Intended as a balance fix for the player’s current ability to make stacks and stacks of full healing, gain ability, or gain level potions, and promote use of found potions instead of diluting them.
• Significantly, potions of holy water mostly work like they do now - the holy water does not mix with anything and is consumed, while the dipped item becomes blessed - but you can only dip a singular item into the holy water, including other potions. This loss of the ability to mass-produce holy water creates a significant balance change.
  • Or it could sometimes make two holy waters, but be biased against it, and allow both waters to become uncursed in the process.
  • Still unbalanced, since holy water can otherwise be mass produced through water prayers and blessed confused remove curse.
• Undiluted potions can be duplicated by dipping them in normal water, e.g. one potion of gain level + one water = 2 diluted potions of gain level.
  • Diluted potions may need to have weaker effects to compensate for this, or undiluted potions stronger effects.
  • Or potions in general should become rarer, and possibly generate diluted.

Remove holy/unholy water’s ability to bless/curse items. Instead, make blessed and cursed oil serve the same functions. Dipping a stack of uncursed oil in holy/unholy oil will bless or curse the stack, as currently works, but since oil is significantly less easy to get than water, this makes mass-blessing of items harder to accomplish.

Anointing an item with holy or unholy oil ignores effects that would normally happen because of the oil. For instance, dipping an oil lamp in holy oil will just bless it, or do nothing if it was blessed already.

Priests now start with a stack of 4 holy oil.

Water doesn’t get outright removed - other things still dilute to it and turn into it in random alchemy - but it’s not much use anymore except for on-the-go dilution.

Not specified whether you could pray to get a stack of oil potions on an altar blessed, or whether this wouldn’t work.

Temple priests can sell holy water as a donation benefit.

Aligned priests can sometimes generate with 1-2 holy water instead of 1-2 of their spellbooks. Moloch priests will get unholy water rather than holy.

You can’t produce more holy or unholy water by dipping. Instead, each water can be dipped into a largeish but finite number of times.

Holy water fountains in temples (would require balancing though).

Saltwater or murky water, intended as a nerf for “just dilute most potions”:

• Potions of saltwater behave exactly like potions of water, except that they cannot be used to bless or curse things. Holy (and unholy) water must be pure.
• All in-game sources of water except for magic fountains (possibly regular fountains as well, but they might be too plentiful) are saltwater. Diluting potions in them will yield only potions of saltwater.
• Can also get pure water if a unicorn horn dip would already result in water.
• Not specified what cancelling potions should do. Possibly most potions just cancel to saltwater, juice or sickness. It’s weird because flavor-wise it shouldn’t produce anything but pure water, but it obviously won’t fix the current problem if you merely have to cancel potions instead of diluting them.
• If called murky water instead of saltwater, the “murky” randomized potion appearance should change.

Alternatively, don’t actually make saltwater a separate potion; just use saltwater as a flavor reason for why the player can’t intentionally dilute potions to water. (Can use a separate flavor argument, that potions are generally corked while not used, to explain away the lack of dilution for water damage.) Also, make most potions cancel into non-water base potions (such as confusion and hallucination to booze), with the notable exception of polymorph. It’s also harder or impossible to get water from random alchemy or polymorph.

A third option is naming blessing-capable potions “purified water” and leaving the mundane potion of water as it is. Things such as unicorn horns can neutralize toxins but can’t actually remove them, so the resulting water isn’t purified.

A priest-friendly artifact that is a potion or tool that acts as a “holy water well” - maybe it slowly but infinitely fills up with holy water, up until it is full.