Thanks for playing as always!
My brain will never get used to countering electricity with ice and water with electricity.
I think water being weak to electricity makes sense, but electricity being weak to ice is very arbitrary indeed. I don't really know how to structure the weaknesses in a fair way otherwise. It would make sense to have each element be both super-effective *and* weak to its counter, e.g. water is weak to electric and electric is weak to water, but wouldn't that simplify things too much? It would also mean that logical counters would no longer work without some sort of pattern breaking: fire wouldn't be weak to water anymore, for once.
Unless I'm mistaken, the barrier spell's calculations does not consider current elemental afflictions. So if you're wet and use fire on yourself the barrier breaks leaving you wet because it thinks you are going to be set on fire.
Yes, this is in fact how it works. I could make it so self-inflicted statuses don't trigger the barrier, but I'm not a fan of breaking generality like this.
[Recipes do] cause some "wait do I have that in this run?" moments. I know that there's an icon on the bottom left but it's not exactly immediate.
Yeah, it's an added cognitive load on the player. I could highlight the player's current recipes in a dedicated UI gizmo, perhaps icons running on the top edge of the screen or next to the alchemy text on the bottom right.
I think volatile tar used to be harder to make, now it's much easier to use and combo with fire.
It is in fact easier to make now, all the special chemicals had their recipes flattened to only use base stuff. I can tweak the numbers a bit on the tar, perhaps make it so it can't self-trigger when an attack has fire + tar, but I don't mind it being powerful. I want the player to have fun.