Recently, having been inspired by a number of things, I decided my new project would be focused primarily on alchemy. While this works on an aesthetic and story level, I'm having trouble making it work outside of those two things. Most games that include alchemy often use it as part of their crafting system, such as the Atelier series, but not much beyond that (at least, as far as my understanding goes), but I was looking for something more than that. While I was planning on including a similar system for crafting, I mainly wanted there to be some way to have the player essentially use alchemy to fight off enemies.
Sadly, the most I can come up with for this is:
Allowing the player to "reforge" weapons in battle to react to different enemies (i.e. changing a Sword to a Spear to deal with an enemy weak to Pierce attacks).
And not much else.
Any ideas on how to go about this whole alchemy-based combat system?