Chef Archive

Hehe, SoW potions, I like it (for those that didn't play EQ, SoW was a spell that would increase your running speed).

Couldn't we make the Secondary buffs last longer?

and make the Primary buffs stronger and not increase their duration?

or switch it around primaries last longer and secondaries are stronger?

Grrrr, for some reason the window decided to enter that. Try two.

From a non-Chef though someone who does dabble in Artisan Domestic: Why I dont' bother with food.

Its a pain in the patookis!

Its doesn't stack in any meaningful way, and even if it did it buffs so little for so short a time its 100% not worth inventory slots when adventuring or crafting. If I have a couple of things I want to buff under different circumstances I have to guess how many buffs of each kind I will need and pre-buy and carry them. If I guess wrong (i.e brought a lot of action & action regen for sampling and only a little health/con regen foor - then end up getting jumped repeatedly by aggros) - the food is of no use.

Part 1.

Thinking of it as a buff system.

I can carry a limited number of short duraction buffs - each costing me one inventory slot. My inventory is at a premium. Bad.

I have to find a chef shop and know in advance what buffs I will want, and manage to prepurchase the right ammounts of the right foods. Since they don't stack in any useful way- trying to keep them on hand will fill up my bank *and* my inventory. Too much hassle.

If I am out away from my home and bank, I have to have correctly guessed the type and ammount of buffs I would want. If i guessed wrong, no buffs for me! Since I'm still learning, and often wrong, this is too much trouble.

Tryingto learn what food does what and even find food vs. spices required lots of web research. The bazaar organization for selling food as buffs is worthless. Anther royal pain in trying to use food.

Now assuming I guessed right, brought the right buffs, and had the open inventory enough to carry them: They aren't that amazing and you don't know when they wear off - and its annoying to have to reclick inventory over and over to make sure they stay up. I mught have gotten it all right and still end up unbuffed. So what was the use to me? Its just another pain.

You can't cancel buffs to replace them with more useful buffs if your situation changes. Yuck.

I know that food buffs, I've researched food buffs. The system is too cumbersome and painful for the end-user to use regularly. The two cases that eliminate most of the negatives are when you want to equip armor and need one dose of specific buffs (you know what you need from seeing armor - no guessing) - so you buy it, eat it asap (taking transient inventory space) and done. Also pet food - where you experiment the quantity up to be inventory efficient.

Every game with short duration buffs that are weak and need to be continuously reapplied has been boo-ed by the players. Most reputable games let you cancel friendly buffs and replace them with others on an as needed basis. These buffs are not only weak, but cause the user to loose inventory spots - which are limited and management of this limit is a key game trait in this game. So the food user gets doubly hit. If you fix the short duration without fixing the inventory and non-cancel issue - then you'll just have people thinking they should use food but whining harder about how unfriendly the system is to the end user.

Part 2.

Now think of it as a roleplay system.

You can't see food drink to admire it.

You can't see an animation when eating or drinking.

You get no message that you just " ... ate a slice of wedding cake." for other to appreciate and interact with your eating.

You get nice names and icons and less roleplay feed back than most one-player games. Errrrm.

It is really all about the buff strengths rather than the duration if you think who will be eating these foods, the fighter! I am certain that anyone fighting a tough mob would choose something that gives 500 buff for 5 minutes over the one that gives 250 for 10 minutes. Why? very simple, battles dont last very long and also you can keep eating as soon as your buff runs out! This is much much more benefitial for us since it keeps the consumption. I can envisage even some food like high caloric deserts giving very high buffs for very short time to secodary attributes (since these are what you need in that dire situation when your health is dropping like crazy!).

So there would be a type of food that you eat before you go to fight, for the primary attributes and then those you take during the battle to boost your secondaries when things are not going well.

We should all wear badges that say "it's the buff stupid" !
just my 2 credits
Bio

Here are the two main problems with Chef and potential solutions:

1. Weak Buffs - Our buffs just don't compare to Spice or Doctor Enhancements, despite the fact at all we can do is buff. However, increasing the power of our buffs could lead to some pretty ridiculous characters if they also used Spice and Dr Enhancements. As a solution, I like the idea of giving Chefs skill buffs. These skill buffs should have long duration, because it's a real pain to go in to your inventory ever 3-5 minutes to rebuff.

2. Redundant Skill Lines - The differences between Entrees, Desserts and Mixed Drinks are entirely superficial. All the lines can accomplish the same things. No other crafting career is (wisely) like this, their skill lines offer clearly different abilities. If we retain the HAM buffs system (skill buffing would be better), each line should target different stats--Entrees, health, str, con; Desserts, action, qui, sta; Drinks, mind, foc, wp. If we switch to skill buffs, Entrees could help Brawlers and Marksmen; Drinks could help Entertainers and Scouts; Desserts could help Medics and Artisans; or something like that.

For part two of my post, I wish to further elaborate on why changing our buffs it skill buffs is a great idea:

1. As I mentioned before, increasing the power of our current buffs would create some pretty heinous characters, if they used Spice and Dr Enhancements too (correct me if I'm wrong, but the three would stack). You could have characters running around with 4000 health and action, more probably.

2. There are 9 stats we can affect, yet there are 13 skills we can learn to affect them (4 entree, 4 dessert, 4 drinks, 1 master chef). The Devs will never be able to make the 13 skills seem different under these conditions. There are dozens of skills that could be modified--speed, accuracy, alertness, dancing, defense, leadership, harvesting, crafting, experimentation, surveying, taming, wound treatment, slicing.... that's 13 off the top of my head, and they could be further divided (rifle speed, pistol speed, stun defense, dizzy defense, armor crafting, weapon crafting, etc).

3. It creates a new market. Rather than having us compete with Smugglers and Doctors, we get our own market, which means all three classes do better.

One last comment... Is it just me or should a pet Rancor require more food than a pet Gubbur?

I dunno, those Gubbur's are hungry critters.

On a serious note, creating our very own market would be nice.

"If a Doctor can buff your stats for 1500 for an hour. A chef needs to be able to do more."

Incorrect. A chef needs to be able to buff your stats 1500 for 5 minutes, and I'd be more than happy. Why? Because anyone can use a chef buff anywhere, anytime, thus, you just have to buy it, and when you need it you use it. No advance planning required. If they made chef buffs that lasted an hour for 1500 buff, do you think that doctors would be very useful? No. They'd be crying out "OMG OUR BUFFS SUCK! GIVE US BETTER BUFFS, OR NERF THE CHEFS".

Buffs usable any time are much better than buffs that need a doctor in a medical center/with a medical bot out to apply.

The devs have obviously placed a lot of effort into the balancing of buffs, and though its not correct at the moment, its nowhere near as out of whack as some may think. Double the effects of most buffs and we'd be perfectly fine.

Wrong, J2xC.

If you can have a chef buff that gives you +900 hit points for an hour, but there's also a doctor buff that gives you +900 hit points for an hour, which do you choose?

You choose BOTH. Our buffs use the food/drink meter, doctor buffs do not. You can have both at the same time for +1800 hit points for an hour. We are not in competition with doctors.

I'm not a chef, but I play a combat class that would really like to be able to justify to himself paying the money for chef food. So take my statements for what they're worth. One of the above posters suggested that as a general rule, they might make it so primary stat food gives big bonuses over relatively short periods and secondary stat foods smaller bonuses over longer periods. I know that I would SO be beating down the door of my local chefs if they could offer me that. What I would really love is some +100-200ish, stackable food/drink that lasted 20-30 minutes for my secondary stats. Oh, I'd very, very cheerfully take 45+ minutes, but I'd be perfectly happy with 20-30 as that would, for me at least, make armor a practical proposition. But with the current buff durations, it simply isnt worth it. Given what you folks have to charge due to material cost, I simply can't afford to buff up before each and every mission lair. (And I shudder to think of how quickly I'd burn through my cash reserves if I burned a full set of chef buffs before each lair if I werent grinding missions.)

most people are already too lazy to go for doctor buffs. If we could do the exact same, without needing a doctor on hand, no-one would go for them at all. our buffs should be better overall, and with the additional boost to effect they would be, even without an extra duration boost.

Doctors will be able to charge less for their buffs as they last for so long, but we get to sell more and people will still generally prefer our buffs because of the added flexibility. How many doctors have you seen hanging around the medical center on dathomir? I haven't seen one yet(and yes, I do spend a fair amount of time there, so I do know). The main market for chefs is with high level players that have spare cash and need that little extra. They dont want to go looking around for a doctor. They just want the boost usable when they run into that extra tough mob they couldn't normally take.

To cater to this market I'm now collecting the best resources I can from around the galaxy and will soon be selling combination packs of quick booster "lunchboxes", consisting of a few stacks of buffs in a bag, that'll do different things, like eliminating downtinme, significantly reducing special move costs, or increasing ham bars. I think you need to play a proper fighter character to fully understand whats important in the buffs, and to also consider how it'll affect general game balance with other existing professions. Currently we're underpowerred, and we need a bit of a boost, however the suggestions a lot of people here are making are selfish like the creature handlers who think its perfectly fine to have three rancors that can each single-handedly take on several maxed out combat characters. By being a profession dedicated to making buffs, we should have the best buffs OVERALL, that doesn't necessarily mean we need the longest lasting buffs(they go to doctors) or the highest boosting buffs(they go to smugglers). We should be getting useful(not overpowerred)buffs, which are fairly inventory efficient, flexible and have no downtime.

Out of those four, we already have two perfectly coverred: Our buffs have no downtime, and they're flexible. There's countless different combinations of buffs you can use, while doctors are mainly limited to improving ham pools, and smugglers can only have one spice active at a time(which generally concentrate on a certain area of stats). The inventory efficiency is only a problem because of a bug. Once crates are working, you can have a crate of 25 stacks, with each stack having between roughly 3 and 10 uses... so 75-250 uses for 5 inventory space... I think thats pretty efficient.

The main issue is the effectiveness. Since we can have multiple buffs active simultaneously, this is by far the hardest to balance. If each one added 1500 as some people suggest, our buffs would be four times as powerful just on pure effect alone. That's just silly. The total combination possible should probably be around 3000-4000 altogether, for 10 minutes, or 1000 for half an hour. And it shouldn't be a question of one or the other. This goes under flexibility. Since we're a flexible profession, we should be able to provide buffs to cater for weaker long term effects as well as stronger short term buffs. If somethings going to only last for 3 minutes, then a buff of 1500 on a singleuse should be possible.

this game is really not done well enough for the chef to be a useful profession for along time

They need to do so much more to how everything works before they even look at buffs ..

Its just poorly thrown together for rush deliveries , they needed to keep it in beta longer for balancing but after they fixed a few major game play bugs released the game..

Thats why I don't beleive chef will be adressed till every other combat profession is debuged and every other combat profession has a ton of issues , putting the chef so far behind its going to be ages before they even begin to look at the profession.

Because how they released the chef tells me they had no plans of making it a Vital class too the game , its just one of those "cool idea" classes they wanted to add some flavor , this class is not broken it was just never conceved as a necissary part of the game , otherwise it would have been looked at before the release of the game.

This developer had chefs in his original game Ultima Online who were originaly suposed to do the same thing as these chefs , well Still too this day the chef in UO does not buff anything worth paying for its product , But at least the UO chef can make War Paint out of berries..

Currently at Mix 3 Dessert 4 cooking 4 Entries 2 and I have no will to keep crafting I have enough supplies tobecome master chef but the only point too do it is for 1 buff.

I think one good idea that I've seen has been having various recipes for different uses. Sure, the combat classes aren't going to need 30-60 minute buffs, since they're generally going to finish up their fighting much sooner. But imagine having a mid-to-high level drink that added 500 stamina for an hour. Go to your local cantina/hotel, give one of those to an entertainer, and I can probably guarantee you'd have a loyal customer who'd buy 3-5 dosesof those a day. If it alsobuffed quickness, that would be even better.

A long duration focus/willpower buff would be snapped up by those poor artisans who can't afford a harvester and have to sample their resources. Especially if it was a different type from the action buff above (one's a drink, the other's food). And since no one seems to like those afk macro samplers,here's our chance to exploit them. The serious ones already use the /ui trick, they'll just put the snack in their toolbar. Medics at a hospital might also use that, although I'm not sure how much healing they do in one long stretch.

As for charges, I think that we should be able to stack identical items. If the only difference between two Sunburns is that onehas 3 doses and an ID tag of 34ksjr81 and the other isID23ylp1z with 2 doses, why not be able tocombine them into a single 5 dose stack(especially since we've been told the item database is out of whack because of space issues). We remove a full row from the database, and just update the charge column of a second. This would also remove a discouragement to using our wares, as Hechicera mentioned inventory space is usually at a premium. I've done up batches of unexperimented food for a CH friend's pet, and since I generally use the same ingredients, why not just have stacks for each of the success types (moderate, great, amazing, etc) since those will have different bonus values. The only reason I can think of not to do this is if food had decay (since the two stacks would have been around for different times), but AFAIK that's not implemented.

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Jazuhl wrote:
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2. Redundant Skill Lines - The differences between Entrees, Desserts and Mixed Drinks are entirely superficial. All the lines can accomplish the same things. No other crafting career is (wisely) like this, their skill lines offer clearly different abilities. If we retain the HAM buffs system (skill buffing would be better), each line should target different stats--Entrees, health, str, con; Desserts, action, qui, sta; Drinks, mind, foc, wp. If we switch to skill buffs, Entrees could help Brawlers and Marksmen; Drinks could help Entertainers and Scouts; Desserts could help Medics and Artisans; or something like that.

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Yes! This is something I tried to cover in my "Total Plan" post.

There needs to be more difference in the dessert line and the entree line than just saying that one is supposed to be a dessert and the other is supposed to be an entree.

They should be distinct on a game impacting level.

Like....

Entrees should deal with regeneration. Willpower, Stamina and Constitution.

Desserts should deal with usage stats. Strength, Quickness and Focus.

Mixology should be like a "wild card" tree, tending to impact HAM stats but also tending to buff one thing to an extreme value at the cost of some other stat. Like you're mega strong! But you're also mega drunk, so your focus suffers, stuff like that.

That would give us distinct lines and someone wanting to be a buff making chef can look at the lines and decide which to do first, just like an armorsmith has to decide if he wants the armor tree, the layering tree or the shield generator tree, we'd have the regen tree, the usage tree and the HAM tree.