Chef Archive
Thread: Discussion: Quality of Buffs
Something to consider..
The buffs a Chef can give out NEED to be better than both a Smuggler and a Doctor.
Why? Because thats ALL a Chef can do. A Smuggler can slice/shoot stuff/faction.. a Doctor can heal you and Rez.
In reality its not any harder to be a smuggler than a Chef (you only have one tree line.. but try it without Surveying). And while the Doctor is a bit more difficult.. its got a huge payoff as well.
If a Doctor can buff your stats for 1500 for an hour. A chef needs to be able to do more.
Mercy
I know spice is supposed to have drastic short term effects with bad side effects... And that's great...
But no one wants +65 action that they have to HEAL up to in the first **edit** place and only lasts 2 minutes or so... You heal up to it and it's gone? This is realy onlya problem with low level (No cooking lvls) chef food...
My answer is this:
1) The buff should last just as long as it keeps you full... and longer at higher level food so a well fed character could overlap effects from a previous meal... (Since people don't suffer from not eating take what would have been the time between meals and aply that to the length of the buff!)
2) The buff should NOT have to be healed up to!.... You reap the rewards of the meal when you eat the meal! Not 45seconds before you're about to lose the buff!
On a side note! I stongly believe that the quantity of each resource needed to make the food items NEEDS to be cut in half to make food a more affordable and profitable item!
What needs to happen is that they need to fix our friggin factories!
This "max quantity of 1" thing is just killer to a profession built around high-volume, consistent-qualitysales.
I'm withholding judgement on the exact balancing of the buffs until they get that fixed. The problem is that it's hard to make any money at this profession when quality control is basically random when using the crafting station and extremely high cost per serving when using the factory. Get the major bugs fixed then worry about tweaking the balancing of the craft.
Cheers,
Kaizen Jonzun
Proprietor of The Drunken Jester
Naboo - Keren 2380 3819
Anybody play Morrowind? Perhaps you'll recognize this scenario:
Alchemist. Create an Intelligence buff. Since crafting potions is tied to intelligence, more intelligence will lead to better potions. Once you drink that one, create another. This one will be more powerful. Drink it too. Now your intelligence is super high. Make a few more, continue ad infinitum. I think at the end, I had an intelligence potion that lasted 4 hours and gave me absurd amounts of Intelligence. While on my mind high, I created potions of infinite flying, potions of infinte water breathing, potions of infinte etc, etc, etc.
So, Devs, please be verrrry careful when introducing skill buffs. If Chefs can make cakes to buff the crafting skill, Evil and unscrupulous Chefs will chain-buff-craft and createsuper buffs. Within no time, people will be crying nerf, and Chefs will get knocked back down to useless. Don't want to see it happen.
So, skill buffs, YEA! But be careful which skills you allow us to buff.
Tocath - Combat Chef - Kauri
Though it may take longer to get to a reasonable level, instead of a quick-fix solution of pumping all the buffs up(and getting it wrong, and undoing), gradual, less extremeadjustments could be made, while monitoring statistics(because the devs have plenty of these), until the devs are satisfied with the balance.
We're not going to get the buff balancing for a while. The devs have too many other issues to deal with. We do however have more marketable items than many may think. At master I'm selling bulk onitems at the moment: 2 second tier(sunburn, veghash), one third(ice blaster), one fourth(corellian fried ice cream), and four master(breath of heaven, vercupti of blahblah, flameout), and as I get the high quality resourcesneeded, I plan on selling other stuff like thakitillo, vegeparsine(if I can get it better stats than the veghash) and other stuff. Yes, there's not a single novice or first tier item in the mix there... But most other elite crafters cant sell much when they're novice or low tier.We're actually better off than many... at tier II we get a very good item, with high market value... with larger farms, and factories to properly mass manufacture these, we could do quite well for ourselves...
Also, a lot of foods are meant to have global modifiers in addition to their base modifiers. Wedding cake is the most obvious example of these, since it only has these global modifiers, which are currently broken. With these modifiers fixed, food would be A LOT more desirable.
I'm now starting to think that before demanding better buffs, they fix the bugs affecting their quality(wedding cake bug, all the experimentation bugs)and production(flora farms, factories), and making it impossible to see the true value of food. Once these bugs are fixed, and we know how effective food really is, then we can see how bad the balancing is. There is no valid argument the devs can give that there's nothing wrong with these errors. They can however say that they consider the balancing to be good enough till they have more time to get to it.
I guess I just like to play devils advocate 
We're talking aboutconsumable products here... there's guns and armor that take the same amount of materials as some of these foods, and they dont run out in less than 8 minutes. I thinkthe devs are a little too strict on buffs and powerups.
Here's the problem.. theres a few foods that buff like 1000+, and theres foods that are 100 or lower.. what really needs to happen is more foods need to be bumped up to a few hundred. There's not enough medium level buffs that would be useful. How about more 250-400 value buffs. Why does everything have to be either 150 or 1500? I've seen a few, but there doesnt seem to be enough mid-level buffs. Also there needs to be more buffs thatcover4+ stats or so at the same time. Maybe good well-rounded buffs at high level, that buff all your regen's and all your special-move stats better. It's a bit too random if you ask me, making people who would potentially use the buffs, not want to deal with having all these different stat buffs on different foods. The comparability to spices, is that food should be much better.. you're talking about spending more skill points just for food. Spices is only 1 column on smuggler, chef is 4 columns.
Also, the durations are not long enough for some foods. Which makes people also go "why should i bother buffing if it's only a few minutes"
Another idea... how about buffing more than just stats? Why not have defense buffs, or buffs that help aim, etc?
Ireally don't think its asking for much, to have either duration increased and/or higher values on some things.
- Z
the chef even if they were completly ubder would never be cried at dirrectly for a nerf
mainly because your going too make everyone else uber the chef will actually be weak because they have the profession and less skill points.
Ask yourself whats the point of buffs?
I think the point of buffs is to make you Uber not just slightly beter , I wouldnt waist the time for just slightly beter , in every game I have played the Buffs were the almost required
Everquest you needed buffs or you would not have enough hitpoints enough attack speed or anything too take out high level static encounters
DAOC the entire PvP system was balanced around a fully buffed character if you were not buffed you were considered "gimped" byy the developers .
Ultima Online , The game was about Alchemists Kegs you needed them with out them you could just could not finish a fight you would run out of stamina and be unable to move
Shadowbane Buffs could take you from a wimpy useless character to the lord of the battle fieldeven the lowly damage shields could be devestating given the speed of some characters attacks.
Even Games like Warcraft 3 Baldures Gate
Warcraft 3 you need too buff your characters if your not buffing them your not going to win.
Baldures Gate , if you were paying attension and forgot to buff your character for each spacific combat encounter they wouldnt make it past the first attack .
In my opinion , if a buff isnt the game breaking fix your character needs to accomplish his or her goal there is no point in the buff.
If you do just fine naked with a pistol
Why are you going to waist your time too get anything more..
We are in luck
Devs have said:
The Player characters are currently too powerful and exepct some changes
SO either they will make characters even weaker or add even harder monster encounters
which means you will need bigger and better buffs hope they remember that the chef is int there game
Give me food with a base duration of 1800 seconds and I'll eat 3 meals a day. I would actively seek out the right foods for my character.
As it is now, the only foods I eat are Teltier Noodles and Caf, and those I eat *after* fighting (but before healing) to decrease down time, and I only eat those because I can make them myself and don't have to spend the time to find them. The short duration on foods makes them unreliable for battle, and, IMHO, is the only chef game-breaker.
Fighters shouldn't have to use food just for one encounter, but for an entire hunting trip. Then when its time to camp they can break open their pack of food and rebuff. This makes sense in real life, and I think it makes using food much more in game.
Some Chefs want short and sweet buffs so they can make a killing in profit from selling high volume. I think you'll get more volume if the food actually last longer than 5 minutes and it makes it worth the time to bother double clicking that piece of food. As it is now, its too much of a bother to constantly eating a peice of food to keep your buffs up doing a hunting trip.
You know, I think the solution to the problem of buffs is not justa matter of doing ONE thing to them, like extending them, or changing them.. I think what we need to look at at some different solutions.
I agree that for a hunt, you'd probably want to eat while camping, go hunting, and then eat again when you make camp again...
Problem is.. how long between camps? This would vary depending on your group, the prey on your hunt and probably quite a few other factors... so as far as the purpose goes, you're bang-on, but I doubt that it's feasible to set a duration which matches the duration of your hunt.
It might instead be interesting to do something similar, but with a slight variation:
When you eat a food you get +skill for X seconds.. if you eat two similar foods you get 2*+skill but still only X duration, since they run out at the same time...what if duration on identical foods was stacked as well? This would effectively solve the problem, as far as I can see... you would have to effectively consider your eating habits.. do you want to buff a small set of skills for an extended duration or would you rather spread out your benefits by eating a variety of snack, at the cost of duration? (sidenote: I just now realize that I don't know if hey actually do this 
)
So: a solution which might be simple and doable would be to stack duration as well as skill bonus on identical snacks! so if you have a 300 second snack and after 100 seconds you munch another, your buff now runs for a total of (600-100 = 500 seconds)
Another, more complex solution might be for chefs to be able to make entire meals... add new recipes to the list and make them consist, not of components, but of complete dishes.. an antree, a drink and a dessert for instance, might make a meal, and the combination of the three would accumulate both bonus and duration by simple addition. The more I think about it, the more I actually think this would be an excellent idea, since these would be harder to make (greater variance in ressources required), and it would be possible to make "trade-mark" dishes. In fact, why not make a generic item that is craftable called "Field Ration", which accepts foods similar to the way backpacks and clothes with slots in them work... this item might have slots like clothes, meaning that the more slots you have, the more foods can be placed in them. These would off course be non-stackable, which might detract some, but hell... if you go hunting for an extended period of time with medics and entertainers.. maybe it's time you brought along you own chef as well
Comments welcome