Chef Archive

I'm rather suprised that this hasn't been brought up more on these forums, but I think one issue that we should bring up would be to have a better indicator for players to know how full they are and how much longer they have on their buffs. Not only chef buffs, but also those in use from spice and enhancements from doctors.

The character (ctrl - p) page is too big to keep up all the time, even when I'm running 1280 res. But it doesn't help when the fullness indicator doesn't seem to show much. Sure it shows a bunch of bars when you eat something, and those bars decrease as time passes by. I'm sure this is a % behind the scenes and its just given a pretty color to make it cool looking, but it would really be nice to see more numbers (or a better way to view information about buffs).

Introducing new toggleable GUI display - The buff indicator

This GUI display would be toggled on by default and you would be able to change it in either the character or options menu (I think character would be best to make it easy to find). It would be a small window (that could be expanded much like the radar for size) that had 4 bars either going horizontal or verticle. The 4 bars would indicate Food, Drink, Enhancements, and Spice. The food and drink bars would have two color tones. The background of it would indicate your fullness level and would be a darker color. The forground color would be the same color but lighter and would indicate the least amount of time before a buff wore out. Also this GUI could display the amount of time below the bars to give some numbers so you know exactly how long before you need to rebuff in case you are in a sticky situation.

Regarding rebalancing - creating a diverse proffession

When they rebalance food they should attempt to add more variety to foods to make them more unique. As is the case with most every other crafting profession, only the masters sell a good amount of product on the market because they have all the schematics and can choose from the best. They also have the most experimentation points to put into their foods as well. There should be tradeoffs for choosing a specific line when you first become a novice. Right now there is already a defined tradeoff between choosing drink or food. Food and drink both have their own fill bar, so the only 2 lines to distiguish would be between desserts and entree's. It is my personal wish to see deserts get powerful but short duration buffs, while entrees are less in effectivness but have higher durations. As you progress up any of the trees the schematics buff more attributes but the additional attributes should come at a significant cost in resources required. This would create foods that are targetted at a specific area for buff at a lower cost, while the higher up schematics would have more usefullness overall but be a higher price due to resources and components required.

Introducing a new variable on food - digestion rate

To give novices a market a new variable should be introduced (or be made visible to the players) called digestion rate. This variable would not be able to be modified by experimentation, as we already have more than enough attributes to effect to make our food distinctive even though its the same dish. Another reason this value should remain constant is to make it easier to balance and create less possible bugs

Digestion rate creates built in downtime - a more balanced game.

So say when they rebalance they could make some buffs have larger buffs for a short duration (5-6 mintues). The digestion rate could be 8-10 mintues for the food to fully digest, so there would be some downtime where a character couldn't be uber buffed 100% of the time with this high buff item. On the other hand they could make another dish give a lesser amount of buff, but the duration would be 30 mintues on it. With the digestion rate of this item it would take 35-40 mintues to fully digest it.

In conclusion I think the addition of a simpler way to monitor the length buffs are in effect and when you can rebuff would be a great addition to the game. Not only for chefs but the other buffing classes. I think that each tree of the profession should have its own logical tradeoffs on why you would want to make those items first. Also, within these trees each tier should become more difficult to make in the means of resources. To compensate for the cost of production each tier should have more attribute modifiers in their buffs. Hopefully this will create a varied price on food so that if a casual player wants to buy a buff but doesn't have the money for an entree's IV dish, he can try out a entree's 2 dish that suits his needs better. I hope this post wasn't too long, what do you think?