Development Cycle Archive
Thread: IT 6-2: Chef Revamp
Chef Profession Revamp:
Very good. I like it. It makes the profession unique in many ways. This is how I see a new chef:
- Buffs absolutely everything (Useful for all professions)
- Make Large quantities (Which has it's problems)
- Generic ingredients, but ALL stats are important
Food Experimentation:
4 Bars to fill. I had problems choosing between 3. However, it definitely adds a challenge since you can't have everything. However, I don't think the balance of the profession reflects the fact that you would be extremely lucky to get over 60% on all 4 bars.
Player Stomach:
It take too long for stomach to empty. Early reports say 45 minutes to empty. That would be good, if it's true. 30 minutes would be better. This relates back to the experimentation. It looks like with 100% Flavor, certain buffs would last 1 hour, or as long as stomach filling would, provided you were 100% full. However, you can't get the flavor to 100% and expect to get decent filling experimentation, so you're stuck with not being able to take the food you want, or having it wear of before you can take more. This follows with skill buffs as well.
Food Effects:
Overall, good. Lots of variety, and no need for artisan buffs once you're a chef. There are some notable excepttions. Chandad gives ~+10 surveying for some time. Since Novice Artisans get +20, +15 after level 1, and a total of 100 at survey 4, it's never going to be useful. There are others, but I'll leave this brief.
Level Progression:
I thought I'd add this, since it was listed in the Top 5 for Chef since the beginning. I love the fact that all artisan food has a better replacement in Chef. This means you don't have to keep master artisan, and can still make good food. However, the fill for these better buffs conteracts the increased skill bonus. You can't stack skill buffs, so why have this negative impact? I think an average filling of 20 (instead of 30) would be a better value.
A notable exception to this is Correlian Ale (Wound Healing Music), and Caramelized Pkneb (Wound Healing Music). Why make one music and one dance? Why not both Dance/music, and do the same progression from artisan to chef as all the others?
HAM Buffs:
I'm going to post more detailed information on this in the chef board, but basically, the HAM buffs don't appear very ballanced to me. Since they stack, you can take multiples of each. However, Most chef food is only marginally better than Artisan food, and some is actually worse.
Compared to the old chef food, I think it's about the same as before, which isn't great, but I can live with it.
Milking:
I like it, once I find a good source of domesticated milk. Right now, Lesser Plain bols give it, but at 10 per Bol, it takes forever to get a decent amount.
Drink Containers:
I've only managed to make Small and Large glasses so far. Large Glass requies 10x more resources, and gives 1.5-2x more uses. Completely useless. I won't be using anything but small glasses unless this changes.
It should have a natural progression, with a bit of a boost.
Eg) 10x resources -> 12x quantity
Bio-Engineered Additives:
I haven't tried them yet, but it's a good idea. Adding to experimentation will really help things.
Overall, the more I analyze and write about these new buffs, the more I like them. Good work.
---------------------------------------------------------------- Overall, it appears to me that this revamp was thrown together quickly without really thinking about it----------------------------------------------------------------
*chuckles*
Your kidding right? This has taken an extreme amount of time and testing and development. Kudos to GM for his hard work on it.
From what ive seen on there, the new food items are incredible. Do you know there is a drink item that well decrease your incap time. Or theres one that will lower your burst run cost and increase the length or speed (i dont remember which).
The only thing i see as a problem is the empty time. There needs to be some give and take. I assumed that it takes 1 hour to go from "completely Full" to "completely Empty" and during that time food slowly decays allowing you to add more. This is one of the draw back of food, spice has downers, food and drink have limits.
Overall i think the changes are great. Im looking forward to seeing it go live.
KStarfire
1. 1-hour Digestion: This is, quite simply, too extreme. It unfairly places huge limitations on every chef product, more so than any other buff in the game. Reduce this to 30 minutes or so, or you will see chef's everywhere go bankrupt.
2. While I think the skill buffs are absolutelt awesome, the absense of any real good stat buffs is discouraging. Your changing the entire focus of the profession, and I think that makes alot of people uncomfortable.
3. This profession looks impossible to level as of right now. After reading the changes, I actually thought long and hard about buying a second account just to have a chef, but I cant see myself grinding for days just to get a level one box. Something needs to change here.
4. Old Chef products need to work...period! To make millions of crates of food unusable is simply unacceptable.
Other than that, Im really looking forward to the new changes. I think you all did a good job overall, but there are those few kinks that need to be worked out.
Just my two cents.
Just a cut and paste from a post to the chef forum:
A food should temporarily patch up a weakness. For instance, as a crafter I chose to have low Health and Action bars. So, I use a Sunburn to stabilize HAM costs to those bars when I need to fight. If a thing onlygoes only 10% of the way tosolving my problem, I won't go look for it. In that spirit:
Skill Buffs, from foods at the chef level,should temporarily sew up a weakness. A defence against intimidation buff should insure that for a period of time the user is meaningfully insulated against intimidation. In other words, the buff should +50% or more, not +7%. The skill buffs either need to be radically enhanced, or skill buffs need to be stackable.
The bar was set for stat buffs by the enahncement of doctor buffs. I understand thatdoctors actually have to be present to delivertheir buffs, and thatmakesthem a somewhatdifferent consideration. Nevertheless, I considered our best buffs in the old menu (fishak, boh, sunburn, GGP) to be at the low end of average in a world that contains +1500, hour+ long buffs. I was looking for buffs, especially at the Master Level, that really wowed me. I mean +1000 buffs that last30 mins. We perhaps do not understand the new combat system well enough to judge what is and isn't going to be a good buff goiong forward... but nothing I've seen leads me to believe that our ability to stat buff has been enhanced in any way. Let me repeat that: nothing I've seen leads me to beleive that our ability to stat buff has been enhanced in any way.
To whit:
We need much more meaningful skill buffs, or else they need to made stackable. A skill buff food should clear up a deficiency for a period of time: a 75% defence against dizzy for 30 mins, a +40 mask scent for 30 mins, a +30 ranged weapon accuracy for 30 mins, etc.
We need more meaningful stat buffs. A stat buff should clear up a deficiency for a period of time.The high end of our old stat buffs should be considered average in the new buffs.Master Level foods should buff stats +1000 for a good long duration - or the equivalent of this kind of buff under the new system.
All buffs should bedesirable to players generally, orhighly desirable for a niche of players.
Thanks for yer ear.
Hero
~
Ok, now to more serious concerns, one of the first ones that is a serious concern in the immediate future is the bug that crated food made before the patch only comes out with one charge and has no stats (i.e. is useless). Is this a nerf of old food or not?
Second why are the stat buffs so low and so limited, while any that could be considered useful have filling of 80%+. If mind is going to be less important in combat why did most all of the mind related buffs disappear and most not just changed but gone (Fishak, Ryshcate, Glazed Glucose Pate, etc.)? If you want to make food far less desirable this is a good approach. Food buffs need to provide a real benefit to using them and as such they need to be in the same playing field as other buffs (doctor, entertainer, spice) in terms of stats affected, level of benefit, and frequency of use available. Currently the new food buffs fall short in every category. In particular, these changes removed every single useful type that chefs currently had but didn't replace them with anything remotely comparable. What fills the Angerian Fishak niche? How about the Breath of Heaven niche? Bivoli? Ryshcate? Glazed Glucose Pate? Considering that most of the best ones aren't even changed they are just gone indicates that this denial of these types (+mind,+focus,+willpower, etc. for 300 to 550) is a conscious decision by the developers.
The skill benefit ones are also too low a level of bonus combined with a short duration and a large filling meaning you can only use them sporadically. This makes them useless across the board.
Milk, hmm still hard as heck to get domestic milk (even Domestic Eopies give wild milk?!?) so that's a lot of still gated recipes.
Padre
Is this going in to Live like this?
Two simple questions.
Padre
- How is the experimentation?
Wont know till after it gets to Live. See, few if ANY people on Test have the ability to gather the massive and uncommon good Flora stuff we need.
What do you think of the new food items?
I think they are cool, but I will miss the ones you took out.
- What are your feelings on the buff effects?
**Sad. As someone else said, they *might* be nice when the new Combat system is in, and these buffs will take their place in that overall system, but for the next 4 months, we will be with fewer sales options than we have now. I say 4 months, because there is absolutely NO reason to expect the next Combat Revamp to be ready till late summer. You guys need to hire more people...
- What do you think of the new Chef hats and aprons?
Nice little novelty thing. is it only white?
- What are your experiences with the new player stomachs?
HORRIBLE!! It shoudl NEVER be more than the duration of the buff itself. Skill or stat buff, it doesn't matter. If something has a duration of 15m 22s, then in 15m 23s we should be able to eat again. Look, these buffs are a VERY pale comparison to the existing buffs of Sunburns, AFS, Flameout, etc... so allow is to become comparable at least by letting people stach the buff. So they eat 4 stacks of something to get an 1800 point Con buff (like Sunburn), but cannot eat anything else. Whats the big deal in that? But bear in mind that this ties in with the part marked by the red asterick above.
- Did you notice the changes?
Unfortunetaly
....Food created before the patch will be unchanged. We encourage all players to seek out and try the new foods!
- What new food effects were you able to create?
I saw the list, but cannot participate because Char Copy is not in yet.
- What are your feelings about the changes?
I think it could be okay as long as you get our pre-Live-Patch issues are fixed. A big one is the bug where existing crated stuff loses it's stats.
- Did you experiment with the foods?
No, Char Copy is not in yet, I wish you guys would just activate it already. What are you waiting for?
- What experiments did you do? What was the outcome?
- What were your food crafting experiences
- Have you milked anything yet?
Yes, as a Novice-ish Scout can do so.
- How much Domestic Milk have you found?
None, didn't have hours to run around looking for the (so far) one creature which gives it.
- How much Wild Milk have you found?
Not enough either. There needs to be a multiplier of 10 applied to all Milking attempts. Do you guys really know how much we need!!?? Or better yet, bring back the Farms you had in Beta so Scouts can plant them and we can have a steady supply of Milk.
- What containers were you able to make?
None, until you activate Character Copy
- What container sizes were you able to make?
- Are Container sizes working as you expected? You forgot this question....
NO, they take a LOT of resources and a set of components...for a Barrel!! Are you KIDDING ME!? Its a piece of metal welded together and with a hole in it. But fine, you want components and high resources, fine. MAKE THE QUANTITY MULTIPLIER MAKE SENSE! Give a Master Chef a REASON to own a TOTALLY DIFFERENT FACTORY, and to craft the parts to mke these. Drinks should not have a Quantity experimentaion, just use the container size. And make it make SENSE! Its easy you know....4 cups in a Quart, 4 Quarts in a gallon, etc.... a cup is a small glass, Quart is a Large glass/bottle (twice the qualntity), and a Jug is 4 bottles, and a Barrel is soemthign like 50 Jugs.
I dont know about you, but I use a speederbike, the only time I burstrun these days is to get a shuttle. Yes, it's "handy" but with the stomache issues, its not really a "must have"
I did say some look OK, but overall, it seems to be a mish mash with some very poorly thought out buffs, low levels, and ridiculously long reuse times.
PadreBook wrote:
Also food removed from prepatch food crates comes out with one charge and no stats--is this intentional?
Is this going in to Live like this?
Two simple questions.
Padre
This is the part that concernsme most. If we could get an answer on this ASAP it would be greatly appreciated. The rest of the changes I will trust that SirVimes and the other TC chefs will give thorough feedback on.
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