At the moment healing in the game can only seem to be done by eating limited food resources. I don’t think this quite works as a general system. It’s primarily an issue as it leads to the slog of needing to fetch your healing materials back. Having ONLY food as a way to heal means your only solution is to end up doing this tiresome trail.
Firstly small food doesn’t heal nearly enough to be considered viable. E.g. a mushroom. I understand this is needed to incentivize the need to cook. But when you’re in a boss fight and need a heal but used all of your heals on the first attempt. Healing what feels like 5% of your health bar every 8 seconds isn’t really going to cut it.
When playing today I got to the first boss with 8 pieces of cooked food. I used all of them on the first attempt (Almost beating him in the process) At which point I ran out of food and had to do all of my subsequent attempts foodless which makes the food feel like its not worth getting if anything
Ideally there should be a healing item which regenerates in a similar way to the estus flask in the souls games as many people have mentioned already. Food can then be supplementary on top of that but not as effective as that regenerative item. The regenerative healing item can then allow you to stay in the flow of progressing to the next checkpoint or challenging the next boss without having to think about the chore of gathering materials.
Being fully healed and having these items replenished by the checkpoints would also be ideal as it gives you something to be rewarded by when finding these checkpoints and stops you having to waste your food.
The combat feels solid but I think making a change like this would make the game flow far better.
Rats are not that easy to find and they don’t drop cooking material every time and once you have cleared an area it gets grindy to just go through empty area just for cooking mats. I hope there’s a refillable flask in the city or some refillable consumables will be added asap
Big issue for me as well, i would like health regen being applied natural and be able improved by a stat slightly
having anything is already helpfull
I jumped down accidently wrong, didnt die but lsot half hp.
food is scarce. ok better kill myself then for the next harsh fight so i preserve food for when i need it.
The biggest issue for me with the limited, craftable meals is that all of them (that I’ve unlocked the recipes for right now) require the specific herb. This means if you don’t have THAT herb, you can’t make the main health items. Yes, they can be found in the world, but they respawn slow. To add insult to injury, the herbalist in the main town of the game, sells a singular herb before he runs out, which is absolutely comical.
theres a lady at the entrance of the town, her inn is burned down and she sends you on a quest to find her husband. hes a cook. once you rescue him he joins the town and he sells unlimited of the intro food items plus advanced recipes. its also relatively cheap at 10 copper or something like that, he also sells that ONE herb you need for everything in unlimited supply. i had the same problem with the healing until i did this quest, after words i feel like i have an unlimited amount of mats.
Farming blood vials was easily the most tedious part of Bloodborne. It was my first soulslike, and I was bad at them.
Healing items that replenish on death is more fun than burning through all of my healing items, then being unable to try the fight again until I take the time to farm up more healing items.
After playing through the first boss only, I got enough to cook 45 mushroom soups which heal all my HP instantly. Didn’t even try to find ingredients, they just so happens to be where I walked. Maybe the game gets harder after Scacrament ? I didn’t feel the need to level up my HP so maybe it’s a high level issue ?
+1 for regenerating estus flask.
This is probably the number 1 QoL item that I’m missing, and you’ve explained it perfectly: it disincentivizes trying hard content, because you’ll run through your limited resources quickly and then have to do a boring slog of farming.
It sounds like we need a whisper bottle that fills up with the blue energy of a whisper, just straight up imitating estus flasks. I assume the idea from the devs was to avoid having the exact system, but as is every game system in this game leads you more and more into a corner.
Here are my examples:
Running can cause your character to jump off a cliff and die, keep in mind a “cliff” in this game can be 8 feet tall and you still die. This makes me nervous to run, but the walking speed is unacceptable. Not to mention holding A down to move at an acceptable pace is an accessibility concern for many
Combat can lead to death and durability loss which also leads you into a corner where you are afraid to fight because if you die you can’t repair your gear due to the cost and the work needed to be put in to gather resources
Healing is limited and on cooldown AND requires crafting. This then couples with the same durability loss problem and combat problem where I can’t allow myself to have FUN because I’m afraid of the intense resource gathering needed to keep playing. I feel TAXED by the game’s mechanics
I tend to explore a lot in these types of games so i haven’t really had to many issues with having enough cooked meals readily available. I ussually have at least 10 on hand.
That being said i think the drop/respawn rates of certain materials should be tuned. For example at one point in time i had almost 60 mushrooms, and 12 crab legs, but couldn’t cook anything becuase herbs are in short supply.
Ya the start is definetly rough in terms of healing items, if you ignore the cook quest like me. Buying the herbs now in unlimited stock, makes the game way more fluent.
There is a health regen stat. I ve got mine on my chest with enchant.
I believe you can buy as many Helmsman’s Jackets from the two sisters as you like and just keep rolling until rngesus is with you.
Absolutely agree about how healing is currently implemented. This games flow is slowed and interrupted by it lacks the rechargeable, static healing solution.
Cooking and food shouldn’t be removed or anything but it is a perfect chance to give them a significantly more interesting role by providing some kind of buff system instead of just various levels of “restore x hp.” Also provides the variety of recipes in the game a chance to shine through at all levels of the game and never get forgotten. It would make what food I use before an encounter a decision, rather than just using whatever food heals most or whatever I happen to have stocked up.
