The cooldown on food items is fine as it is.
It prevents spam healing so you have to actually think about combat rather than trying to brute-force everything.
We don’t need another game where everything is the same as Dark Souls.
Don’t need flasks; don’t need changes to the healing cooldown.
If you’re relying on spam healing to stay alive, that’s not an issue with the game.
The healing cooldown means you need to approach combat more intelligently.
It’s a good mechanic that doesn’t need changing.
SO I AM ASKING YOU, what is a fine state. I am genuinely trying to have a discussion here but you’re waving it off. I outlined clearly why I think the food system is fine as is. I read your initial post, I can see some of the benefits, I do not think removing the cooldown is the answer even with limited carries(20 as you say) because your entire argument is around the fact that it’s “boring” to wait, but you yourself admit you optimize the game, you’re arguing that you can’t be aggressive. There is NOTHING stopping you from being aggressive, from dodging, from parrying. When you heal that’s it you have healed, go back in & fight.
That was actually what i was going for with my proposed food types.
Make food cool but exclusive → No constant swapping of differnt types of foods; You chose the one you like for your build/playstyle and stick with it.
I am sure there could be other exclusive food types, but those three fill all the niche cases i can think of.
@Jinpaw What do you think about Fast Food? Would that solve your issue?
I replied to the wrong person; misread the conversation. Apologies.
In Hollow Knight you can heal aprx. 3 hits.
To Heal ONE hit you have to stay still (you cant move).
If you are out of “soul energy” to heal, you have to hit enemies to refill your soul energy.
→ In boss fights there was no time for me to heal so i ended up to not heal.
Darksouls, you got a few (3-5 or so) flasks, if they are empty your doomed.
You had to rest on a bonfire to refill them
In NRFTW you can have how many heal items for one single fight? hundreds.
They do not refill but you can farm them.
To heal you have to wait the few secounds.
For me its fair
Go out of fights or dodge/roll untill the time is ready
Idk. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with healing or its CD. I thought it was part of the Souls experience.
I would however say that “sleeping” seems useless. It should offer a 20-30 min CD of an overshield or faster healing lag and CD to have some sort of meaningful benefit to sleeping.
Not gonna say it’s a skill thing but maybe a genre kind of thing? It would probably feel like EZ mode with Donald casting Curaga as Goofy chips damage away as Sora hides in a corner kind of feeling.
I just started a new realm and character and the skill development from the first play through feels so rewarding. I hardly die too and I haven’t even allowed any stat points from a level up cuz I wanna build it after I find the right weapon to stick to.
I agreed with you on spamming heals to stay alive is not the right approach to the fight. But saying the currecnt mechanic is good and no need to change is wrong in my opinion.
The problem here is that Foods has both direct heal & buff effect.
Having cooldown as is now, make fully buff yourself take a minute;
Not having cooldown make spamming direct heals possible.
So a possible solution should be remove direct heal from Foods, make them provide buffs and passive Heal-Over-Time (non-stackable), solely to provide recovery outside battle.
And move direct heal to a seperated mechanic with cooldown (eg: HP flask/potion)
Then will make both side happy. In the current system, there is no win-win situation no matter how you tune the cooldown.
but for just buffing you got the other items, like oils to increase weapon damage.
I started playing Jedi Fallen Order today the first time. Here i have two stim packs, witch heals me aprx. 50% of my live and my character is slowed down at the time of taking the stim pack
would you prefere this version? Taking two or three stim packs in a row and not being able to heal more.
I thing there is no best way.
Even if we find the best solution for you, other people will dislike it at the same time.
I now, its not what you want to hear but for me the healing system is part of the game style and part of the difficulty.
I think there is a solution that compromises a few points from all sides.
This transfers the risk from waiting for food to come off of cooldown, to making you be more calculated about when you can eat. This limits the need to breakaway, while also making it a better experience for buffing up pre-fights.
Food providing buffs existed so long in RPG history. People expected that most of them has some buff attached to them.
And nothing feel wrong having food buffs & item buffs exist the same time. Like eating food make your body better in some way, and applying oil to your weapon enchant it will extra property, have no contradiction.
There are already Focus/Stamina potions, I think Health potions fit well in the same category, as long as they cannot spam. I believe resource (HP/Focus/Stamina) instant recovery spamming is bad to the game because they let you ignore game mechanic too early.
If a clear distinguishment is needed, I can think of one:
Food - long lasting character’s stat increase (>5 mins)
Oil - temporary buffs to weapons that increase item performance (<30 secs)
Potion - instant resource recovery (HP/Focus/Stamina) with cooldowns to prevent spamming
I agreed about food drop rate. As I think players are expected to cook food themselves rather than loot food from corpses.
But I think if food are rarier, then they should be higher tiers to stay relevant.
No matter what system are chosen, concept is clear:
The thread is about changing the cooldown not the other way around. Please make your own thread discussing feedback about healing items.
Please stay on topic to the thread.
Thank you for actually sticking to the topic of the thread.
And I like your idea alot, the more options the better for the player base in my opinion.
Definitely close to a solution to the topic of the thread with your idea.
Hope they look into it.
People are generally used to being able to heal on demand aka estus flasks. Also, having so many healing items in your inventory creates the problem where you have almost unlimited healing and I think the devs decided to balance this out by restricting how often you can heal.
I’m not a fan of it I think they should restrict how many healing items we can carry rather than how often we can use them. but most of the time the healing timer is not a huge issue. It’s easy to use heal aura to keep your health constantly topped up. However, it does become an issue during the Echo Knight fight because when you get hit and heal, 22 seconds is just too long before you can heal again.
This is when you start to rely on using weapons and rings which give health on damage dealt to compensate which, frankly is easier than relying on healing items and makes the game even easier.
crazy idea, but why not keep the cooldown, but bind it to the just used food item stack.
So when you eat a buff food, it goes on cooldown for every stack of the same food item, but other food like mushroom soup can be used. If u then eat the soup it goes on cooldown too for all of the same soup, but another buff could be used. (i hope u get what i mean.)
This would also encourage crafting of different food items (i mainly end up crafting the same 3 types of food). and when u combine that with having for example a max of 5 cooked item slots (ready meals, not ingredients), you would have addressed every issue discussed here, without making food too much or too little “spammable”
ChemileOn, I think during normal PVE, it’s not a problem but how many times have you done the Echo Boss fight? That boss is very fast and very aggressive. He doesn’t let up. Even taking time to heal is dangerous. I’ve died many times while healing. I can’t imagine how difficult it would be to cycle through different food types during that fight.
I get what you are saying, but for me personally, skipping through items is not an issue. I just do it while moving.
For me it is second nature, to walk somewhere and while walking doing some inventory management. but i can see, that these options are limited in this game (so far), since some buttons are used for more than just 1 function.
I get when it is too much, but when you do not have time to skip through food stacks, you would not have time to eat some either. And with this you would not have to skip through 20 stacks, but just through 5, which in my book is a thing of a second, 2 at most. Def. would be faster than a 20 sec cooldown tho, don’t u think?
I was just trying to find a reasonable compromise 
If it meant being able to heal up when I needed to I would be down for learning how to do it. I just don’t like the timer full stop. I don’t understand the logic of making healing to be so restrictive. It only makes the echo boss fight harder. That was probably the idea though.
a lot of boss fights are designed, to punish (bad) behavior.
For example input reading in Dark souls 3. Certain bosses read your controller input and when you heal or walk away, they punish that with a specific follow up attack.
I am not saying this is the way to go, but i can respect if developers decide to punish certain things during bossfights.
For me personally the worst are crowd control bosses, where you have to fight multiple enemies or even respawning enemies. I find it so unnecessary and annoying, that it sucks all the fun out of me. So i def. get the frustration.
In my book some restriction is necessary tho. As mentioned here before, if you take that away, it becomes too easy. Lets put it to the extreme: Lets say remove cooldown for heals, remove stamina cost for rolls, add iframes when doing runes etc. What is there still left with a boss? (i exaggerated on purpose here to make a point).
And so far i found the cooldown to be a reasonable approach to limit heal spam. so for 20 seconds u don’t attack, but dodge or block, until u can heal again. Or as also mentioned here before, use healing enchantments and synergies. Yesterday i watched someone kill the echo knight without consuming food, just with life leach enchantments.
So i am def. seeing a compromise here 
And some new strategies to learn