Time after eating is so annoying!

Wicked General
21

If I had to make the call to make food feel better overall I would:

  • Remove the cooldown
  • Allow for 3-5 equipable foods (so you don’t have to scroll through all food items)
  • Add a few more frames to the eating animation to make it a bigger commitment
  • Balance it so only one buff from food can be active at a time
    – *Make some potions with long-term buffs, but without healing to compensate

Also to address this point:

what players will actually do is optimize the fun out of the game

This is actually a growing issue across most games. With the ease of being able to look up meta builds and min/max options, it can be hard to figure out a way to add fun content which lets someone feel powerful, but also limit it from becoming broken.

22

I’m not pissed if anything you seem pissed at me and I think you are projecting it on me because you seem to believe the game is not gonna be fun to play because I believe in trying no cooldown on healing items, but with modifications to how many of course.

And you seem to think people aren’t gonna want to challenge themselves to play in a different way, but why does that matter?

Sure with multiplayer it might be boring, depending on how scaling works, but as a solo experience you still get option to challenge yourself to not rely on healing as much.

But you say you have played all the From Software games so I don’t understand why you are hounding me for having an opinion when you seem to have enjoyed games that offer same option.

23

that… sounds really good actually, wow.
and yeah nowadays its incredible what game designers pull off to keeo things contained while giving players options and empowering them.

so when you say 3-5 food items, that would be a maximum of…80 heals per fight more or less? massive grind to get that many, but i will say, i think the game telling you “go grind more food items if you need the help” is odd. do you find farming fun in this game? personally i dont, if i have to do it a bunch; i enjoy it when i just want to look at the scenery for a few minutes and/or have killed all the enemies in a small area so im relaxing a bit between fighting; so i think it should be more of a pace breaker than an incentive/accessibility tool.
maybe reducing the maximum food items per stack (so instead of 20 food items i get like 10-15 max?) could help with that? so it makes grinding less inviting/more pointless.
it does cause another issue tho, which is healing sustain while exploring areas.
idk, give me your thoughts!

24

nobody challenges themselves “just because” especially on their first playthrough. still, i didnt read anywhere that you argued about compensating the removal of the cooldown with something else, so i couldnt know you wanted to compensate it. i just assumed you would have left it at that. anyways i think i wont reply to you again, youre not really putting much on the feedback table other than misguided ideas and angry talk.

25

I don’t mind the farming, but currently I leave any area I go into with more food than I left with. There is also a surplus of coin that can be used to buy a good chunk of food or ingredients.

So, it is a bit hard to say right now. For all we know, the next area unlock with be brutally difficult which makes Echo Knight feel like a crab by comparison. Also, I enjoy doing bounties and challenges, which running around lends itself to over-gathering on my way places.

Overall, I think there are enough ways to get food—gathering yourself, drops, or buying—that I think it is in an okay state. I would feel less comfortable changing the acquisition of food too much until we at least see the second area, however.

1 Like
26

agreed, waiting to see the rest of the game seems optimal.

28

I like the timer on food. It is part of the combat dance. Each encounter is a tactical battle and taking away the CD on food removes part of the decision making in the dance.

Disengaging and creating safe space via distance, obstacles or shield to wait or to eat is key in the tougher encounters. Wouldn’t do the game any good in removing tactical options imho. It would dumb-down each encounter and players could just power heal through fights more so than they can already.

1 Like
29

counterproposal since you make an interesting point. what if there was a way to keep that tectical aspect that was not “just staying away from the fight”? personally i dont feel like thats so strategic/tactical, nor engaging.
for example, i dont think removing the cooldown but making the healing animation longer removes the tacticality of the fight. in fact i think it just shifts it in a more interesting place, where the pressure is put on nailing when you have a window instead of running away from the fight until you stop being chased or make enough distance to get a munch off

30

Disengaging and creating safe space via distance

I could get behind this if the timer was something a lot shorter. Especially when learning enemies, one of the least entertaining things to think of is just running away so I can sit and wait for a cooldown.

You still have to time when you eat (although I did suggest a slightly longer eating animation), and that at least keeps you in the action. Disengaging should be reserved for when you need to do a total reset or even to completely run away, not just to one piece of food.

1 Like
31

yes. also this game has the issue of “healing while exploring vs healing in the middle of a fight”
i will say, campfires are supposedly the solution to this, so maybe improving a bit campfire placement solves it and allows for a tighter food limit mid bossfight.
i also think there should be a way to access healing items that isnt equal to farming or going back to sacrament, because both of those take away from the bossfight and thats a but unpleasant while trying to learn a boss.
i felt this a lot the first time i fought warrick. took me a few tries, i didnt have many healing items, so i had to either go farm more healing items or fight him with no food. ended up doing the latter and won but still lol.

32

No, campfire are fine and main story bosses has always a Whisper near by and I enjoy going back to town and talk to the chef and cook at the stove or sort through my inventory and chests in the house

Theres also a campfire right next to both Warric fights btw.

33

yeah, but i didnt have the basic resources to make food, so the campfire is pretty useless there

34

Other than early on when I was learning the mechanics of the game the only place I feel I needed to run away was in fog gated boss fights. So no real running away there. Just the creation of space being wary of ranged attacks or gap closers. So your interpretation of running away was much different than the one I was thinking of in a sentence including “creating safe space via distance, obstacle or shield.”

So if you get in a fight and the baddy gets the upper hand and you need a breather by putting a large rock/shield in between yourself and the stronger opponent that this is not an engaging tactical choice? You would rather have the go-to maneuver to take more time eating in front of your opponent?

Also, there already are windows of opportunity in even the most difficult fights where either healing or attacking is safe to do. It is about learning when and when not to do it. Out of all the issues in the game I never thought food time was one of them.

1 Like
35

Come on you cant stuf yourself with food constantly it just isent healthy. You do need to digest watever you eat.

Jokes aside I dont have any big issue with healing there are foods that fully heal me so I can take 1 or 2 hits and almost never notice the cooldown.

However when consuming buff food it is annoying to wait for the cooldown.

Also I think the animation of consuming the food does leave you open to attacks so you do have to be carfull when you decide to heal.

I would like to see buff food without cooldown but they just buff you without healing and maybe lower cooldown on healing if there is high demend from the community.

36

using pathing issues from the enemy ai can be fun, sure, but definitely shouldn’t be the go-to choice at any point in a fight; its immersion breaking and a bit too uphanded if you ask me. fights are more engagin when you’re constricted in trying to understand what the enemy is doing, but i can see how this falls in subjective taste

37

My solution for this would be if the developers added a reduced healing cooldown affix on gear. Then who ever is having this as an issue can choose gear with that affix and problem solved.

P.s I’ve never had a problem with the healing system in this game actually like it a lot!

2 Likes
38

We actually are in agreement. Don’t take my examples as “go to”. They are just examples of what one can do if they need to wait on a food timer. They are examples of how to use space and positioning properly in a fight.

The primary options are the usual dodging, blocking and parrying along with heal on damage upgrades to buy time in order to eat again. Timers also places more importance on high quality food and not the cheap stuff.

1 Like
39

I want to point out food (healing items).

So both Souls-like and Diablo has a flask for a healing items that has no cooldown.

In Wicked we have plenty of healing items in my opinion, but on a 20-30 second cooldown.

This to me seems counterintuitive as it slows down gameplay. Food that has buffs I can’t understand having a cooldown as what is the point have the option to buff multiple times but having to wait for 20-30 seconds between each almost loosing the buff in the process however they need to heal for less. Food that just heals should have less of a cooldown or none at all, but make it so that you only can have a few at a time, say 20 with you when leaving Sacrament (the hub area) and maybe introduce a «food bag» at campfires where you cook and select food you need and don’t.
Remember that you also need to farm for recipes in this game to find stronger healing items or get lucky at vendors.

Theres almost no different than Dark Souls as you have the choice, eventually, to have up to 12-15 healing flask of course most didn’t use all charges for healing, but nonetheless and the last Diablo games had 1 on a short cooldown or you had a few without cooldown, some mobs had the ability to put the healing items on cooldown, but other then that no cooldown.

Getting hit by a knockdown or knock back or being parried I think would be a better idea to put food on a cooldown to stress the situation forcing players to be wary.

So I’ll be honest, I don’t try to play picture perfect as I see health as a resource in games.
If I can get a few hits in, but I take a hit from it, I usually do as I know I’ll be fine as I can heal up.

But with the long cooldown and most enemies seem very aggressive in Wicked, the gameplay becomes more and more boring to me and the action in a action game isn’t there for me anymore.

I would love to see a change in food cooldown or food overall to encourage more action giving players the option to have healing available.

This isn’t to say the game is too hard, I get by fine with chests full of food items, I just wish I could be as aggressive as the enemies are, especially bosses. Give players the option to choose for themselves lean on healing or play «by the book».

40

hah, you make good points. i guess it can work with the upcoming balancing (it is a bit much at the moment but im sure that will get sorted out) but yeah it can work fine. i was wondering if there could be a more interesting way of doing it than just saying “nope you have a cooldown”; it just feels a bit… dated? but i see your points, understand your view, and we do agree on many elements

43

Out of all the issues in the game I never thought food time was one of them.

I think this highlights a lot of the points of contention in this thread. There is a lot of I/we experience from both sides.

What we know for sure is that there was enough concern raised about food early on that they buffed the rate to obtain it (I believe hotfix 2 or 3?). So, I think this will ultimately come down to this: will making a change help more people than are actively opposed to the change?

I think a compromise would be the best choice, something like I mentioned prior. Essentially shifting the risk from not having food off cooldown, to making eating require a larger commitment in the moment.

1 Like