Time after eating is so annoying!

Wicked General
70

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

71

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:

  • Instant Heal (also extends to other resources like focus/stamina) should not be spam-able
  • Buffs can be spam-able as long as the effect don’t stack
1 Like
72

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.

73

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”

74

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.

75

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 :wink:

76

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.

77

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 :slight_smile: And some new strategies to learn

1 Like
78

Yes, I think the fight would be a hell of lot easier if we could heal on demand. But really, is the problem that boss just wasn’t hard enough that they needed to tie our hands in that way.

79

no, def. not lol

but if cooldown on healing is a design choice i can respect that. that’s why i suggested not to remove it completely, but apply it to the item used, not the whole item category.

would also be a bit more realistic, to for example buff before the fight and still be able to heal if u ate the first charge attack.

80

Yes I think it’s a deliberate design decision. I’m not a fan of it and never will be though. I still hope they will restore my healing privileges. But in the event they don’t, your solution might be a good work around and something I would be happy to explore.

81

Great conversation. I had a few thoughts on the healing system I figured I would share:

Eating food in combat to heal just feels wrong. For me this is an RPG immersion issue. It was mentioned previously that we have healing runes and item-based healing stats. I wouldn’t mind at all if healing were rebalanced with a few of these ideas:

  1. No combat eating/drinking
  2. Increase the variety of buff foods (add ones with resistance, regeneration, rebirth, etc) and give them categories that overwrite so you have to strategize which ones you want active
  3. Limit the total number of passive buffs you can have applied - perhaps this number can be increased over time via the ichor system?
  4. Increase the duration on food buffs AND remove cooldowns
  5. Give us a garden system so we can cultivate common ingredients, but let us forage for rarer ones
  6. Randomize the location of ingredients in the wild so we don’t have to make the same trip to that silver ore 6000 times!
  7. Reduce the drop rates of high end foods (I’m looking at your, vegetable pie!)
  8. Create a Heal Aura-esque innate Cerim ability that we start with and balance it in a way that limits abuse so it doesn’t get used as a crutch. Perhaps have it require 50% stamina to trigger, it then consumes that stamina along with all remaining focus and restores 75% health? Or, maybe a better idea, tie it to its own generation meter so, after you’ve generated a certain amount of focus (not tied to your actual focus limit) the ability becomes available.

The goal is to minimize the need for combat healing while improving the current food system and encouraging players to engage in the system.

82

I made a post awhile back about how I don’t like the timer. I don’t want it removed but I did have a few ideas on how to potentially alleviate the issue so that it is fair.

I’m interested in hearing your thoughts.

83

No combat eating/drinking

That is a bit too harsh i feel. Nearly every game out there has some sort of healing. Most don’t have HP regen during combat, but u should be able to heal, when u made a mistake. overlaps a bit with point 8. i prefer situational healing on demand (with or without cooldown) over constant healing. imo constant healing or how u call it an “healing aura” makes the player lazy. and it is boring to stand around and wait until you are healed.

Give us a garden system so we can cultivate common ingredients, but let us forage for rarer ones

Not sure how i feel about this. I honestly do not want the 10000th RPG that adds some sort of survival game type mechanic like growing food. I really do not want to build and maintain a garden. But maybe just add garden with respawn-able veggies to sacrament.

Randomize the location of ingredients in the wild so we don’t have to make the same trip to that silver ore 6000 times!

oh lord, please no. what u are suggesting here is not removing the “boringness” of the silver run, but add an additional chore of not only farming the thing, but also first searching for it. for me that has no positive aspect at all. yes its not always the same route, but u might just spent triple the time to check all possible spots. nobody likes walking, and triple the walking is even worse!

Increase the duration on food buffs AND remove cooldowns

buff duration balancing adjustment will surely follow as the development progresses. Same goes for passive buffs on equipment etc.
And the cooldown thing, well as i said. If i had a vote i would rather vote for keeping the cooldown, but changing how it works. Make it a bit shorter and/or apply it only to the used item, not the whole item category…

…or as a new-ish idea (already mentioned here or somewhere in this forum): Potions, or rather the portion crafting and merchant are at this point completely useless. Drop rate of potions is too high, same goes for crafting cost, and they are more or less not necessary at all (maybe focus potion for mages but thats pretty much it).

So why not go the well established way of offering some sort of healing potion that give u a healing buff, like an healing aura or even reduced cooldown for food items or or or.

So you would for example buy or craft a potion, that removes cooldown on healing items and lasts for 10 minutes. problem solved. when the boss is not dead by then, well then jugging 20 more soups would’t have helped either :smiley:

84

Just cut the timer in half. The devs get they want. We get what we want.

85

Ok,

So healing aura was a bad reference. What I’m thinking of could basically be a healing skill that’s tied into focus generation and charges slowly based on how much focus you generate. It won’t matter how much focus you actually have, but the mechanic would create a built-in timer the player can influence by attacking.

As for the garden, Sacrament does have a farmer, so maybe they were already thinking of this.

I get your point on resource randomization, but it doesn’t have to be all or nothing. They could make certain locations sure things and others random so you can be pleasantly surprised from time to time.

I personally have never been a fan of healing potion mechanics in games, so I would love to see them go a different route. The absolute last thing I would ever want (not that anyone here has suggested it) is the idiotic system where bosses poop out healing potions at set intervals. Ugh.

86

Ah yes, the good old boss pooping out ammo/orbs/xp bubbles. Never really understood that either. Always seemed like lazy balancing to me. “oh shit, players can’t win this fight with the amount of ammo we have given in the lvl before. how could we fix this? An yes! make the boss poop rockets” :rofl:

87

I like options with clear pros and cons. One for spammers, one for CD with huge effect lovers and one for preppers who don‘t want to actively heal at all during Combat.

I personally can imagine myself liking all those options and playing different builds / play styles to match. :smiling_face:

Check out my post if you like:

88

I think someone already mentioned it but for me a good option would be to create a new gem that allows us to reduce the waiting time between meals. It would take up a gem slot and in exchange we would lose another benefit by occupying that slot.

89

I posted it in another thread about markos the potion seller. Potions currently are way to expensive to craft for very little benefit.

So my Idea would be:

For example a potion that removes healing item cooldown for a set amount of time or reduces it by x%