Confectioner Revamp: Cat’s Thoughts
Disclaimer: I haven’t made 6 of the expert foods and probably around 10 or 12 of the master foods. I have not hunted down all the garnishes, nor have I completed their quests or made the food from said quests. I also haven’t eaten the foods on a character lower than T6.
Before I go into a list of things I have issues with, I want to mention what I like about this. It isn’t all bad. After that, I’ll list some details about the foods, like timers and whatnot, so other people know what I’m talking about before I start complaining.Then I’ll complain some, then I’ll add my thoughts for the pony list, then I’ll wrap up...so if you don’t feel like reading the nitty-gritty details, scroll to the bottom. (Adventurers, I suggest you read the section titled “The Facts�)
Summary: My first thought, upon seeing all the new resources was “Wow! Look at all the food!� After spending some time working on confectioner on Blight, my thoughts are now “Oh my god...look at all the food.
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The Good Stuff (or What I Liked on Blight)
I like that there’s some variety. There’s so much new stuff and it isn’t just piles of the same old boring food we’ve been eating for years. I can even make cookies with honest-to-god chocolate and all sorts of things with strawberries! *drools*
I like that higher tier foods are more effective at getting rid of death points than the old foods. With the way the system is currently (before revamp), a T1 person can eat all foods in all tiers of food full reduction of DPs. Of course, that also comes out to over 150 foods, but still… Meanwhile, a T4 or higher person is pretty much stuck with the available T4 foods for full effectiveness and T4 never had a full range of recipes.
I like that the DP reduction the foods provide has been significantly raised. No more 3 minutes here and 4 minutes there. Yes, the lower tiered foods still aren’t a lot of reduction, but the length the DP lasts isn’t that bad, either.
I like that it takes SO much less food to get rid of a DP than it did before. It’s not as fast as Amb 7, but it’s still easier to acquire.
The Facts
Dishes refer to each food.
Type refers to the categories of dishes: appetizers, desserts, sides, and main dishes.
Meals refer to the combination of all 4 types of dishes.
For those who don’t know the details, all the revamp foods have a 200 casting delay. All foods also have a regular delay that varies with food type. Appetizers - 200, Desserts - 300, Sides - 500, Main Dishes - 800. Casting delay is how long it takes you to do something, while delay is how long you have to wait afterwards before doing something else. 10 delay equals 1 second. This means you’ll spend about 4.5 minutes, including all delays, to eat a full meal. (20 seconds eating each dish, for a total of 80 seconds eating one meal, and you’ll spend varying amounts of time waiting after each dish [20s, 30s, 50s, 80s], for a total of 3 minutes of waiting time, while you eat the meal).
All the revamp foods have a 20 minute cooldown. (Ex.: Eat a chocolate chip cookie, then wait 20 minutes before you can eat another one.)
The revamp foods now have linked timers for the same type of dish. This means when you eat an appetizer, you have to wait 5 minutes before you can eat another appetizer. The linked timers did not affect the one rare/quested food I tried.
In comparison, the “old� foods have 40 delay, a 10 minute cooldown, no linked timers, and no casting delay.
The Not So Good Stuff
1. Confectioner skills per level. Please consider making confectioner like the other craft classes and allowing them to have 8/level gathering skills (fishing and foraging), 9/level processing skills (preparing), and 10/level finishing skills (cooking/brewing). Most of the other craft schools I looked at (with the exception of dragon crafter) are set up this way. This would lower fishing and foraging from 9 down to 8, and raise the proposed gain of preparing from 8 to 9.
2. Delay and casting delay. Wow. Four minutes and 20 seconds is a lot of time eating one meal or waiting to eat or do something else.
2a. Remove/reduce delay and increase casting delay. Personally, I think the times should be decreased all around, but I’ll get into that later. Currently, there is no way to tell when your delay timer is going down. That makes it very frustrating when eating things with high delay timers like the main dishes. With the main dishes, you have to sit and wait for well over a minute after consumption with NO indication of when you can do another action. While I was testing this on Blight, I kept thinking I’d gotten disconnected while waiting for the next food to cycle.
I would suggest making the delay significantly shorter (100 all around?), if not removing it altogether. If it’s deemed necessary to keep food at the current overall delay, then I’d also suggest increasing the casting delay to approach the current delay. In other words, basically switch delay with casting delay, plus a few tweaks.
2b. Reduce overall delay. I understand that asking people to sit down and enjoy a meal together is a good thing. Forcing them to sit down and enjoy that meal is not. Additionally, what’s the point of having a virtual cornucopia of meals if you only really need 4 meals per tier?
3. Linked timers. Ouch. In addition to huge delays, you have to wait 5 minutes between the same type of dish. I realize this is probably to encourage people to eat a whole meal, instead of just side dishes, but I think this wait is a little long. Please keep in mind that this is coming from someone who typically doesn’t mind waiting and/or crafting DPs off (I’m a crafter, not a hunter, Jim!).
4. Foods with rares need to remove more time. In some cases, foods that require bonus items (seafood, chili peppers, and squirrel) remove more time than regular food. This isn’t always the case. Baked Squirrel Pie, a T4 advanced main dish only removes 90 minutes, while the other two T4 advanced main dishes remove 95 points. Unless someone is dying for squirrel, they probably aren’t going to ask for it. Additionally, Seafood Salad, a T5 advanced side, requires THREE bonus resources to make, yet only reduces DP by an extra 10 minutes compared to the other T5 advanced side (90 vs 80). Please consider raising the time reduced by however many minutes (5-15?) per bonus resource needed, especially for those resources where you only get one or two per bonus, like squirrels and squid.
5. Resource quantity and bulk. To me, the revamped confectioner is like lairshaping on steroids. It requires more resources and more combinations of resources, not to mention more combines (in some cases) in order to make the final product. Lairshaping requires 4 combines at most before applying to a lair, while confectioner can go up to at least 15 combines/processings for the more complicated dishes (I used Gnomish Pot Pie for this example).
5a. Fish, seafood, and ‘shrooms. Please reduce the bulk on these from 10 down to something more in line with the rest of the confectioner resources.
5b. Reduce quantities of resources needed. There were many dishes where I needed 10 fish or 10 raw meat in order to make one dish at optimal. (If I’m remembering correctly, I needed 20 raw chicken for one dish at some point.) I tried very hard to suspend my disbelief with this, but I just couldn’t. That’s a lot of fish for one bowl of soup, especially considering what goes in to making most permanent items (tools and armor) as opposed to consumables. :/
5c. Increase finished quantities to two. I’m suggesting this in addition to 5b, though it could be taken as an either/or thing. Please let us create two dishes at one time. It will cut down on a lot of the frustration of needing to have crazy amounts of resources. If 5b and 5c won’t be considered together, please increase quantities to 4 or 5.
6. Pawnbrokers. Currently, it appears that imperial pawnbrokers aren’t all that interested in food. They were offering 2c for 5 T4 meals. Please increase that.
7. Cogs and Techniques. Please consider adding preparing techniques and putting preparing on cogs. (Also, it would be nice to keep brewing useful, but I don’t recall seeing it on the new forms.)
8. Raw meat and storehouses. Please make sure to allow raw meat to be stored in storehouses. This wasn’t something I could check on Blight, but it still doesn’t work on live.
9. Eating animation? It looks kinda silly to sit down, stand up and punch the air, then sit back down again. If this is fixable, great. If not, put it on the pony list, please.
Things for the Pony List (or, Things I’d Like to See Changed, But Probably Won’t Be)
1. Reduce delays for lower tier foods. Most newbies I’ve met are not going to want to spend the time sitting and waiting to eat food.
2. Make stoneroot ice cream T5 or T6, not T2.
3. Please put a cauldron in the confectioner shop. Confectioners use it as a finishing machine, so it should be in the shop.
3a. Move the distillery to the alchemy shop and let them make potions with that, as opposed to the cauldron. This would keep the machines to three shops, while letting the finishing machines stay in one shop.
4. Change gravies, doughs, sauces, and marinades to cooking. Anyone with a knife can chop a carrot. Good sauces take skill to make!
5. Break away from the 2:1 processing ratio. It’s very irritating. (Two fish yield one fish fillet seems like a horrible waste of fish.)
6. Increase stacks in storehouses. With 118 different resources needed to make the final product, having even one more stack in a storehouse would be nice.
7. Make the wines, water, and milk drinkable. It would be fun.
7a. Do not make them required to aid the DP reduction of foods. It would not be fun.
To Wrap Up
I dumped out my vault on Blight, did the vault upgrades, and stuffed that sucker full of food. I only made three of each of most of the foods, but I spent a LOT of time collecting the food and running back and forth between my vault and the Feladan kitchen. I didn’t bother making a lot of the high end foods, nor did I go hunting for garnishes because, frankly, I hit a severe case of burnout. It was bad enough that I didn’t want to do anything Horizons related for a couple of weeks.
I love lairshaping. I like complex things. This is... well. I didn’t really have a lot of fun working on this. I’m hoping it was due to a lack of stocked silos, combined with the unfamiliarity of a new system, but I really do think there needs to be some tweaking done before this goes live.
Thank you to tramsan and Creme for reading this over and making suggestions as needed.
Originally Posted by Justa Mirage
