Guild Wars 2

I want to take a moment to discuss something about Cooking that has really bothered me from the get go. I don’t mean to bash whoever conceived it because it clearly was designed by someone who really loves cooking, but I think game-play wise it’s really cumbersome.

Cooking is used to provide bufffood which offers us powerful, yet limit duration power increases to our character. They are essentially consumables comparable to those found in almost all RPGs.

My problem with Cooking however is just how convoluted it is.

We have to juggle more than 50 different base ingredients, some of which are account bound and only purchasable from random NPCs and other which can be farmed.

Based on these 50+ base ingredients we have another 30 or so components like Dough, Sauces etc.

Then we have the 20 or so ingredients that the Cooking NPC sells directly.

Then, depending on the recipe we might have a few more intermediate items to juggle.

As an example, let’s see what it takes to produce a Bowl of Curry Butternut Squash Soup

It requires:
1 Coconut – purchased from a World Karma merchant
1 Butternut Squash – farmed item
1 Jar of Red Curry Paste – intermediate item
1 Bowl of Herbed Vegetable – intermediate item

Now the Jar of Red Curry Requires
1 Lemongrass – farmed item
1 Lime – World Karma merchant
1 Cayenne Pepper -farmed item
1 Pile of Stirfry Mix – intermediate item

Now the Pile of Stirfry Mix requires:
1 Onion – farmed item
1 Head of Garlic – farmed item
1 Ginger Root – farmed item
1 Chili Pepper – farmed item

Now the Bowl of Herbed Vegetables requires
1 Rosemary Sprig – farmed item
1 Sage Leaf – - farmed item
1 Pile of Simple Herb Stews – intermediate item
1 Bowl of Vegetable Stock – intermediate item

Now the Pile of Simple Herb Stew requires
1 Thyme Leaf – farmed item
1 Bay Leaf – farmed item

The Bowl of Vegetable Stock requires
1 Jug of Water
1 Celery Stalk
2 Onions
2 Carrots

The End.

Holy crap that’s almost as complicated as crafting a Legendary item. I know most of these ingredients aren’t very expensive but the fact that you have to go through so many lairs and juggle so many items is just really unnecessary. Let alone all the inventory space it takes just to cook like that.

But we’re talking about bufffood here that lasts for a mere 30 minutes. It should really not be such an inconvenience to cook such food.

It’s especially hard to understand since many of the other recipes are comparatively simple. Omnomberry Pie for example “only” requires the Omnomberry Filling and the Dough, most of which can be purchased straight from the Cooking merchant.

I really hope ANet revises some of these recipes over time and removes some of the unnecessary bloat from cooking. The ingredients bought from the merchant for example really don’t add anything to the game.

I kinda like it. I had a lot of fun discovering everything.

If you only need one of something why not just buy it from the trading post? Or buy the immediate ingredients from the trading post? This is usually cheaper than crafting your way all the way up the chain anyway.

And if you need a ton of something and want to craft it all the way from scratch for some reason, you’ll put in (about) the same amount of effort as crafting just one.

Agreed. To help cut out the bloat, I nominate the removal of Grapes from the game. They’re used for a grand total of one (discounting dyes) recipe, while in turn is used in a grand total of one recipe. Can you say pointless?

It’s an especially obvious problem when compared to the other crafting professions.

All other crafting professions follow a pretty standard model of 1 item of category X + 1 item of category Y + 1 upgrade item Z = new item.

That makes crafting much more fun.

But cooking recipes are entirely random and follow no such model.

I’ve spent hours clicking through my various ingredients trying to find new recipes but eventually just gave up because there are too many possibilities once you start including the intermediate ingredients.

Cooking is fun, takes time, gives good XP, things up level 375 sell for less than 10 copper and cost silver to make, this is a problem.

I rather like it being so multi layered. Intermediate ingredients are something I buy from the BLT rather than craft after I’ve discovered them, if needed. Also a lot of recipes have duplicate effects, but I wouldn’t consider it bloat. Different characters starting in different zones may have different ingredients. To me anyway that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

I concentrate on the recipes I want to use though. Other folk who are completionists may find it a bit annoying I suppose.

A final thought is they will be expanding the game. In the case of grapes Maybe we will see more grape involved recipes. We may also see some fish recipes hopefully.

/sushi anyone?

The complexity would be fine if they gave us a storage mechanism to handle the item bloat. Having at least one of everything on hand to properly use discovery is just not possible with space requirements. I ended up ‘cheating’ and looking up recipes because I never had that one last ingredient, usually intermediate, on hand.

Also, it would be easier to craft if you could right click on a missing ingredient you have already crafted and bring up that recipe because the recipe list is also ridiculously long.

I think the cooking is great! There isn’t bloat. There is logical progression to the recipes/discovery.

When you take it as a profession, the game warns you cooking will require more coin and karma then other professions,

Why does everything have to be easy and 1+1 and done?

For someone willing to take the time and enjoy this craft, I think it’s really well done. The recipes are intuitive. There are a ton of them.

I would HATE to see it nerfed or changed in any way because some people can’t take the time and patience to immerse themselves in a well thought out, more complicated than average aspect of the game.

I hope they make more ingredients, more recipes, more discovery!

If you don’t like cooking, harvest the materials, sell them and buy the cooked goods.

Don’t ruin a fun craft for the rest of the players.

I love cooking just for the fact it is 1g(tops) for 10 free levels on any character. I can take my main buy all the Karma foods and easily level it to 400. In fact my last character I did 60-70 in under an hour doing nothing but cooking on a crafting booster and was able to reach 0-400.

Anyhow more on your topic, it mimics real life cooking which I do enjoy and have discovered almost all recipes if not all of them.

As a guy who just discovered every cooking recipes 2 days ago I think cooking it’s fine as it is. Probably the most fun to use discovery tab. Discovery on other crafting professions is less interesting. There is always ingredient 1 + ingredient 2 + insignia/inscription = armor/weapon.

The only thing I don’t like about cooking is that after the chili peppers exploit all our results have no vendor value so all you can do is either eat them or sell them on tradepost sometimes for 3-5 coper a piece.

My only issue with cooking is that I wish all ingredients. even the ones we make, had there own collectible slot. I’m using way too many slots on my characters and bank for them. It’s also a good visual aid in making certain we have everything available.

Cooking may be fun, interesting and different, but asides from that only a handful of recipes and ingredients are worth selling.

Cooking is the craft responsible for creating consumable (never mind the lack of demand for 95% of the consumables we can produce). Replace “Cooking” with “Alchemy” and replace “food” with “potions”, but keep the same number of ingredients, intermediate components, and finished goods. Would you still think the craft wouldn’t have benefited from a bit of streamlining?

Sure, they warn you up front that it costs more coin and karma to level Cooking. But I don’t think anyone’s really bothered by that. It’s the high inventory strain and the excess number of meaningless recipes that I think bug most people.

As someone who enjoys the Cooking discovery process, I’m holding on to at least one of everything I make. This has taken 7.5 of my 8 bank tabs. And I’m not even 400 yet. So my choices are going to be discard a lot of the intermediate components I’ve got clogging my bank and spoil the fun by using the wiki or betray the completionist in me and accept that I’m not going to learn everything there is to learn.

I generally don’t like crafting in games unless you can make fun stuff or consumables (and even then I am lazy with it). Because I can at least use what i made, while for any other craft i always in every game seem to be behind in crafting to what I can use (so I always have better by the time i make something already).

Cooking for me is fun, and a huge part of it is the, what I like to call, “Guess the recepy game”. So I would not like to change that.

Yes cooking for yourself does seem like a huge money waster if food on the TP is cheap as heck, so you are almost always spending more making it yourself. But you get the guessing game, please the completist and a fair amount of xp back. And as far as I seen pretty much all crafts are money sinks and you are better off just selling base mats you gather and buy what you need.

But what I do strongly dislike about it, almost hate, is the HUGE amount of intermediate cooking ingredients that don’t go into the special cook-materials tab of the bank. People before me voiced it perfectly. So I will only add. For me to really safe the fun in this craft and the only thing I personally wish for:

Add the homemade cooking materials to the tab please!

Would be a great feature for all crafts by the way. Though with cooking it’s gotten to the point of being silly.

The multi-tiered creation is a benefit, not a hindrance. You can level with ease by using things you made at a much lower level.
For example, toast you made at low levels can be used to make garlic bread 75 levels later, which in turn can be used to make meatballs, which can then be used in meatball dinner.
Other crafting options get at most 75 levels of benefit, after that anything made can’t help you.

All I want is an option to create the final product after discovering it if you have all the materials. Takes just ages to do all the soups and fillings and whatnot before you get to the final product you want. Would that be too hard to implement?

Reann.9480:

All I want is an option to create the final product after discovering it if you have all the materials. Takes just ages to do all the soups and fillings and whatnot before you get to the final product you want. Would that be too hard to implement?

I’d love that. Maybe make it work like in discovery mode. For those who dont know. Let’s say there is a recipe which I haven’t discovered yet which requires 1 ingredient A + 2 ingredient B. Ingredient B is craftable and I know the recipe for it(and also have the materials for it). Currently if I put 1 ingredient A and 1 ingredient B in the discovery slots, the UI will show me that the recipe requires 2 of ingredient B and it will add a “+” button on the ingredient B which will craft one more ingredient B for me if I clock on it. I’d like this to work with known recipes too.

Reann.9480:

All I want is an option to create the final product after discovering it if you have all the materials. Takes just ages to do all the soups and fillings and whatnot before you get to the final product you want. Would that be too hard to implement?

This. Times one thousand. This would make me enjoy cooking much more. The time and effort spent doing a zillion substeps X to create final product Y takes the fun out of cooking. To a point that it’s no longer worth the monetary reward to cook for coin. All other crafts (except, at times, artificer) do not suffer from this problem.

Another example. Recipe: Bowl of Orrian Truffle Soup.
To make this, combine:

(i) Bowl of Cream Soup Base
(ii) Shallot
(iii) Orrian Truffle

In order to acquire (ii), visit a karma merchant [in Timberline falls]. It cannot be purchased on the TP.

In order to make (i), combine:

(iv) Glass of Buttermilk
(v) Bowl of Roux
(vi) Pile of Salt and Pepper
(vii) Bowl of Poultry Stock

In order to make (v), combine:

(viii) Bag of Flour
(ix) Stick of Butter

In order to make (vi), combine:

(x) Packet of Salt
(xi) Black Peppercorn

In order to make (vii), combine:

(xii) Jug of Water
(xiii) Slab of Poultry Meat
(xiv) Onion
(xv) Carrot

The process to make this is simply too onerous for something that sells for three silver, has little profit margin, is not in demand, and is not “better” than other foods that merely require you to combine 3 or 4 ingredients.

I love the current system, I only wish they’d build on the existing ingredients with new recipes and add a collection tabs for the transient mixtures, that are expensive to make but get dumped to make inventory space -

Bowl of Red Meat Stock
Bowl of Tangy Sautee Mix
Bowl of Winter Vegetable Mix
Pasta Noodles
Pile of Divinity Fair Herbs
Pile of Paprika
Pile of Simple Stew Herbs
Pile of Tangy Seasoning
Jar of Orange Sauce
Jar of Citrus Cream Sauce
Bowl of Pesto
etc… etc…

I think they should provide a “shortcut” once a very complex recipe is discovered so that u don’t have to craft all the intermediate items one by one to get the final product. For example, the Curry Butternut Squash Soup, instead of having to craft the stock, stirfry mix, curry paste……(list goes on) before you can craft the soup, just list all the required base ingredients in the final recipe and craft it in one go.

Dee Jay.2460:

But we’re talking about bufffood here that lasts for a mere 30 seconds. It should really not be such an inconvenience to cook such food.

Hmm? Don’t you mean 30 minutes?

Cooking is bloated. I don’t find it intuitive, either. It is expensive, complicated and bizarre. It certainly isn’t maximized for speed, ease, OR profit.

BUT…

So what? This is a fantasy game. If you want to Max the skill quickly, there are ways. If you want to spend your time collecting ingredients and playing with recipes, I think it is great the game is set up for that.

I do agree that not being able to store intermediate ingredients is irritating, though. For all skills, not just cooking.

Elric Of Melnibone.4781:

The complexity would be fine if they gave us a storage mechanism to handle the item bloat. Having at least one of everything on hand to properly use discovery is just not possible with space requirements. I ended up ‘cheating’ and looking up recipes because I never had that one last ingredient, usually intermediate, on hand.

Also, it would be easier to craft if you could right click on a missing ingredient you have already crafted and bring up that recipe because the recipe list is also ridiculously long.

This is definitely possible if you have a lot of bank space you can dedicate to discovery and are careful about organizing things. I did it myself, and got my discovery list completely empty by systematically finding recipes until there weren’t any left. Since then I’ve peeked at some of the trickier recipes introduced in updates, but that’s mainly because it would be too expensive to get all my intermediate ingredients back just to find a lone recipe or two.

Cooking is one of the cheapest skills to raise to 400.

The cost becomes far closer to the cost of other professions when you buy an additional bank tab in which to store your intermediate results.

Thats the solution my wife and I used.

I don’t have an issue with intermediate ingredients taking up too much space, BUT with the caveat that I basically spoiled myself by looking up a list of all the possible recipes, and then converting that into a list which breaks down all the different recipes by crafting level, and using that as a checklist while cooking. As a result, while each cooking tier creates some intermediate ingredients/recipes, most are used by the next cooking tier, and I only create ONE of each new type of recipe. (If a future recipe needs more basic ingredients, I just create those as and when needed, or just buy them from the TP.) I still had to dedicate about half of a bank tab to storing these future ingredients, however.

Dee Jay.2460:

I want to take a moment to discuss something about Cooking that has really bothered me from the get go. I don’t mean to bash whoever conceived it because it clearly was designed by someone who really loves cooking, but I think game-play wise it’s really cumbersome.

Cooking is used to provide bufffood which offers us powerful, yet limit duration power increases to our character. They are essentially consumables comparable to those found in almost all RPGs.

My problem with Cooking however is just how convoluted it is.

We have to juggle more than 50 different base ingredients, some of which are account bound and only purchasable from random NPCs and other which can be farmed.

Based on these 50+ base ingredients we have another 30 or so components like Dough, Sauces etc.

Then we have the 20 or so ingredients that the Cooking NPC sells directly.

Then, depending on the recipe we might have a few more intermediate items to juggle.

As an example, let’s see what it takes to produce a Bowl of Curry Butternut Squash Soup

It requires:
1 Coconut – purchased from a World Karma merchant
1 Butternut Squash – farmed item
1 Jar of Red Curry Paste – intermediate item
1 Bowl of Herbed Vegetable – intermediate item

Now the Jar of Red Curry Requires
1 Lemongrass – farmed item
1 Lime – World Karma merchant
1 Cayenne Pepper -farmed item
1 Pile of Stirfry Mix – intermediate item

Now the Pile of Stirfry Mix requires:
1 Onion – farmed item
1 Head of Garlic – farmed item
1 Ginger Root – farmed item
1 Chili Pepper – farmed item

Now the Bowl of Herbed Vegetables requires
1 Rosemary Sprig – farmed item
1 Sage Leaf – - farmed item
1 Pile of Simple Herb Stews – intermediate item
1 Bowl of Vegetable Stock – intermediate item

Now the Pile of Simple Herb Stew requires
1 Thyme Leaf – farmed item
1 Bay Leaf – farmed item

The Bowl of Vegetable Stock requires
1 Jug of Water
1 Celery Stalk
2 Onions
2 Carrots

The End.

Holy crap that’s almost as complicated as crafting a Legendary item. I know most of these ingredients aren’t very expensive but the fact that you have to go through so many lairs and juggle so many items is just really unnecessary. Let alone all the inventory space it takes just to cook like that.

But we’re talking about bufffood here that lasts for a mere 30 seconds. It should really not be such an inconvenience to cook such food.

It’s especially hard to understand since many of the other recipes are comparatively simple. Omnomberry Pie for example “only” requires the Omnomberry Filling and the Dough, most of which can be purchased straight from the Cooking merchant.

I really hope ANet revises some of these recipes over time and removes some of the unnecessary bloat from cooking. The ingredients bought from the merchant for example really don’t add anything to the game.

What 30 seconds? It lasts for 30 minutes mind you. I’ve maxed my Cooking profession and I can tell you it’s not troublesome at all to level up cooking. In fact, in my opinion Cooking is the easiest profession there is.

There is a difference in leveling cooking and actually using it. Many of us are making the point that using cooking to actually do stuff when you have reached 400 is very slow and utterly annoying. Don’t confuse the two issues people are talking about in this thread.

It’s pretty tortorous. I would care a lot less about how convoluted it were if it didn’t eat up so much inventory space. I’d like to see anything that features as an ingredient in something else be a collectible. Or perhaps if we had a special bank vault called a “refrigerator” or “pantry” that we can put only food items/ingredients in. Same for the guild bank. Otherwise you’ve got a lot of wasted food. You can’t do anything with it but sell it on TP, eat it, or destroy it. Selling on the TP is a joke for most items. Even assuming your item is worth only 1 copper, the other 500k orders are going to get filled first. Cooking ends up throwing away so much time/money it’s ridiculous.

Very good idea to simplify the process once the recipe is known, I loved levelling up my cooking the way it is now but actually using it is another matter completely.
I would wholeheartedly agree to a change that simplifies (if you wish to tickbox ) any known recipe so you can easily produce an item, I would also be shouting if you touched the discovery part and altered it from what it is now as that is what makes cooking fun.

Cooking is very, very tedious to level. So many spices, sauces, foods used to make other foods, ect… its just crazy the number of things you have to juggle and daisy-chain to make certain dishes, and while doing discovery you have to have EVERYTHING on hand (unless you’re using a list / guide). So much inventory space used on all the random stuff you have to have that by the time you start actuall crafting food you fill up your inventory in a couple minutes and have to either sell (for no profit) or eat all the stuff you made. Can’t even sell the stuff to normal vendors to at least make a few copper to cover the cost, or salvage to get ingredients back, if the item sells on the TP for 3 copper and already has 5000 available, then to waste it by eating it or deleting it is your only option.

And on top of that, many of the regular ingredients are zone-specific (karma stuff usually) or rare as well, so unless you’ve been everywhere you probably don’t even have the raw ingredients you need either.

Right now my cooking is sitting at I think 250, and I’ve got probably 15 ingredients in my discovery list that aren’t greyed out. But none of them can combine to make anything. I’ll have 2-3 ingredients that’ll combine, but not make an actual dish, must be missing that crucial 4th. What am I missing? Who knows. Could be some random karma ingredient from a corner of a map I haven’t explored. Could be a random sauce or spice or other food item I missed making. With other combinations I’ll click on a couple ingredients and the level requirement will shoot up to 350 so I can’t make it anyway, even though both ingredients are shown not red or greyed out.

And even once you do get a successful discovery, then you have to check to make sure you didn’t use any of your component ingredients and if you did remake them so you can continue to use them for discovery.

Then when I get tired of clicking 50 ingredients trying to get one to work, I’ll have to delete / sell all the sauces and stuff to clear my inventory, which means the next time I want to do a little cooking I have to go down the list and remake every one all over again. Probably missing one or two, leading to the above problem of “What am I missing?!”.

Then there’s the problem of ingredients that are “done” as far as discoveries go. So I’ve discovered the 3 recipes based on this spice mix or that sauce, but how can I tell? I’ve got to make the ingredient first, then put it at the top of my inventory and check the discovery box. If it doesn’t appear at all (neither grey nor red) then I can safely say I’m done with that. But what, I have to write down a list of things I don’t need to make any more, so when I’m going down the list of things I still have to remake for discovery I have to cross-reference a list of things I don’t need and not make them?

Honestly, I think its the combination of the two systems that makes it so tedious. I don’t at all mind “chaining” different components together to make something if I just know what I need to make. Once I do get to 400 and don’t have to faff around with discovery any more I’ll be perfectly fine with having to make a bunch of components for a recipe. It makes sense and its really not a problem to me. And I also actually really like discovery-style crafting systems in general (as an example I loved Alchemy in Skyrim). But the combination of dozens of components / chaining and discovery together just makes it all too tedious and maddening.

IMO, of course. This topic makes it clear there are plenty who like the cooking as-is, and thats fine and means that it probably shouldn’t be changed.

Electro.4173:

snip

The wiki is your friend when it comes to finding out what crucial ingredient you are missing. If you don’t like the act of discovery on your own, the wiki has a pretty exhaustive list, just search for what you think is the least commonly used ingredient that is a match.

Rather than selling everything, how about holding on to the items that are ingredients. These are easily identified by the presence of “Cooking (275)” or however it is worded.

Cooking is not as complicated as people want to make it seem. I would love to have the UI that lets me make component parts on the discovery tab work on the regular UI as well, but using the search and filter options, it is pretty easy to find the right ingredients to make and, best of all… if feels like real cooking in that regard.

Fildydarie.1496:

Electro.4173:

snip

The wiki is your friend when it comes to finding out what crucial ingredient you are missing. If you don’t like the act of discovery on your own, the wiki has a pretty exhaustive list, just search for what you think is the least commonly used ingredient that is a match.

Rather than selling everything, how about holding on to the items that are ingredients. These are easily identified by the presence of “Cooking (275)” or however it is worded.

Cooking is not as complicated as people want to make it seem. I would love to have the UI that lets me make component parts on the discovery tab work on the regular UI as well, but using the search and filter options, it is pretty easy to find the right ingredients to make and, best of all… if feels like real cooking in that regard.

I don’t have the space to hold onto everything. I only have 1 bank box and my Chef’s inventory is already half taken up by cooked food I’m gradually using in the field.

I guess maybe the problem is that I’m trying to level cooking before I hit level 80 and can make a bunch of gold to afford extra storage space, or the fact that I’m trying to do it in chunks and not just doing it all at once.

Xolosheep.1649:

I think they should provide a “shortcut” once a very complex recipe is discovered so that u don’t have to craft all the intermediate items one by one to get the final product. For example, the Curry Butternut Squash Soup, instead of having to craft the stock, stirfry mix, curry paste……(list goes on) before you can craft the soup, just list all the required base ingredients in the final recipe and craft it in one go.

So, I didn’t play the original GW, and this game is one of a fairly decent number of MMO’s I have played. I have been having a great time discovering recipes….but yeah. If you have to have 3 other components to make another item, it would be reasonable to either give you a space in your collectibles tab to hang on to your mid-tier items, or (and this idea is really, REALLY GOOD) do what the above posters have suggested and give you a shortcut. Even if you have the items, you have to bop back and forth between tabs to make things. I have a small notebook with steps involved in making items…when the rest of the game is so much fun, and you have gotten the joy/job of discovery already done, it seems like you should be able to click on an item and just make it. Yes, it is doable the way it is, but there just isn’t a reason that it needs to be made more difficult than cooking already is!
I am not a completionist, nor does everything need to be perfect. But I feel like cooking doesn’t quite align with the rest of the game’s vision. !

I agree you should have more collectible space to store you middle-tier items, but reducing the complexity is a bad, bad idea. Some people are complaining that some of the recipes are going for too little copper in the TP. The cause of this is excessive offer. Imagine if the profession was less convoluted! nothing would be worth making at all as all would be for sale for cheap.

I advocate on the contrary: add more recipes! add more combinations! add higher tier recipes! and add different combination recipes in the middle as well. Adding variety reduces the offer if people are not forced to make them to level up the craft.

This isn’t about leveling cooking.

This isn’t about it being “easy” or “cheap”.

This isn’t directly about how “fun” it is to cycle through millions of possible combinations only to find out you’re missing one of 200 possible ingredients.

This is about how unnecessarily complicated and inconvenient it is to cook some of the higher level recipes, especially considering we’re talking about something that is fairly trivial after all.

Why must a diagram for cooking some pretty standard food compete with a Legendary item as far as complexity goes?

Dee Jay.2460:

This isn’t about leveling cooking.

This isn’t about it being “easy” or “cheap”.

This isn’t directly about how “fun” it is to cycle through millions of possible combinations only to find out you’re missing one of 200 possible ingredients.

This is about how unnecessarily complicated and inconvenient it is to cook some of the higher level recipes, especially considering we’re talking about something that is fairly trivial after all.

Why must a diagram for cooking some pretty standard food compete with a Legendary item as far as complexity goes?

How is it complicated?

Level 80 exotic necklace:

1. Refine Orichalcum Ore into Bars.
2. Craft Filligrees
3. Craft Setting
4. Craft Chain
5. Craft Jewels
6. Craft Necklace

Level 80 exotic weapon:

1. Refine Orichalcum into Bars
2. Refine Ancient Wood into Planks
3. Craft Dowel
4. Craft Inscription
5. Craft Component A
6. Craft Component B
7. Craft Weapon

Omnomberry Bar

1. Craft Baker’s Wet Ingredients
2. Craft Baker’s Dry Ingredients
3. Craft Omnomberry Compote
4. Craft Omnomberry Bar

Sesame Roasted Dinner (the most complex cooking recipie off the top of my head):

1. Craft Pile of Salt and Pepper
2. Craft Bowl of Mashed Yams
3. Craft Bowl of Spiced Mashed Yams
4. Craft Sesame Ginger Sauce
5. Craft Filet of Sesame Roasted Meat
6. Craft Sesame Roasted Dinner

Dee Jay.2460:

This isn’t about leveling cooking.

This isn’t about it being “easy” or “cheap”.

This isn’t directly about how “fun” it is to cycle through millions of possible combinations only to find out you’re missing one of 200 possible ingredients.

This is about how unnecessarily complicated and inconvenient it is to cook some of the higher level recipes, especially considering we’re talking about something that is fairly trivial after all.

Why must a diagram for cooking some pretty standard food compete with a Legendary item as far as complexity goes?

What you see as unnecessarily complicated and inconvenient, other people who love crafting see as fun and entertainment. If you are part of the first group of people who do not derive joy from the crafting, then you should probably stay away from crafting and just buy the items in the trading post from people who love the crafting process.

Legendary food (meaning food with high demand) should be harder and inconvenient to craft, this creates a better market for it.

The fact that you are comparing a level 80 exotic crafted item worth multiple Gold with food that gives you a 30 minute buff is pretty…./facepalm.

And saying “just buy it” is a pretty lame excuse. I leveled cooking specifically so I didn’y have to.

I don’t mind Food trays being complicated to make or even something a little more long-lasting. But for food that is giving you a 30 minute buff I think some of these recipes are missing the point.

murven.7581:

What you see as unnecessarily complicated and inconvenient, other people who love crafting see as fun and entertainment. If you are part of the first group of people who do not derive joy from the crafting, then you should probably stay away from crafting and just buy the items in the trading post from people who love the crafting process.

And what do you say to the guy who wants to enjoy the Chef crafting discipline without spoilers? Inventory restraints make it impractical at best to hold on to everything you make. Using spoilers to learn exactly what you need to make everything defeats the purpose of the discovery system? There’s an impasse for this person. What do you say to him? Which aspect of the “fun and entertainment” do you advise him to sacrifice?

darkace.8925:

murven.7581:

What you see as unnecessarily complicated and inconvenient, other people who love crafting see as fun and entertainment. If you are part of the first group of people who do not derive joy from the crafting, then you should probably stay away from crafting and just buy the items in the trading post from people who love the crafting process.

And what do you say to the guy who wants to enjoy the Chef crafting discipline without spoilers? Inventory restraints make it impractical at best to hold on to everything you make. Using spoilers to learn exactly what you need to make everything defeats the purpose of the discovery system? There’s an impasse for this person. What do you say to him? Which aspect of the “fun and entertainment” do you advise him to sacrifice?

i say to him: stop complaining, and go enjoy your cooking. or in other words – go back to the kitchen and make me some pie

Dee Jay.2460:

The fact that you are comparing a level 80 exotic crafted item worth multiple Gold with food that gives you a 30 minute buff is pretty…./facepalm.

And saying “just buy it” is a pretty lame excuse. I leveled cooking specifically so I didn’y have to.

I don’t mind Food trays being complicated to make or even something a little more long-lasting. But for food that is giving you a 30 minute buff I think some of these recipes are missing the point.

You haven’t done much crafting, have you? Jewelcrafting aside, the weapon example is no more complex than crafting most other weapons from 1-400 skill. The JC recipie listed is only slightly more complex than the least complicated end-product JC recipie.

You think this is complex but it is not. The recipies are simple, even for the multi-step products; they are simpler than what you will find in other crafts on average.
The one valid complaint is you have less categorization in the list of ingredients and often have to borrow some low-skill recipies to make high-skill products—you just use the search filter to whittle it down to a few items and you’re done.
You think it is bloated, but it really isn’t; most items are end-products and they fall into tiered results that fit different patterns. The intermediate items are no worse than any other craft produces—the only reason people complain is because they blindly discover recipies and don’t want to part with their creations.

If you want to talk real-world analogies, then fine: Real-world cooking is harder than real-world weapon and armorsmithing; I do all 3, so I have some sense of the relative difficulty. Cooking might be faster, but it is far, far more complex.

There is an option to make more of an item. I mean, when making omnomberry bars, there is a plus-icon that allows you to craft missing compote. Except… it doesn’t work.

If they could make that feature work, and allow us to also input the amount of stuff, that would already be a major help.

More bank tabs would help too. I’m maxed out on bank tabs X.x

darkace.8925:

And what do you say to the guy who wants to enjoy the Chef crafting discipline without spoilers?

I say no chef has ever discovered every single recipe s/he’s ever made. All of them have at some point used a cook book.

The biggest problem with cooking in my opinion is that there are too few gathering nodes to support the fact the many of the commonly used end game food items use the same main ingredients. It creates artificial inflation when special event items (like ghosts) for example come into the mix.

The entire crafting system is messed up. Too many intermediate items that don’t even go into your collections. You should be able to simply select the end product, and the game would display a “tree” of ingredients, like the GW2Spidy website does for recipes.

It would then automatically craft the final item, as long as you had all the necessary ingredients.

The intermediate steps are fine for discovery, but once you’ve discovered all the items it’s just a PITA and bad UI design.