Guild Wars 2

I was going through the the new recipes offered by the HoT vendors and they all seem lackluster. For example… Bowl of Tapioca pudding is barely better than a Delicious rice ball in the most optimal of circumstances, it’s even worse when you upgrade to any of the three variants. Shouldn’t these recipes have a purpose? even if it’s not better then Holiday food, shouldn’t it be markedly different?

Hehe … then you look at the bug section on the wiki.

In a game where the design goes out of its way to prevent power creep, you have to realize that at a certain point new foods, gear stats, etc. will eventually just stop having utility.

In theory they’re all supposed to be side grades of one another, but in practice there will always be a single mechanical “best” for a given purpose.

After three and a half years, it’s a miracle they can still create stat combos and buffs that people want at all, given the way stat progression is designed.

Not to mention some of the foods are insanely expensive to make compared to vanilla food. 3 times the price (compared to similar vanilla food) for 30min food seems to be common for the new foods.

To explain my perspective further, let’s compare 3 foods (2 being HoT craftable foods)

Delicious Rice Ball (~2s)
Food – Nourishment (30 m):
100 Healing Power
+10% Healing Effectiveness (Outgoing)

Bowl of Tapioca Pudding (~5s to craft)
Food – Nourishment (30 m):
+200 Healing Power for 10 Seconds on Using a Heal Skill (Cooldown: 20 seconds)
+10% Outgoing Healing

Bowl of Prickly Pear Tapioca Pudding (~13s to craft)
Food -Nourishment (30 m):
Gain Condition Damage equal to 10% of your Healing Power
+70 Healing Power

The prickly pear pudding needs the tapioca pudding as one of it’s ingredients but looses the flat 10% outgoing effectiveness healing buff. With the ridiculous scaling of healing power stats why on earth would you ever run this food.

There’s an easy solution for this. If/when Chef 500 is released, some of these expensive foods get redesigned to be 450 or 500 rank foods, and are buffed to become quad-stat foods. Considering how few people seem to run food/consumable buffs even in dungeons or fractals, I honestly think it’s not going to have much of an effect on balance.

I don’t really have a problem with some foods being used as ingredients for other foods that are vastly different in terms of their stats, so long as it doesn’t end up making said food insanely expensive. It makes sense to an extent, at least to the extent that any food magically making you better at stuff does. Sure, the base food may be included in the ingredients, but its being combined with other things that alter the end result. Thus yielding different boons.

The pricing / ingredient costs on some of the new foods needs a serious looking at, though. That’s sadly been a running theme with a lot of new foods added to the game after the initial release, that their prices and the number of items it takes to craft them are just silly compared to the base food items from launch. And they’re not strictly “better” for the most part, just different, so having the prices vary so wildly between them doesn’t really make sense to me.

And yeah, there are cases where festival foods just flat-out beat crafted foods. Not necessarily in effectiveness, but in ease of acquiring, simply because festivals tend to absolutely flood the market with festival items to the point where they sell for vendor price or otherwise very cheap. Not really sure what can be done about that, though. If you just make the festival food inferior then it becomes useless, which is no good. There are already people that feel festivals just give out useless junk, so to further that feeling by literally making everything dropped inferior would be a bad idea.

Perhaps the best solution there is just no solution at all. Sure, on some level its a bummer that a crafted recipe is just pointless, but perhaps instead of looking at is like “Wow, my crafted food isn’t needed” you can look at it like “Cool, I can save some gold buying festival food instead”.