128795-hi-nerds-cooking-whats-that

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Hi nerds! almost done with my first month and so far i'm having a blast!  Been doing some trade skill stuff and so far i've found cooking to be really weird.  I'm not level 50 yet so i know the experience might change later on, so please correct me on the parts i may be wrong about.
 
Heres my review of cooking and some suggestions that might make it even more fun.
 
The Fun parts
Really loving the battleship style system of walking my shots onto the target and hitting it.  Makes crafting more than just *click button*, grab a snack, get stuff.  Then after discovering that recipe, figuring out methods of making that thing with the least amount of materials is pretty cool.  Getting the food recipes and discovering the variants to find the right one for your class makes every cooking binge a mini adventure. 
 
The right food buffs also make a good contribution to performance increases, ontop of the decrease in downtime from just healing faster.  Well that is assuming you get the right buffs.  Not sure why i'd need a combo of insight/deflect rating buff, but the food healing is always appreciated.
 
Overall, 4/5 would definitely cook again.
 
 
 
The not so fun parts
I've talked to a few players about cooking and we've all came to the same conclusion.  Food is too hard to make, and why bother making food when you can just visit neighbors with festivals fabkits and grab some snacks there?  Not a guarantee to get the foods you want, but thats why we share with friends right?
 
Food Buffs:
Cooked foods offer pretty great buffs assuming you cook the foods that offer you the stats you need.  But some weird food buff combinations really make no sense.  I haven't played all the classes yet but i'm assuming those weird food buffs are for other classes specs.  The part i don't understand is why there are multiple foods that offer the same buff?  For example the sweet and sour poultry and fiery coleslaw both offer the exact same heal/buffs.  Why is there a redundancy here?  All it does is take up tons of inventory slots because this is something i'd eat eventually.  Aside from possible RP connotations for serving food for vegetarians, i really don't see why there should be a redundancy in buffs. 
 
Then we have the issue of keeping track of what food does what.  Theres no rhyme or reason to the naming scheme of the foods nor is there a way to really sort foods that i'm aware of based on their buffs without manually looking through each one.  Maybe this changes at level 50, but the lowbie foods all seem to just be a big jumbled mess of buffs.
 
Recommendations:  Perhaps the food buffs could be looked over and each category of food could have their buffs be standarized.  For example, maybe chicken dishes could all offer moxie and the variants of chicken dishes could give a combination of moxie and whatever.  We could then add more variants to the generic dishes to cover the buff combinations that makes sense.  The zone specific meals and variations could then be relogated to the same buff standardization but just require meats while generic meal recipes would require meat + plant material. This would could make it so theres less redundancy in food buffs and we won't have to dedicate extra inventory slots to misc foods of the buffs we want while giving a theme to a jumbled naming scheme.
 
For plain foods that offer no buffs and just pure healing, perhaps we could have a new category of foods called snacks.  This could be something thematic like Protostar food rations, or sampler platters.  Snacks could require a mix of all the generic food materials of that tier and would offer a higher output.  Variations of snacks could just offer pure hp healing in exchange for loss of focus healing and vice versa.
 
Raw materials:
I ran through algoroc twice.  Once on my own because i started playing a week before my friend, and a second time with my friend whlie helping her do the algoroc quests and finishing the random quests i missed.  After both clears, and going over and finishing all the challenges i started trying to do all the cooking recipes for algoroc for the talent point.  I noticed something really disturbing, i only had enough materials after all that for 2 tries for the foods that require 1 species specific meat and didn't even have enough for the recipe that requires 3 different species specific meat.
 
I thought oh, well maybe i was just unlucky and i went on to do galeras.  Ended up with worst results since i only ran through it once.  Similar results so far with whitevale, farside, and wilderun.  Haven't tried malgrave since we'll be doing that this week, but i suspect the trend will continue.  There is something wrong with the drop rates on species specific meats.  I went roan hunting and i was literally being worst than a zombie-stalin 3rd reich schutzstaffel going around genociding all the animals of algoroc and trying to do some ethnic cleansing of all the inferior animal species, twice.  once without survivalist and once with survivalist.  The only difference survivalist made was that i ended up with a little extra tough meats and various other materials that fall under the generic categories of bug/meat/poultry/fish.  The only way i could farm any harder is by channeling the spirit of ancient chinese bot farmers.  I tried buying them from the auction house, but the prices and availability suggests that i'm not the only one that has problems aquiring cooking materials.  Lets also not forget that almost all food require some plant material, all of which seem to be the more uncommon/rare variants of the base plants of the zone.
 
Recommendations:  Something should be done about the food material drop rates.  Reading the description of survivalist i thought that this would be the tradeskill i would need to complement cooking, but that was really not the case.  Species specific cooking materials such as dawngrazer meats and the tiered variants needs a buff in their drop rates.  We could shift the total drop % by lowering the generic meat drops, such as tough meats, and increasing drop rate on the species specific meats. 
 
Animal carcasses could become the way for non survivalist to acquire the generic meat variants and just increasing the overall drop amounts from carcasses.  While survivalist get a chance of bonus meat/animal products per kill as ususal. This could make it so that survivalist would be to go-to for the generic meat variants as it would go perfectly with the housing survivalist thicket's butcher blocks giving the generic meats.
 
 
Stuff that could be added:
You have trade skill dailies for a lot of zones to help contribute to the war effort by supplying weapons and armor, but nobody needs food?  Immersion wise, I think supplying foods and feeding the soldiers is as important as gearing them up.  Maybe we could do something creative with these quests as well besides just the generic "make me x of y" quests.  Maybe we could have like a cafeteria mini game and we could cook and serve some foods for the guards/npcs at the local chow hall.  I'd imagine aiming and throwing food rations at hungry soldiers would fit the theme of the game pretty well.  Cooking dailies could reward vouchers and we could have a new tab on the voucher npc that offers cooking materials.
 
 
Anticpated results from the proposed changes:
Cooking would be less tedious and would actually be a valid method of getting food buffs without resorting to large scale festival food farming.  Getting rid of all the tedious aspects of cooking would make it more fun.  Unless of course you're some sort of fun-hater.  You're not a fun-hater are you?
 
 
Anyways! Have fun nerds! See ya in game!	
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			Hi! I may be one of the few other people in the world who actually care very much about the cooking and other hobby tradeskills (Cooking being the only one at the moment), with hopes of future skills such as fishing and some sort of plant-gathering professions. Cooking has been in its current state since, as far as I'm concerned, Pre-release. Needless to say it's a very rough and unpolished system. I highly doubt it's what Carbine ever intended to be their final product for cooking, but they have been much busier with trying to add and improve on core game mechanics to keep the game alive and breathing after going through a few very long rough spots. Without any official word, I'd suspect Carbine may do a more tradeskill heavy drop in the future with improvements to, and maybe the addition of new tradeskills.	
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Even tho, i am now a level 8 cook, it had taken me just under 1 year to do - yeah i could have done it faster if i were grinding 20 hours a day but on average spent about 3-4 hrs a day farming meat. Give or take, a few days off etc. This tradeskill is unlike any other, you could farm your materials in a lot less time than that of cooking. 
 
For someone that plays exile, i often had to go into the dominion areas to farm those animals for a long time, not that have an issue with it, but its a very long grind.
 
To be honest the system is pretty good and fun, to fix it, simply up the drop chances of the meat, they are what like 2% drop chance, maybe change it to around 40-50%, and survivalists should have an even higher drop chance!
 
I agree with you with a daily or something, i am level 8 and i just make some food at the start of the week and bam don't use it again for the rest of the week. Perhaps the daily could offer the same as the other tradeskills, crafting vouchers and maybe eldan data fragments.	
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