Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Food is too OP, balancing suggestions

To the point where i hardly even care about potions and healer. There is way to much food, and it's ability to insta-heal you is way too strong.

Instead make it work like an additive buff. With very slow health regen, and having character overeat - debuff him/her.
With good food and going close to been overeat, food buff should at best provide something like 5 hp regen per minute. Totally unreliable in combat (as it should be), but good way to replenish health in between combat encounters.

If character overeats - he will lose all food buffs, and gain 'poisoned' condition for a while.
Alcohol (and other drinks) can stack separately with food, but likewise can cause heavy issue if drunk too much.

Wouldn't worry too much about overeating. Instead, just focus on the food problem, infinitely can eat.

Just make it where you can only eat one or two pieces of food per short/long rest. Once you eat, your just full until the rest. No need for more than that.

Considering that food often only heals 1 or 2 hp a pop, if you changed food consumption to a rest-based mechanic there would be almost zero reason to use it anymore. Especially considering the relative rarity of potions, players would be encouraged to spam long rests (to make sure their healers weren't blowing all their heals between battles) which is already a small issue.

I think making it a slower regen would balance it to be more practical as a way to replenish health while making it impractical for battles and reinforcing the importance of health potions/healers.

Eating food to heal is called taking a short rest. It should be removed and short rests allowed twice or maybe three times to avoid overuse of long rest.

Unrestricted longrest is another issue Larian should worry about.
There definitely should be penalties for player resting too often.
Or just outright denying longrest, until party actively plays for about half an hour, or pass one battle encounter.
Also, some food heals over 20hp. Which makes even potion of greater healing really worthless.

I don't heal my broken bones by eating two apples. They shouldn't heal at all. At best, they should give buffs or be used to deal with hunger.

Personally I would be happy if the remove the food items from the game. I was pretty shocked when I saw that food healed you. Has that happened in an D&D CRPG?

Replace food with rations and have it that your need 4 rations to long rest. Now you can balance the long rest VS short rest issue and have a reason for rations to be in the game, if they must have food.

I agree. Currently it adds nothing to the game.
If Larian wants to add some sort of mechanic around food, that's a different story, but straight up heal is just weird.

Gotta fill those numerous containers somehow!

Yeah I'd rather see food items healing you removed entirely.

I agree. I long rested after each combat so I was prepared for the next encounter. In normal 5e you're only able to benefit from a long rest once in a 24 hour period. You can short rest as many times as you want, but can only heal a number of times equal to your hit dice.

A tired/exhausted status can be added to the game to show when your characters can/need a long rest.

In addition, by removing food, we can add more healing potions as loot on humanoid creatures.

In fact yes. Just add component in various containers, with which players can craft healing salves, and other minor alchemical substances. Still shouldn't be as good actual potions, just bit extra healing.
Food at best should provide very minor bonuses or, veeeery slow health regen.

actually I would rather they not add any crafting to BG3. crafting not really well done in 5e books and would much better if they focused on adding more story or making game more 5e like then spending time on a crafting system. Not every game needs crafting.

Well, Larian already heavily homebrewing. Why not give them a chance to fix thing, that Wizards were failing fixing for years.
They surely can learn lots of things from Pathfinder, as well as 3.5e.

Because developer time is a limited resource and feature creep can kill projects. What would crafting really bring to BG3?

Well, Larian certainly have large experience with crafting how it's done in DOS 1,2

I think the best decision will be to make food a resource for fast\long rest. That is, in order to make a rest, you need, for example, 4ed of food (depending on the number of people).

I also happen to dislike spending time crafting rather than playing. I have a feeling that a lack of crafting would generate a whole slew of posts saying "where is crafting?" - but I for one very strongly prefer crafting to not be in the game at all.

I'm an adventurer, not a smith.

The heal from Short Rest and Long Rest assumes you are eating food as part of the resting.

The food items in BG3 function mechanically exactly like healing potions. Just get rid of them. Eating pork chops while fighting goblins in melee belongs in a game with a more comical style.

If they want some kind of a food system, do it like Pathfinder where you can cook special meals during Long Rest (Survival check, ingredients) for MINOR buffs like +1 to Con saves or +1d8 temporary HP.

Hopping on to BG3 for the first time and see that food was a healing item was a bit of a shock but slightly understandable for a game aspect but unfortunately after playing for a while it is seemingly to op and I find myself not really going to camp to long rest and i don't really use the short rest. I haven't seen this option on here but I'll give it a shot and apologies if someone else has said this. What if food could only heal you half way, so this still a "Viable" use and need for food and is just an easy fix (if it is), this will also Incentivize the use of healing potions and or spells to heal the rest of the way. This is just a though.

P.S. Also make it only heal 1 to 2