Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Counter Argument: Food is fine.

Maybe add a debuff so characters cant eat endlessly?

Which should kind of encourage cooking so people are not eating 30 apples to regain full health.

Game is probably balanced towards 'play the game you want within arbitrary reason' and not everyone likes Shadowheart or wants to roll a cleric/druid etc. Food also weighs a lot more than potions such as the pig's head being far heavier than the rest, so horay for inventory management.

And if you do have a 'healer' in your party, they can now do other things which are far more impactful anyways such as providing advantage and having spells like Bless etc.

All those are just resources which need to be controlled and taken account for (which they have a limited quantity of).

If they didn't mess with 5e and incorporate their own version of DoS/D&D into this game, you wouldn't need to add food that heals, change healing spells, have healing potions and revivify scrolls falling from the sky, change short rests per long rest, etc. But when a 1st level caster can now cast a fire bolt cantrip that does more damage in one cast than an eldritch blast cantrip, with an agonizing blast invocation (which requires a level 2 character) that also has a 1st level hex spell on them, then maybe you'll end up with damage and healing issues.

+1 Agree, a whole load of the problems seen so far are either (depending upon your point of view) Larian mixing too much DoS into 5E or too much 5E into DoS. There is a real need to pick a ruleset here, this hybrid version they have at the moment isn't working.


THIS, SO MUCH THIS.
If Larian want to keep Food in the game as a consumable item, let it be a 'currency' that is expended to on each short or long rest, either to heal naturally (long rest) or to voluntarily consume it to expend a hit-dice (short rest). I would even be open to a camp-site 'mini-game' where you could mix some of the miscellaneous ingredient items up to create a 'recipe' that would have different mini buff/debuff effects for a set duration when consumed.

It doesn't completely remove the need for a healer in the party on its own. It makes healers less useful. And another thing that makes them less useful is free "help" action that brings a person back up with 1 hp. However they are still useful because of Healing Word, which is a bonus action. This is I think the only reason to have a healing character in the party: to be able to healing word someone (heal them at range as bonus action) and attack on the same turn. This only makes sense if the other character is down though. Food is useful to allow for more hp gain as there is only one short rest per day available.

The camp has a storage chest, although I've never made use of it.

I've used it in the sense that I sent to it heavy items I wasn't willing to carry around while exploring... But I never bothered taking anything back from it, now that I think about it.

Hi!

I'm the guy who made that "When you find out that food heals..." meme on reddit about a sack of delicious potatoes replacing my beloved cleric. Gonna repost a bit of my comments from there, hope that's fine:

For me food does not at all come down to realism or even my desire for a pure 5E ruleset. Instead it comes about because I find it unbalances the rules of the tabletop (and by extent BG3) that impacts my gaming experience in a negative way. I would presume Larian will redesign some key features like "surfaces", the overpowered enemies (yes I can still humblebrag about the fights being easy cause I am a big tactics game nerd but bear with me) and short rests. Maybe by implementing the hit die system already in the tabletop ?

It should also be made clear that Larian implementing custom difficulty settings, like whether food heals or not, would make EVERYONE happy. But I digress!

The issue from a balance perspective comes down to the concept of "infinite out of combat healing". Either through resting or delicious potatoes. THIS is the issue food currently poses in the game. Here's my comment from reddit:

"In 5E "easier" fights are still fights of attrition. Fighting some goblins might only cost you 1 spell slot and 14 hp across the party. But keep on taking such "easy" fights and you're gonna be out of resources come the big scary "deadly" fight.

If you get "infinite" out of combat healing then you never have to use spell slots or rest rechargeable abilites in the "easier" fights as you will recover "infinite" hp afterwards. This means you now get to walk into the boss room at full hp and with all your spells/abilites unused as you could reliably take the damage before and just eat a delicious potato.

Short rests SHOULD NOT be spammable "infinite" healing, but in 5E they're clearly not.

Food is nice to maybe top off healing out of combat but casting "goodberry" or "prayer of healing" are out of combat healing options that now become useless."

So yeah, I WANT to have to bring a dedicated healer with me to be able to heal up between fights. It's totally cool if you don't want that and dislike the idea of having a party spot locked down for mandatory support. But again, Larian seems to have a bit of a split fanbase between the DND5E purists (hello!) and the "but why not just make the game actually fun" crowd. Hoping for custom difficulty settings eventually so I can enjoy my masochistic cleric tendencies. As it is. Healing spells are pretty dang redundant and my beloved cleric is severely crippled as my party gorges themselves on delicious potatoes while I cry in the background wondering why larian let me pick the life domain.

Nice way to ignore the arguments people are making and then say there's no argument and your idea is therefore the best. Food is retarded because it adds dozens more items to an already shitty inventory management experience. DOS2 had the same problem with its 80+ varieties of food. I want to play a game, not a shitty inventory simulator.

I didn't even know food would heal you on my first playthrough, so I never used it. I also never used a healing spell, despite having a Cleric on the team. The EA has so much unavoidable damage from ground effects/thrown items/bad pathing that 7 health at the cost of a spell slot is pointless. You mitigate more damage than you heal by just killing the target faster using an offensive skill. I just watched a firebolt miss a character, but they took 4 points of damage from the ground, 3 points on the next turn, and 1 point of burning after stepping off it. Clerics are essentially useless right now, doubly so when the cleric companion has a bad stat spread. Food doesn't even matter anyway, because you'll have 20 potions in your inventory by level 4. I didn't even abuse the long rest system on my first run, because I though it would have story consequences, and I STILL had a dozen unused potions after clearly everything I could find. Having food on top of all that is insane, but you need it to counter all the unnecessary damage.

My solution: 1) Cut back on the unavoidable damage so we can reasonably make it through a few encounters without needing an insane amount of healing. Right now healing spells are useless even without all the food and potions anyway.
2) Leave food in the game, but limit it to 1 or 2 uses per long rest. This is more realistic, and it gives an incentive to still use the food. Maybe even give additional buffs to foods like an MMO.
3) Place some type of limitation on long rest so there is a reason to use healing items at all, and so points 1 and 2 are actually limiting. Doesn't have to be a hard limit, but maybe require a consumable like camping equipment.
4) Reduce the abundance of healing potions, or at least make them more difficult to obtain.

Wow that was a lot of non arguments in the OP statement. Just smacks of wanting the game extremely braindead

Wait. You guys.

WHAT?

Food DOES STUFF? But I... I threw away every single apple, every plant, every meat I've found.

Oh no. Oh no no no no no no no.

My long lineage of RPG players will never allow me to enter gamer paradise now. I am... I am finished :'(

Oh I know, but right now it is a pain to keep things organized in it if you end up storing a ton of stuff there. Either they need to redo storage containers to make it possible for us to keep things organized, or else have multiple storage containers so you can put weapons in one, armor in another, potions someplace else, etc.