I had about 15 or so Auntie Ethel fights (it's always after I got lvl 4 after the gnolls and Anders and before the goblin camp) but never one where she was supported by the masks. In what situation does this happen? It really sounds like a very very hard fight.
If the masks are still alive when you fight Ethel in her lair she’ll call them to support her unless you kill her very quickly indeed. There are various ways to achieve this (particularly if the bug that prevented sneaking past them has been fixed, which I’ve not checked), but I’ll not spoiler them here. The masks don’t need to be killed as they’ll turn neutral once Ethel is dead (unless you get hit by the bug that intermittently prevents that), but still make the battle pretty hard as they’ll attack and debuff your party and heal Ethel unless you can stop them.
If you differentiated between non-ingredient and ingredient food, you had a third category of the same item. Don't like that.
Fair enough. Sometimes we just have different preferences. But just in case I’ve not been clear about what mine actually are, I would like to:
- Be able to use all food in the form in which we find it to contribute to the total amount required to fully rest (ie exactly how it works now).
- Reduce the amount of food lying around (to be fair, this isn’t so much of a problem in the Underdark).
- As a nice-to-have, get some easy-to-use recipes that allow us to combine some food items into meals that contribute more points towards a full rest than the constituent parts would if used in their raw form. The recipe interface, if we have one, should enable us to click on the recipe to create the meal from our party inventory rather than faffing around finding their constituent parts and combining them.
- Get rid of supply packs.
- Don’t add any more complex mechanisms around food management or boosts from specific meals.
I do agree that traveller’s chest management could be improved, and would be in favour of enabling food to be selected directly from it in the rest dialogue box, and including its contents in the party inventory view when in camp. Though personally I tend to just dump a couple of nights’ worth of food in there for emergencies but then never touch it as I generally have enough food in my party inventory to rest with.