Today I would like to talk about cooking, the forgotten craft. I just dinged 50 cooking 2 days ago on a non-legacy server, and started making food for my FC who has begun end game.
There are a few problems with cooking I've seen so far:
1) It makes 1 item at a time
2) The shard costs for food is equal to that of an armor/weapon
3) Food lasts 30 minutes
4) Food fades on death
These are all huge problems, and make cooking extremely grindy. Why do you ask? Simply because making one piece of food, which lasts 30 minutes and fades on death costs as many shards as making any weapon/armor that lasts forever. A day of doing dungeons/raids will easily take up to 15-20 pieces PER PERSON. Not factoring in deaths and only flawless runs, it might be around 10-15 per person of a day of dungeons/raiding, more if you play more. For example, the shard cost of buttons in a blanket, the second best determ/crit/VIT food is 6 fire 6 water shards per synth, meaning 60-90 water and fire shards per person(10-15 pieces of food)
This forces me or my FC to constantly have to grind shards for me, which are only obtainable through mining or botany. There are a few other ways to get shards, leves sometimes give but not many and are limited and cost shards to finish the leve, market ward prices are high, and farming ele's isn't as good as mining/botany. This is easily potentially 1-2 hours of shard farming per person. That's a LOT of farming just to keep a food buff up during raids.
My proposed change is simple, make food synth into 3-6-9-12 pieces of food per synth(a lot of the materials already do this, why not the finished product?), add food that lasts for 2-3 hours(I suggest the 1 and 2 star food lasts this long, turning rare mats that only spawn once per game day into a 30 min food that perishes on death isn't a very good idea) and persists through death. This would make the 1-2 star food MUCH better than the other(right now you're better off using slightly weaker level 45-50 food) and fixes the problem with food.
Please help your Cooks out and support this !