For mana and healing potions (and whatever else you want) You could make them use a scaling on health and mana so that their healing is based on a flat amount plus a percent of your health so they remain at the same strength throughout the game.
Nah, the entire point of potions is that their effects are instantaneous, rather than happening over time like with food items. They don't really need to become more effective than they already are. Food items, though, probably should scale differently than simply extending the duration of effect for more powerful food; I tend not to ever use food items that restore more than 30 or so HP, or 20 or so MP, specifically because they're so much more expensive than 2 items with half their duration. Even when I craft, I generally sell most of the food/drink items I make, just because it's way more cost-effective to sell whatever I make and stock up on danishes and grog.
I have always been a fan of percentage based healing. Star Ocean 2, for instance, had one basic healing item and one basic mana item that remained relevant throughout the entire game because they healed a percentage of health (30%) that could be increased up to 60% by ranking up a specific skill. In that vein, then, I'd like to expand Null's idea: healing potions should heal 20% of your heath, +3% per alchemy rank.
I agree on the percentage thing. 15 hp is basically nothing on the later floors, when monsters hit for huge amounts. Even if it is done instantly, the fact that it takes 1 turn to use it negates any benefit it gives you.
Yep. At the later levels teleporting out of harms way is far more useful to staying alive than getting a flat and petty amount of healing that cannot come close to what you will take if you stay and chug every potion of have. I always thought this was a broken mechanic. We need more potent healing potions after around DL8. It might be nice to have several types.
I'd rather have one potion that scales up than many different ones. Just to save on clutter and such. bur one more type wouldnt be that bad.
I will freely admit I don't know a lot about the damage amounts on the later floors, so potions really could become useless eventually. Even so, food items also need buffing; if potions become useless halfway through a full RotDG run, imagine how terribad food is.
A Deep Omelet is the equivalent of 64 . So if a Healing Potion is only ~25 then it is much less useful except as immediate health when you have a spare turn in combat. I would like to see health potions have bigger brothers like "Greater Health" potions and even "Grand Health" potions, healing 50 and 100 respectively. They would be rare or require Alchemy skill to make from multiple normal heal pots. But they should not be entirely game breaking if they have an appropriate malus like -10 , -50 -50, -50 and antimagic for ten or twenty turns too. (That way weather you are a caster or a fighter you would not want to spam them in combat.) The problem that remains with this idea is how to balance them for archers. I know of no way to prevent you from throwing or shooting for a while after using one. It would be really nice if there was an "All Thumbs" debuff that prevents you from shooting while in effect. That would solve the problem entirely.
What if healing potions added something like the "full belly" buff in Roguish Renovation, where consuming an item gives you a temporary boost to ? (whether or not these would be stackable is another question)
Buffed healing potions would need a serious nerf to the recipe output. It's common for players to end up with 200+ potions by the end of the game. There's a reason the Phylactery's 50 + /2 healing is worth the debuff it gives.
But one Deep Omelet performs exactly the same function as six Danishes and an Apple. (Well, actually, the danishes and apple heal one point more than the Omelet, but who's counting?) You heal one point per turn with food items, period. Therefore, all of the food items are exactly the same, except you have to choose between high cost (Omelet) or large quantities (Danish). Except that the quantity limits in this game are high enough that I've never hit them, so you've got no reason not to just sell any expensive food items you find and just run around floor 12 munching on Dire Sandwiches whenever it becomes absolutely necessary. Duration's useful to a point, but you cannot possibly tell me that waiting one turn to re-apply your healing boost is at all likely to hinder your progress if you have to do it more than once every 20 turns. The higher-tier food items should get some way of making them stronger than lower-tier items other than just duration. Perhaps, say, halve the duration of food items that last more than 25 turns, but double the points per turn they heal?
I think Health Potions should at least scale the same way that Poison bolts do. At skill level 1 and 2 you make Poison Ampule Bolts, but at higher skill levels you make Poison Bottle bolts. There should be stronger potions available from the recipe, which will also be found in deeper dungeon levels. I also agree that high level food should do more than just give more turns of healing 1HP. They should give more than 1, or give buffs like food in RR. Food is just not a good enough source of healing, and for pure warriors, that's pretty much all they get.
Completely disagree, though I did agree with your sentiment for a couple months before I learned better. The proper use of an omelet is during zoos. To eat 6 danishes and an apple during a zoo requires 7 actions that must be spent eating instead of attacking or moving. While you'll certainly get those actions during the course of a zoo battle, you'll rarely get the free moments exactly when you need them. A single omelet at the first opportunity will give you a constant regen over the first half of the zoo, and allow you to fire 6 more bolts or spells instead of eating little items. It's still just 1 hp per turn, but not having to worry about it really frees up your options during long fights. I'll even eat one at the start of a zoo even if I'm not injured yet, because chances are it won't waste more than a point or three before the first hit lands on me. It's a rare zoo that doesn't do 64 or more total damage. EDIT: Changed a "can" to a "must" as that's really what I meant. When Lorrelian quoted it, I noticed my original sentence wasn't technically saying exactly what I meant. I'm pretty sure everyone understood it already though.
I agree with r_b_bergstrom there. In fact, I never even chugged a health potion in the time I spent playing DoD, because using a deep omelet or a cheesy omelet when I opened the zoo seemed like a much better thing to do (and whenever I got attacked by a small group of normal opponents, I could defeat them with barely any health lost; so other than the occasional portion of ground meat, healing items [such as food] I only used when attacking named monsters or trying to get through a monster zoo). Heck, unless you are skoling every non-food non-artefact item and using "This belongs in the museum" on every artefact item, you should not need to sell food to get money. Unless I really found something shiny I wanted that costed a lot of gold, by the time I got to floor 6~7 I always could get back and buy every single food and drink item there were up to the floor I was on (and floors 6~7 aren't that difficult unless you get unlucky).
This is the heart of understanding food. It's extremely powerful, but you have to understand what foods to use, and when. It's one of the things that make DoD's battle of attrition tricky to balance and more fun to play.
