With production skills being a viable means of advancing and engaging the world, has there been any consideration of cheer items (items that grant temporary morale bonuses when "consumed")?
While food or alchemical items could be produced to provide a minor bonus for combat oriented characters, even art (pictures or books) could be utilized the same way.
Additionally, what if a performance based PC (bard or someone interested in making a living "selling" buffs to other player characters) could act, dance, or sing in order to grant temporary morale bonuses to nearby PCs that "tip" them. It would be a means of producing a product that player characters may wish to purchase, and higher training in the performing arts could grant higher or longer lasting bonuses (with a subsequently higher pay scale).
Just a thought.
Goblin Squad Member
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I wholeheartedly agree.
The game should track the health of our Spirit, not just our Body. Depending on which options we choose during Character Development (before entering the game), we should be able to raise our spirits by eating a freshly prepared, home-cooked meal, or maybe an exquisitely presented gourmet meal, or maybe just by sitting around a small campfire in the wilderness with a brace of coneys roasting on sticks.
And it's not just food. Our spirits should raise or lower based on all sorts of events. If I'm cold and wet, my spirits should lower. If it's been a week since I've slept on a proper bed (and I'm not the kind who prefers sleeping on bare earth with a tree root as a pillow), then my spirits should lower.
There's a lot of room for automatically adjusting our mood in ways that other players can see and use as a basis for RP.
This would be a really great system, and I hope Ryan and the rest of the people at Goblinworks give it some serious consideration for inclusion.
I know WoW has the "campfire" buff that lasts for like 30 seconds. It would be sort of interesting to see if weather (like pouring rain) provided a temporary debuff while you were unprotected outside or for 30 seconds after finding shelter.
Give endure elements something to do, right?
However, my main emphasis was on players generating buffs for other players as a commodity.
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Goblin Squad Member
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For buffing, check out LOTRO. The Cooking skill in that game is not just "I can make out-of-combat healing items!"; the buffing food that cooks can make beat almost any buff that any class gets as a skill.
There are four kinds of food in LOTRO: Trail Food, which buffs one stat; Fortifying Food, which gives lots of resistance against debuffs; Fine Drinks, which boost Legendary Item Experience gains. (And if you don't know what LOTRO's Legendary Item system is, you owe it to yourself to look it up; it's a fantastic way to customize your character and stay busy at level cap, and something that PFO should look at.) Then there's Cooked Food, which gives massive boosts to your regeneration, both out of combat and in combat.
As for other buffs, they don't really exist, other than that you don't have a health bar. You have a Morale bar. So all healing is about inspiring and refreshing your allies; the two main heals Minstrels get are called Raise the Spirit and Bolster Courage. If your morale hits 0, you're not dead, but you are so demoralized that you have to retreat. In game terms, it's just like WoW's death and resurrection, but without any actual death. But you can get a jolt to revive you from skills like the Captain's famous Escape from Darkness or the Minstrel's legendary skill Rally!.
Oh, and then there's Hope and Dread. Each character has a Hope/Dread score, which is usually 0; neither hopeful nor dreadful. However, certain areas and bosses give Dread, which gives penalties to max morale, damage dealt and received, healing effects, and at severe Dread, can reduce the effectiveness of your skills. Having high Hope doesn't help that much, but the main use of Hope skills is to counteract Dread; any hope buff counters dread debuffs, and vice versa. So there are several auras and skills that fill your allies with Hope, which stops any Dread-giving bosses from debuffing you too badly.
So LOTRO has a lot of inspiring and cheering items, worked into the game's mechanics. PFO could take a few notes if they want to include inspiring items in the game.
As long as not eating it doesn't punish you.
I found dread to be a simplistic way to increase the challenge level of an encounter without actually having developers put much thought into it. A cheap fix really. The easiest way for any developer to increase challenge is by adjusting mob morale up and player morale down. The problem in LOTRO with dread was that the counters had rather large timers on them. And if you popped one and subsequently died, there was no way to remove it at all for at least 40 minutes or more, making raids very slow and prone to complete breakup and disbanding in the event of catastrophic failure, and then you may end up losing your raid timer for the week too. Although they certainly have items in the store for instant removal and buffing of hope now, to my total and unending disgust. And since they're going to be removing Destiny Points as well at some point in the future to avoid having a game mechanic compete with their store, players won't have many options to remove large dread except by buying it.
Please don't trumpet the legendary system in LOTRO. It's crap. Nothing more than a way for Turbine to make money now. You the same Arbalister from that forum too?
The only thing I want P/GW to take from Turbine is a lesson in how not to treat your loyal customers.