Veggie Cake Discussion

[PlayerNumber03]

Hello, I wanted to gather everyone's opinions on the recent changes to veggie cakes.

First off, there is no question that the healing on these were going to be nerfed within 24 hours. 15% is just insane for what they cause. However, the nerfs to this might have been a little too much. I would like to hear the reasoning behind it at the very least.

Veggie cakes in v252.6: Manually-used Veggie Cakes now heal 15% (over 10 seconds when manually fed) in addition to +500 HP (on Herbivores), have cooldown interval reduced to 10s, and take 4x as long to spoil

Veggie cakes in v252.7: Doedicurus and Carbonemys no longer gain Herbivore-healing from Veg Cakes; Veg Cake max healing amount limited to 3000 HP over 10 seconds (otherwise 15% of max HP), in addition to instant +500 (edited)

Doedicurus and Carbonemys

Why were these herbivores omitted from the healing benefits altogether? Surely their ability to be dropped into battle (as opposed to a sauropod being restricted to where it can walk) is something to consider, but now they're thrown back into the exact place they were at in v252.6: they can only be healed by idle, non-stasised healing. If a mammoth can take advantage of the veggie cake healing, we're going to see an increase in their battle effectiveness after this patch.

Sauropods

The introduction of the % max hp healing was a godsend to the sauropod family. Currently, these dinos have the highest possible base health stat of their class with numbers exceeding 15,000 on a non-nerfed post-tame server. v252.7: Sauropod Tamed Health gain (leveled-up portion) reduced by 30% I feel that this was a justifiable nerf. Even on official servers, you can get these things well into the hundreds of thousands of health. With that being said, 3k hp out of 300k health is not very good. Perhaps on an official server it is, but it would be nice to see at least a setting for these food changes in unofficial.

How this affects combat

Previously, it seemed the sauropods were used mainly for defence (save for the mobile bronto bases) due to their lack of utility. The bronto is incredibly slow, and walking one across the map for a raid is generally not worthwhile. The diplo, although much faster, was often neglected due to not being able to put anything on its saddle. Had you managed to take one across the map and it survived the battle, you'd be waiting at least a week for it heal back up before it could be used again, and that's on lower max level servers.

Suggestions

Mainly I propose that the nerf be decided by the server.

VeggieCakeMaxFlatHP=3000
VeggieCakeMaxPercentageOverride=5

This will give the server owners the ability to adjust how effective the cakes are, thus determining how effective sauropods are in battle. These settings will give the owner the option to limit the cakes based on flat HP gain, or a flat percentage of maximum HP (where flat HP is either ignored if the percentage is given, or the lesser of the two is utilized when healing)

An alternative to save the doeds and turtles would be to add a veggie cupcake, perhaps one that has a hard limit of 3000 hp gained per consumption, which would be utilized by all herbivores.

[PlayerNumber03]

Originally posted by Smittah79:

well... there is a CD timer, you can "technically" speed heal carnivores if you know the how to, and the cost of materials for making veggie cake is not necessarily easy for all players.

Precisely. Carnivores have the ability to be healed at a ridiculous rate, and it costs next to nothing. These veggie cakes were difficult to craft, and now their benefits are being reduced to minimal. I believe raw meat is 5hp per remote use, which reduces the cakes to 600 raw meat effectiveness, and it doesn't work on all herbivores.

[oldkane]

I dont understand why the change to Doeds, guess the Carbonemys is because they are used as a damage soak so much but why the Doed? Unless it is becuase they take reduced damage anyway from Dinos so they could be used like the other one?

[Attack Kitty]

Incidentally, for those wishing to maximize their dinos for veggie cake use, the current sweet spot for health if you want maximum efficiency from veggie cakes is now 23,300... (3000+500 expressed as 15% of a health pool). Obviously you might want more, for various reasons, but your benefit per veggie cake consumed won't go up with more health than that, meanwhile any health lower than that could get more benefit from veggie cakes by being raised up to that value.

The reason for the change on turtles/doeds is because they were loaded up with cakes and dropped in front of massive batteries of turrets in pvp, and they'd just infinitely soak up the damage.

Honestly I think they have taken a completely broken approach to balancing the cakes, the correct fix was simply to make them a manual-use item, so that dismounted dinos don't auto-use them. That would stop the turtle/doed abuse in pvp right there, and still leave cakes useful for all mounted dinos. The only dino that probably shouldn't be allowed to use the cakes is the titanosaur.

[oldkane]

I like your Idea Attack Kitty, it gets my vote.