Right now some deckhands are extremely good, like navigator and shipbuilder, others are alright, like cannoneer and enchanter, but chef and merchant are just bad.
This suggestion is to make them atleast not horrible and hopefully just as useful as the other types, reaching towards the utility and value offered by navigator and shipbuilder.
General Idea:
The frst thing that really came to mind to solve this issue was to make both of them serve more specialized “merchant” roles, as this would allow them to not only be useful to the player by selling items of a specific type to them, but also have their own unique perks outside of selling.
Chef Changes:
1: Having a chef deckhand now passively gives you a multiplier to any food you make, increasing hunger and status effects.
2: When cooking a gold/legendary fish, chefs will now give you between 2 and 4 scales depending on tier instead of 1 since no deckhand profession should ever have a tangible downside.
3: Chef deckhands will now use fruits/mushrooms increasing in quality based on tier so that crew cooked meals will no longer exclusively give recovery.
4: Chef deckhands can now sell food items and seasonings.
Merchant Changes:
1: Renamed to Alchemist, they exclusively sell potion reagents and catalysts, this is because every other item in their sell pool is typically just a waste of space for the player that they could easily find by hopping between 2 or 3 merchant ships, selling notebooks and coal does not warrant an entire deckhand slot, especially when there’s NPCs sitting around that cost you nothing to find and do the exact same thing just as if not more reliably.
2: Their stock would consist of all potion reagents up to and within exotic tier, including reagents that generalized merchant ship NPCs would be unable to sell.
I personally believe that every deckhand should be extremely valuable, though, all of this is obviously subject to change, I’m no game balancer and I’m not going to pretend I am lol.
As such, feedback is appreciated.
(actual discussion starts at reply 87 for anybody reading this that wants to catch up)
Yes it doesn’t save me any resources and 9 out of 10 ship encounters in this game don’t need any buffs to get through in the first place.
I’d say cannoneer was on par with shipbuilder if I had a use for it.
Enizor is an enchanter, he’s an alchemist in story but he doesn’t do any alchemy.
The highest quality thing that a merchant is able to sell outside of reagents is an unenchanted unmodified arcsphere.
That… isn’t useful to anybody that has gotten to the point where they have a master tier merchant.
I shouldn’t have said typically, I should have said every.
He enchants things.
That is literally his only purpose as a Co-Captain beyond stats.
He does not fill an alchemist role or an enchanter role in deckhand terms.
it’s not always about the value or usefulness of an item, sometimes it’s convenient to just find clothing items or niche stuff. i definitely do not complain about getting sold giant clams, that’s a ton of easy decent potions. i don’t complain when i get sold gloves, i was looking for some.
When I say alchemist I’m obviously talking about potions get the super specific nonsense out of here holy shit.
also what are you talking about it absolutely IS always about the value and usefulness of an item, what the fuck am I investing in if not something that will give me a tangible benefit, this is why nobody uses merchants.
it’s still definitely a tangible benefit because uncommon reagents in bulk is a very nice thing to have on-demand, not to mention your merchant coming with galleons so you can quickly sell things on the go or across serverhopping
They just tried to tell me that getting spiked iron gloves from a merchant was a tangible benefit even vaguely comparable to other deckhand types, including chef.
This argument is pointless.
have you never broken a rock? just go to whispering caverns and go mining
again tailors or mabey metal scrap and notebooks which albeit fair you are rolling for like 2-3 items out of then entire pool of common/uncommon items in chest