There are definitely many issues I see with the buff system. A lot of it also ties in to fishing, so I’ll start there.
Fishing is arguably one of the slowest professions. While catching fish doesn’t take long to do, the spool consumption and decay are low. Starting off, your returns are .01 for the fish (if you even get a fish), and .01-.02 in fish scraps usually. This is ok as a low cost and slow profession starting off. However, there are other issues with this profession that should be discussed.
Fishing has the fish looter profession tied to it. I assume it works like animal looter, mutant looter, and robot looter. One thing that stands out is you don’t get skill in the fish looter profession like gutting or filleting by simply catching fish. This is strictly tied to every other codex reward and every other fishing meta reward. That is a problem, as this profession is slow to progress as is. With hunting, you can target the looter profession you want to farm, while also hunting higher maturities to boost codex progression speed. There are many different mobs to hunt, allowing you to farm the beginning levels of the codex for each mob. With fishing, you can only hope to catch the fish you’re trying to reach the next codex for. You can pick the biome and bait, but maturity and fish type is still random, even if you use the higher quality, deeper depth, and more costly bait.
Let’s now turn to the equipment required to even participate in this profession at the entry level. You can get the free Baitfishing Rod, but baitfish are used in some crafting recipes or mixed together with universal ammo for spool cells, aka fishing ammo. So one of the entry level setups everybody has access to is the Herman Angler A-01 (L) unlimited blueprint, Sollomate Linelock B-01 (L) unlimited blueprint, Weak SL-40x Fishing Line (L) unlimited blueprint, Adu Darcia Ultralight Fishing Blank C-01 (L) unlimited blueprint, and Sweat Ball Bait (L) unlimited blueprint. This requires five different crafted pieces to be put together just to engage with fishing, along with the spool cells required as ammo.
Let’s look at the entry for other professions compared to fishing. With terrestrial mining, you can buy the entry finder, resource extractor, and refiner straight from the trade terminal. Ammo can also be directly bought or you can just use universal ammo if you have it. With hunting, you can buy a starter pack from the store, or buy entry level weapons and armor from the trade terminal. Ammo can also be bought from the trade terminal or it uses up universal ammo. With space mining, it seems to be a more specialized and “premium” profession to get in to. You need a space ship, thruster, and oil to get started with the profession. Crafting the space ship and thruster isn’t too complicated, and there are enough in the auction house or shops available so it isn’t much of an issue. This is partly due to how long these last. You aren’t burning through space ships that fast, unless you also enjoy space hunting (which I don’t think is very popular in a quad-wing). Even with it being a more costly profession, you can still buy entry mining lasers from the terminal to start it up with little hindrance. Ammo can be bought from the trade terminal or you can use the universal ammo you have. Not only does fishing require five different components to start, the ammo it uses requires either spending time baitfishing, buying the baitfish for a premium, or crafting the spool cells using transgen fruit. Crafting using the transgen fruit requires buying the fruit at some high markup, or growing the fruit yourself, requiring an expensive upfront cost on the land, house, gardening plot, and ingredients themselves. That is a discussion by itself.
Now lets look at what you have to craft to complete a basic angling fishing setup. Standard rods, metal mountings, simple 2 conductors, simple 1 plastic ruds, long moonleaf boards, and nanocubes. This is all just to craft the rod, tying in four different professions (hunting, mining, resource gathering, and crafting). This requires both enmatter and ore mining, hunting animals and robots, and gathering from huge trees. In total, there are six different crafting recipes you need to run before you can craft this rod, along with everything else. That, or you can buy the items from other players, but how many middle men do you have to go through to get just the rod? I don’t even want to go through the materials required to craft the attachments and bait. While some items do cross-over in the crafting blueprints, there are a few different items that need to be crafted or gathered.
The herman angler a-01 rod usually sits at a 150% markup (6 PED total) on the auction house, so you can let the crafters be crafters, but think about the markup you’re paying to finish just a basic setup. Not only that, the ammo is not readily available, or you’re spending roughly 70%+ markup for just the spool cells alone (as 1k baitfish are about 7PED at the time of this post). It seems odd to me that one of the slowest professions to progress and one that is considered a premium profession is heavily tied to one of the few “free to play” mechanics. It would be understandable if the barrier to entry weren’t so high.
Aside from the ridiculous amount of crafting needed to get any setup started, every other angler blueprint is largely supplied from daily quests that reward a random blueprint with a single click. Players aren’t going to do the daily for a month in the hopes that they get a meaningful stack of a single blueprint to throw on the auction house. This bottleneck is also why the prices are so high. Not only that, every fish has a base value of .01, leaving almost all of the raw returns in fish scrap. This forces player markup to drive returns, which will be high because of the entry costs and blueprint bottleneck. I saw that people don’t like how a lot of the fishing is done by free to play or low deposit players, but if you actually think about what it costs to do any sort of crafting or cooking, you should understand why.
Now let’s finally look at cooking. The only unlimited gastronomy blueprint available from the terminal is the Cod Fillet Recipe. This requires cod fish oil, food container 1, nutri paste, vita boost, and fish sauce. There is so much involved, I don’t want to even start to break this down. Just know that you don’t even have access to all of the blueprints from the terminal that is required to craft the entry gastronomy blueprint. All of the blueprints required for it are unlimited, with the exception of the food container blueprint. This is currently the huge bottleneck, as no unlimited version of it (to my knowledge) has been found yet, and the limited blueprint is a chance drop when crafting other provisioning items. Not only that, cooking the vita boost requires preservo gel, a level 8 nutritionist recipe that starts it’s SIB at 17.6 and requires transgen fruit.All of this for a 1 hour, 30% increased health regeneration buff. I find it extremely odd to require such a high level in another cooking profession along with highly gated items to just craft the basic recipe bought at the terminal.
One good thing I can see from this complex jumbo of requirements is that it gives players many options to specialize in something. Don’t want to collect or buy materials to do 6 different crafting recipes for the rod? Focus on metal mountings. Maybe you enjoy hunting, so you can focus on the conductors, plastic ruds, or triphased wires for the fishing line. You get the idea.
This quickly becomes an issue if you want to be self-sufficient in fishing, and even more so if you want to use that fish in cooking. Fishing should naturally feed in to the cooking profession, and it does, but not at the level I am comfortable with. If I have to scrounge for so many materials, tap in to many different professions, or opt to buy the crafted rod and attachments at a high markup just to gather fish, that creates a huge barrier to entry. Cooking the food buffs with fish that is caught seems out of reach for most players because of how much complexity is added on top of what is required for the fishing profession. It just seems that gathering the fish should be most of the work required to cook the food, not gathering more ore, enmatter, and wood, and being bottlenecked by blueprint drops, on top of having to gamble on six or more crafting recipes.
Dislike and complaints aside, here are some suggestions that I think would improve these professions. Change the blueprints for, or add a basic fishing setup that can be bought from the terminal. Add gutting and filleting (when unlocked) to the action of catching fish. Add fishing skill rewards to the daily fish turn in quests. Remove the cooking rewards from the fishing codex. Implement a daily crafting quest that rewards cooking skills (craft x provisioning recipes, get x PEC in provisioning skill). The ability to select which limited blueprint you get when turning in the daily fishing quest. Add more clicks to these limited blueprint rewards. Reduce the level of the preservo gel blueprint. Remove the requirement of a food container when crafting the gastronomy food. Instead, put a base TT value to package the food, or require the container in order to list it on the AH or to be put in a shop or shopkeeper (maybe refine the food item with the correct container).
I normally don’t post, but after spending an insane amount on markup to try the Omegaton Abyss D-200 (L) and it’s setup, only to catch the same fish I was catching with the D-100 (L) setup (and yes, I did use deeper and higher quality bait), I hope my concerns can at least push towards some improvements (or speed them up). I won’t even bother with cooking food buffs unless the fishing profession itself is improved, and hopefully the insane bottlenecks removed.
Have you tried paying more? 
Tweaks need to be slow and analyzed carefully. Let’s not destroy a whole new section of gameplay
