Obviously, the ideas I would like to put into some context here are not new at all and can be encountered repeatedly and scattered over some dozen of topics in the wish lists. Still, allow me to put this together here for further discussion.
Why do I post this now? The magic system, the behavior and stats of mobs, the edibility of food and the crafting transformations for cooking and baking having undergone significant changes to allow a game experience that feels more balanced and reasonable. Still, since mana and both types of stamina are no limiting factors (effectively unlimited), offensive spells at the higher levels of masteries are clearly superior to combat arts of comparable ranks, and the production of food is not truly encouraged by game mechanics (pending fixes for quality and prices of food are another topic).
So why do I call the subject regenerative buffs?
The only such buff which currently regenerates one or several quantities over time is relaxing sleep, imho the main reason for magic being so greatly superior to the combat arts. Judging from the spell description, the caster should not be able to take any action without losing the regenerating effect of that buff. I am convinced the dev team is perfectly aware of this, yet I wonder why it has not been changed yet. The reason for putting this statement here is that I assume this spell to behave differently for the further discussion, such as forcing the caster to sit and debuff as soon as he, she or kra stands up. In this case, the amount of mana available during a battle or hunt would be limited by the supply of consumable items, such as potions and - possibly in the future - other goods crafted with the use of alchemy, herbalism, brewing, cooking or baking. The problem with this is the way such items currently work. Consumable are arbitrary amounts of items with a one shot instant refreshing effect. This allows hilarious scenarios, for instance a severely wounded person eating several dozen of raw fish withing the blink of an eye to be healed instantly. So what about giving those items regenerative buffs instead? Of course, the problem with buffs and duration of time are complexity and stacking behavior. But with the current spells, repeated casting of an active buff results in "nothing happens." The same could be done with potions, food etc. Thus, if the different types of regenerative buffs are kept at a small number, and variations (duration, regeneration rate per time unit) of the same type of buff just override each other, I don't see any problems here. Of course, the quality of the crafted items could then determine the variation within a certain type of buff. These concepts do not only hold for the magic system, as the analogy with health and physical stamina is straight forward. Furthermore, this could lead to a natural balance between magic, combat and crafting, not only when hunting animals, but even for player vs player mechanics.
Thanks to the patient reader for taking a look at this.
