I'm not talking about drinks and meals or potions, but rather how we craft them:

Cooking food and drinks
The fact that most food recipes require style materials and alchemy reagents seems wrong. Really wrong.

We have an awful lot of stacks of ingredients we never really use because the best dishes require alchemy reagents, I never know if I should try to make potions with powdered mother of pearl, or save them for food... which always ends up with me using that alchemical reagent for meals and make other potions without said reagent.

I don't think many of us think that food ingredients should make 100% sense, so I think food crafting should require us to make use of most of our base ingredients instead.

I thought about this when reading the skyrim cookbook in real life, they mention how to make imperial spices, nord spices, etc, which is a combination of several types of herbs and spices. And subsequent recipes don't say every ingredient you need, it says you need imperial spices and other ingredients.
I think cooking in this game could do something similar, where advanced recipes require you to cook other 'ingredients' first using base ingredients and refine/cook them to higher quality ingredients instead.

For example, Ozorga's triple trifle pocket requires guts, columbine, beets and white meat (1 is a fishing bait and the other an alchemical reagent)
So why not make it imperial spiced red meat, nord herbs, beets and white meat:
Imperial spiced red meat requires spices, red meat, Jasmine, and Honey.
Nord herbs require spices, rose, yerba mate, and comberry.

Now we'd be using other ingredients to create advanced ingredients to create better meals.
Heck, we can even use basic meals... like, in the same example above, instead of requiring white meat, we can require tarragon chicken.

And this might be a longer shot, but for QoL for people who just want to select a recipe and craft, there could be an auto-create where in order to make the main meal, it will automatically create the other ingredients.


Or if we just want to simplify everything without adding more ingredients, why not just make that same recipe require each individual ingredient:
red meat, spices, jasmine, honey, rose, yerba mate, comberry, white meat, and beets (it would make the screen look cluttered tho).


Potions
I think potion effectiveness should affect the cooldown timer.
The base duration is 45 second cooldown, or down to 25 if using traits.
Maybe a basic stamina potion that only restores stamina could have a base 20 second cooldown (or 10 if using traits), a potion with 2 different stats have a 32 second cooldown (or 17 if using traits), and 3 different stats would have a 45 second cooldown (25 with traits)

Often times we get lots of basic potions we never really use, not even at low-levels because of all the tri-stat potions we get for free just for logging in one day, and using a potion that only restores one resource would have the same cooldown as one with 3 stats.

And for potions with negative effects, I think there should be a rework regarding the snakeblood perk. It shouldn't reduce the time the nerf remains active, but rather the intensity of the nerf (instead of taking 4000 armor loss, for half the potion's duration, it could do 2000 armor loss for the whole duration, and that's an example with no real values). It would make it more interactive with the sustained by suffering CP perk as well and make alchemy builds more dynamic and enticing.

Or in an alternative manner, negative effects on potions could also reduce potion cooldowns. It's very easy to make potions with no negative stats (they're only there to make sure we don't make potions that restore our health, stamina and increase weapon damage). So why not give an incentive to add a little toxicity to potions for strategic advantage? Like, chug a potion that damages armor and restores health and you'll be able to chug another potion sooner than if you did a potion with tri-stat recovery.

Sets like clever alchemist or iron flask wouldn't necessarily be affected, they have their own cooldown.


I'm ok with enchanting crafting.