But all the other 'food' and item-skill items have real effects with effect icons.
On top of that, with GW:EN has skills that benefit from the drunken status.
Additionally, people may deactivate post-processing to prevent the blurry effect.
That makes staying under drunkenness more annoying than anything else.
So my main suggestion is:
Give alcoholic beverages their own effect icon.
Now that they added an effect icon to the bottle of grog, we positively know that can (And they should when they have time) to the rest of alcoholic drinks.
Additional tweaks to the drunken status could be:
- Make the icons have a number like the minion count or the hard mode death counter to show the current level of drunkenness.
- Make the icons have a bar showing the duration of the current level of drunkenness. When the bar hits 0, the number decreases and the bar resets.
- Make one icon for each 'type' of drink (Beers, soft liquors, strong distilled drinks, grog, etc) or for each 'rank' of drunkenness (not drunk/drunk/alcohol poisoning)
- Add a benefit to the title that affects only drunkenness itself. Slight increase in duration of the items would do, since it's just a gold-sink title. Nothing that really affects the game, just saving a bit of cash for those that do not really need to drink more for the title so they can give more drinks to other characters:
- Drunkard (1): Drinks give +20% of their levels. Since it's 20%, affects only 5-level drinks, making then give 6 levels instead of 5.
- Incorrigible Ale-hound (2): Drinks give +200% of their levels. Makes all drinks give double levels. (Thus lasting double)
- Change the levels people can be drunk, so you need more drinks to start being drunk, but in exchange you can gain more levels of drunkenness by drinking more, and stay drunk longer. There could be even an adverse effect if you drink too much:
- Level 1..4 : Sober. Minutes here do not count towards drunkard rank increase, no screen effects, no quotes, no emotes. (Just like now)
- Levels 5..20 : Drunk. Minutes here count towards drunkard rank increase, quotes, fun emotes, soft screen effects (Like current drunk, just with softer post-processing effects).
- Level 21..25 (optional): Alcohol poisoning. No drunkard rank increase, HARDCORE screen effects that barely let see the screen, like current rank 5. Dying, /sitting, /pout and other sad emotes. Cannot drink more until the level goes back to 20. Also randomly works like poison, blindness, dazing and/or crippling even in outposts, without being removable or really dealing the condition. Each minute under this levels will have a random effect that is decided when the level starts counting to the next. Dying from this effect won't stop survivor, of course. Basically, you'll be safe with 4 level-5 drinks. Drink ne more without waiting 5 minutes and you get sick.
- Make PvE versions of the Drunken Blow and Desperation Blow that benefit from drunkenness. Needless to say, the benefit would be quite small. Maybe increasing by 25% the damage or the duration, or maybe having a 10% chance of dealing all effects instead a random one. Always keeping the knockdown, since it's key part of the skills.
