In this contribution, we propose to study the transformation of first order programs by course of value recursion. Our motivation is to show that this transformation provides a separation criterion for the intentionality of sets of programs. As an illustration, we consider two variants of the multiset path ordering, for the first, terms in recursive calls are compared with respect to the subterm property, for the second with respect to embedding. Under a quasi-interpretation, both characterize Ptime, the latter characterization being a new result. Once applied the transformation, we get respec- tively Ptime and Pspace thus proving that the latter set of programs contains more algorithms.