First of all i'm just telling you my opinion and what i've leanred so far by expirience in the game so don't be mean.
1. It's a complicated game... if you are dieing is probably because you did something wrong, or you weren t equiped to handle that situation. A good build needs to have everything balanced: 1 healing skill on every skill bar, 1 escape skill on every skill bar, 1 aoe on every skill bar, balance between magika and stamina consumption, balance between melee and ranged attacks/skills, skills to restore your resurces, etc etc ... if you don t have all of the above... you are usless in vr zones and especially in VR doungens or you need to change your build/items/skills before every doungen boss.
The bad news is that in pvp is that you can t switch to aoe fire when you are being ambushed by vampires... so balance your build and then balance what you can do as a group with your guildmates...
2.The AVA (pvp/cyrodill) mechanics are diffrent from pve... if you are being ambushed you will die no matter what... skills are used.... if you are lvl 30 and i m vr 3 i will kill you no matter what... if i m vr 3 and i meet a vr 10... i will die (same number of players/ same skill for player) before vamps became so popular an entire zerg would have gotten wipped from 1 full raid aoe ambush behind a rock, it didn t matter what aoe skill they used.... now they use bat swarm... adapt...
3.when me and my guildmates finnaly decided what campagin to set as home we joined the pvp (15 player group and i was and still am the only vampire they don t want it) and got wiped twice by a 10 player vamp group... we starting screming in the ts... and swearing saying it s op... and probably if we were crybabys we would have spammed the forum... but we didn t we adapted... (like most ppl in pvp they get ambushed die once then come back and wipe the vamps)
situation 1 : after we experinced what vamps can do... we were trying to cross a bridge ... we got ambushed by a big group of vamps.... 5 of us in the front... died... and the rest guess what they did... ran!!! waited for the bat swarm to end... and then wiped out the group... and revived us...
situation 2: we were takeing a lumbermill or something, all 15 near the flag... vamps starting jumping from the keep with bat swarm...(about 10 of them) 4-5 of us used impulse with fire stuff and wall of elements... and the other 10 we use what aoe we had slotted ... result? all vamps wiped... not 1 of us dead...
situation 3: sigeing an enemy keep... after we secured it a full group raid of vamps with a vamp emperor were camping in one of the towers... who entered that tower... died in 2 sec.. solution...: 2 purple domes that disables all skills and no more vamps....
and i have many more examples of us getting wiped (by vamps or not) or us wipeing others(vamps or not)
and we are not special... we are noobs we don t know how to play:P so i ve seen so many adapt and deal with the vamps... few ppl still cry on the forums...
every class has all the tools it needs to deal with every situation.... you just have to know what to use, how to use, when to use...
and vamp skills passives are heavily bugged and so are my cirt passives as a nightblade...
sorry for the bad spelling, english is not my primary language... and i was too lazy to spell check.... if you mention my bad spelling... it doesn t make my argument null...