I thought of making use of undeath passive in pve when solo, but for really hard content you don't want to sacrifice so much sustain, plus health recovery if you're built into it. Such or better mitigation can be achieved with pearlescent/ironblood/aetherial.

Apart from that, I'd stick to the 1st stage just for skills. Although even they're pretty meh at this point.
Blood for blood is a "free" spammable with damage scaling on your health - kind of good interaction with frenzy, but in challenging content you don't want to drop your health low. Still might be good if you need extra sustain and have decent healing, but I play stamNB and I find the class spammable to be much better because of resistances, penetration, and I can sustain it anyway.
Frenzy used to be really great, especially the morph that gives you health back. It used to be a burst heal, now it doesn't work this way. It grants so little damage compared to what it was, and no healing either now. I used to play vamp because of that. Plus if you use it in group you can't be healed.
I miss old mist form that granted 75% resistances. Now it's an escape tool that has nearly no use in pve.

If I remember correctly, titanborn grants you 440 damage when below 50% health, I don't count penetration because you can reach the cap easily without it. Coral riptide grants you 740 when you're at 33% stamina, which you're going to reach anyway because of terrible vamp sustain, so I'd consider it, IF you're playing stam or can reach this treshold. Otherwise bahsei might work.

autocookies wrote: »

My current ice warden is a vampire named Artic Mist. Endless sustain because you use your health instead, if your light attacking properly between blood for blood you will heal most of your health back from the lotus.

Dual ice staffs
All into mag with points.
Food: Corrupting Bloody Mara or Ghastly Eye Bowl.
Orders Wrath (Light or Med) on the body with mag enchantments
Ice furnace as the frontbar and jewelry.
Iceheart (Light or Med) helm + shoulders.
I use the maelstrom ice staff backbar.

Bar1:
Deep Fissure
Blood for Blood - can swap for another morph for trials or choose a different spammable example: Crushing Shock
Blood Mist
Arctic Blast
Bird of Prey
Ult: Swarming Scion

Bar2:
Elemental Blockade
Winter's Revenge
Lotus Flower - Ether morph depends on what you want. I choose the green morph because it makes my staff glow.
Blue Betty
Simmering Frenzy or Ice Fortress - Depends again if you need to survive or extra spell damage. (this is a flex spot) other frenzy works too if you need a massive heal.... but Artic Blast is all you need really.
Ult: Northern Storm

Will destroy world bosses solo. Able to complete vet dungeons and if you don't want to upset any healers just swap the 2 skills Blood for blood and Simmering Frenzy.

(edit didn't read the post above. I haven't used the other morph ever so didn't know they destroyed the heal from it stage 4 vamp always

Thank you for posting your build and for revealing how you made a PVE vampire build work. This was ultimately what I was looking for thank you!

First, I am all for build diversity and believe a lot of non-meta builds can do just fine in veteran group content. With that being said, here comes the bad news.

I'm assuming you are looking to be a DD. Normal dungeons, no problems. Veteran base dungeons, should be okay. But those 2 are probably the ceiling of a PVE vampire build for group content. Maybe normal Craglorn 3 trials, but probably not.

In PVP, Battle Spirit, armor, and other resistances are effective as the amount of incoming DPS somewhat capped, because the attacker has to obey similar limitations on their build to survive as well. Undeath helps out in PVP because your resistances are typically already high, so if you run a 25-30K health build, low health makes those resistances even higher.

The damage in group content PVE is consistently higher than PVP. The main problem with PVE vampire DDs is that their focus on surviving the elevated damage takes away from the amount of DPS they are able to put out. Add in the elevated damage stage 3/4 vampires take, the lowered healing, the higher skill costs, and a vampire becomes a strain on healers who have to heal them, tanks who have to tank longer because of the lowered DPS, and the DPS who have to carry the load of what the vampire is taking away.

The return of Undeath and higher resistance does not balance that out. Undeath can not overcome the one-shots in veteran DLC dungeons. Nor can it make up for the damage in even in the normal Craglorn 3 trials, i.e. HRC's Warrior or the last 3 bosses in AA. As for veteran trials, you will be kicked if you are a vampire, regardless of build, as you will die. A lot.

To further handicap you build by making it a low health build, you are just further gimping a build that is already susceptible to dying. But now you are dying from mobs, like in Rockgrove and Sanity's Edge.

I certainly wish off-meta build were perfectly viable in all content, but alas we do not live in that world (yet....)

Although think this is part of the wider "when are both vamp and WW going to be integrated into classes, rather than standing off to the side as their own mini-classes" conversation, there is one idea I have.....

Unfortunately it won't be for a dd build, this is probably either a tank build, or a pure ulti-gen support build. And still it would be rather niche....

The problem with running vamp in pve content, is, as others in this thread have pointed out, the passive downsides of increasing your vamp stage - the increased flame damage, and the increased non-vamp skill costs.

EDIT: Anyone reading beyond this point, at the time of writing you cannot generate ultimate while in the vamp ult transformation, so the following build is impossible....but a nice idea

So in order to remove the downsides of vamp in pve content, we ned to remove those passive weaknesses, and there is only one way to do that - the "perfect scion" morph of the vamp ultimate, which grants all the benefits of vamp stage 4, but removes all the downsides.

So how do we build upon this? Well we can take inspiration from this build:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4qTm3fiWe0Q

And say "we want to be in this ultimate all the time" so we want a full-on ulti-gen build.

So dk and necro are already last place for this build as both already have their own class-specific ultimates that do the same job - magma shell and ravenous goliath.

Sorc or nb would probably be best as they have the "reduce ulti cost" and "gain ulti from potions" passives respectively, and both classes have a self-heal that scales with max health, the clanfear pet or the "dark cloak" (non invisible morph) which syngerise with the max health granted by the vamp ulti.

Skills - a health based heal, a taunt....usual tank stuff. But required is Exhilarating Drain for the huge ulti gen.

Gear: Some combination of (not sure which is best for this setup):

Potentates on back-bar for 15% ulti cost reduction.
Drake's rush on front bar for major heroism.
Shapeshifters chain another 15% on the vamp ult (I think it still works for that transformation).
Baron zaudrus or bloodspawn for more ulti gen
Either dual frost staff with decisive front bar or sword+shield front bar for slash (for minor heroism) or use ulti-gen potions

Or drop the monster set and use 2x 5 piece sets instead. Maybe akaviri dragonguard for a THIRD 15% ulti-cost reduction? That's a 20 second transformation with 167 ulti cost on sorc or 196 on nb

Or if you're going down the support route rather than tank route you'd want master architect or pillagers profit, maybe on a warden to make use of the health based heal skills.

If you're doing Solo PvE Blood for Blood isn't a bad spammable if you have the self healing for it. Can remove quite a bit of recovery when you offload a lot of Magicka/Stamina to your health pool and use healing over time as recovery instead.

Classes like Dragonknight with Burning Embers can pull it off quite well, but also a Restoration staff skills, Blood Mist, Ring of the Pale Order, and other reliable healing over time effects can sustain Blood for Blood pretty well, and in same cases even Blood Frenzy and Blood for Blood!

It's probably not the most viable, but I've been able to beat Vateshran Hollows and the Maelstrom Arena on veteran with a pure vampire build running the vampire health cost skills, especially after the rework to Blood Frenzy where the cost is no longer infinite scaling.

Vampire-heavy builds, after the vampire changes of several years ago, have been sort of the White Whale that so many of us have hunted (but ultimately never really found). The bonuses look appealing on paper but the trade-offs to actually get them generally don't end up being worth it.

If you are set upon making one, you do have to listen to what others have said about group content. There is a hard ceiling on how far you can go before you become a burden on the rest of the group. And conscientious folk should always try to avoid being a burden.

If you DID want to try for low-health, however, I would definitely suggest True-Sworn Fury rather than Titanborn for PvE since Critical Damage and Chance are much more valuable in most cases than Penetration and Weapon/Spell Damage.

You would probably also want to check out the From the Brink CP star (that gives you a decent shield once you reach very low-HP) and the Reaving Blows CP star (that gives you a small taste of the Pale Order ring for passive healing). Of course, running those stars detracts from your damage since they're Blue stars, but nobody deals damage when they're dead, haha.

I would probably also recommend using like Prismatic glyphs on your armor pieces and a bi-stat food (aka Max HP + Max Mag, such as Pickled Fish Bowl) to pad your HP total and bring you closer to 30k. Being a Warden would allow you to hit 30k with their Minor Toughness passive without any other build sacrifices.

Other skills that heal you might consider using are Structured Entropy (Mage's Guild), Blood Craze (Dual-Wield), Blood Mist (Vampire), and various class skills. It is likely important to have that healing going on in the background to stay at lower HP (or simply survive) for longer.

Final ideas that would definitely nerf your damage but would be sort of safety strats would be: using Iceheart (damage shield), using Brawler as your spammable (damage shield), and using an Ice Staff for a Heavy Attack build (damage shield).

However, you can see that going this route is almost always a damage loss vs. standard builds. But if you really want to do it then hopefully something here is useful.

Quethrosar wrote: »

never tried it in trials, but i did in dungeons. stage 4 sorcerer.
i can heal myself so i wasn't worried about heal issues.

dps was ok, but not the best.

i even did it in city of ash with all its fire damage lol.

As someone who's tried it in trials.... it's not a great idea lol, especially after the great nerfing of Blood for Blood. Reason being is some set buffs rely on healing in order to impart the buffs, and the vampire penalty to cutting off outside healing will actually negate the receiving of those buffs (Think Spell power Cure for example). Additionally some trials will actually throw out so much damage you need a healer to save your life or you'll be spending the whole time casting healing powers to stay alive.
Stage 3's Undeath for tanking isn't the greatest either since 9 times out of 10 you want to remain topped off at all times due to so many 1-shot mechanics, so you're just eating a fire damage penalty and cost increase unless you actually use enough vampire skills to balance it out.

If you have the self healing you can get away with DPSing as a vampire in dungeons, but you'll be giving your Healer a heart attack unless.... you are the Healer! This is actually funnily enough the role where Vampire's Blood for Blood and Blood Frenzy make the most sense, but the non-vampire cost increase begins to have the most effect since vampire doesn't actually have abilities to heal or buff others. They can increase the amount of healing done with Blood Frenzy, the Strike From the Shadows passive, and Blood Scion, but that's about it.

So my PvE Vampire build is a group support healer that can function as an off-DPS. <.<;