Alright, after finally getting to test some of vampires changes, I can honestly say, that I don't find the 20% cost to be the game ender everyone thinks it is. I am sure a lot of you are shocked, and outraged by this, but let's be real, most of you read the patch notes and haven't tested this at all. Stam characters struggle with vamp and it's draw backs I will admit, but I don't see a problem with that since it is clearly designed mostly for magicka characters.

Now, as a magicka character, you will see one of two very strong potential play styles emerge from vampire, thats a super tank that mitigates damage by percentage instead of by resists, or a super damager that can die as fast as he kills. The cost increase reflects the numbers you can pull, as far as I can see.

Lets look at the bigger picture for a moment, and I will explain why the cost increase makes some sense mechanically.

The most obvious reason is the damage numbers you can pull with one of two buffs active and how low the health cost is at stage four, blood frenzy and its morphes, plus Strike from the Shadows puts my potential burst at extremely high levels, all those stack with major sorcery by the way, so, drink a potion or use Degeneration which is still cheap after the cost increase and you have a spammable that hits for over 10k with necromancer and warden, now the cost increase is starting to make sense with that, spamming that from a safe distance and blood misting away as soon as you get any attention, without the cost increase it's just too easy. This isn't even considering the stacking damage mitigation based on the % of received damage, which is *** nuts by the way.

Now, you might be saying to yourself at this point. " But the no outside healing sources makes up for the damage increase. " I want to remind you of the passives you get along with this, 30% damage reduction and a cheap invis on sprint, these are very powerful in both pvp and pve, and added up with the ability to slip in and out of mist form makes your damage mitigation very high along with the extra damage you can deal for free by flipping a switch for a single GCD that lets you burst heavy and then just turn it off and go on the defensive with that aforementioned mitigation.

I'll admit. certain classes and builds will see more benefits from this then others, but that is fine to me, the game was getting to samey anyway, and the classes that benefit most are the ones that struggled the most as dps builds, and that is mag necro, and mad warden, these two have the mitigation skills and healing dots to sustain a stage four vamp better then most other classes, and at the most efficient cost. Mag Blade can get some creative use out of it too as far as I have tested but it struggles more with the health cost then necro and warden.

My only real concern with the cost increase is in a non-cp environment where a lot of resource regen is lost, I have yet to test this since no one has been queuing for bgs and I could not find anyone in the non-cp Cyrodill

Is 20% too extreme? I don't find it to be so, I would not complain if they brought it down a little by any means, especially for non-cp environments, but I caution you all against knee jerk reactions here, cause if you get your way today, you may regret it tomorrow when real builds that maximize the options presented here start to appear.

Without having tested it I was looking directly at magcro. The defense/sustain this class can manage would fit so well with the vampire since vampire gives some escape mechanics to a class without any.

Scythe might be a perfect place to ramp up damage considering it could pay for its own buffs. And timed bombs like graveyard mean you control when you spend extra RSS. For cp heavy lightning and passives should help sustain. I'll be running imperial and considering a combo of seducer and necro/nma and some reduce cost glyph.