The entire vampire skill line is trash and feels horrible to use. As someone that literally quit the game for over a year in response to the horrible vampire changes in update 26 /Greymoor, here are my thoughts on the current state of vampire:

Fix the appearance of the vampire ultimate:
The ultimate puts giant vampire clothing/jewelry on you, which is immersion breaking since I didn't have any of that on before I transformed (should at most be a loincloth, as your human clothing would stretch/tear and potentially remain on the larger vampire form around the waist). Ideally I would want a more realistic model, but the second best would be a ken doll or loincloth. All the fancy jewelry or other nonsense you want to throw onto the vampire ultimate's model, make it an optional skill style.

Flame Damage Debuff vs Undying Passive
+20% damage taken on the most common damage type in the game (flame) is just ridiculous. Why would I want to be a vampire when the difference between the undying passive (reduced damage taken when low health, AKA in execution threshold) and the stage 4 flame damage debuff is a net negative?

At that point, just delete the undying passive altogether and set the flame damage taken to 5%, then you'd be telling the truth instead of obfuscating just how bad being a vampire is.

Increased Cost To Non-Vampire Abilities
So the goal of this is to incentivize us to use vampire abilities? This just makes playing a vampire feel even more niche, like you cannot have any build diversity, and even then, no one wants to use the vampire abilities because they're just so bad (see below). This wouldn't need to exist if the vampire abilities were actually good/could even compete with the bottom 50% of other abilities from all the other skill lines in the game.

Eviscerate
1) Vampires traditionally have been Magicka build focused, same is true in Skyrim. So why is our only spammable a melee ranged attack that has a weak/low quality sound and visual effect/animation?

2) The ability and both morphs reward you for losing. This is horrible design.

3) One lets you change the spell cost to health, a rare thing in ESO, and a cool idea, but then it disables your ability to be healed by anyone other than yourself. That makes literally no sense, why can you still have your stamina/magicka restored by healers via abilities like Luminous Shards, Enchanted Growth, Druid's Resurgence scribing, etc after using a stamina or magicka ability? It's inconsistent logic and is arbitrarily being applied to only vampire and the only vampire themed mythic (Pale Order Ring).

*) I will say, the only good change was adding bleed status effect to this ability. I'd rather the entire ability be removed still and something completely different replace it, as this is just one of the most generic, unfun, and self-punishing abilities I've ever used.

Vampiric Drain
1) Removed the CC on the original Drain Essence ability

2) Remove the damage focused morph (accelerating drain's 0.7 second tick vs 1 second ticks) for a very weak tank oriented missing stamina restore morph

3) Rewards being low health/losing, but not even, since you just get deleted by Bloodthirsty traits and execution range abilities.

4) Resource restored scales with max health, so again just designed to incentivize tank builds, meanwhile you cannot tank as a vampire due to cost debuffs and damage taken debuffs.

5) Both morphs look nothing like blood/vampire theme. Just orange/black tether and a bright green tether, meanwhile only the base morph looks correct.

6) No interrupt protection, you walk slow, it's a 3 second channel, if interrupted it literally goes on cooldown.

*) This ability screams attack me, I cannot defend myself, I don't know how to build my character for PvP, and I'm in execution health range. I think it should stay in the future vampire kit, but only after HEAVY BUFFS.

Blood Frenzy
1) Involves a ton of micromanaging
2) Despite being off GCD, it still fails to toggle on and off very frequently, especially in PvP situations, many times being the cause for your death
3) Can be used on a bomber build to do stupid damage effectively bypassing the drawbacks of the health loss over time and not being able to be healed by anyone other than yourself
4) Sated fury morph allows you to sit outside of combat stacking up a massive full health restore burst heal that automatically activates when your health is low, this is not good for the game. If this was the intended design behind the vampire rework (stack up full heal sated fury, then gank someone, and spam Blood for Blood without being worried about health falling low to get the most of the damage bonus because you just instantly heal back to full) it's really complicated for new players to pull off, requires you to sit out of combat spamming self heals for about 74 seconds if stage 4 with a max health pool of 20k (so would take significantly longer if you had more health, and encourages your to decrease vampire stage so that the health cost is more, so that you ramp up the burst heal faster in PvP)/is disrupts to the normal flow of PvP combat...

*) I think this ability is unhealthy for the game, likely difficult to balance, and should be deleted. I think the Sated Fury morph is an interesting idea, perhaps if you get the full channel of Vampiric Drain, you could get a temporary buff that if your health would be reduced to 0, you instead restore like 15% of your max health, and that could happen up to once every 15 seconds? Maybe that could replace the undying passive, I don't know, but I do know this ability just makes the vampire experience feel bad. Also if any ability requires "cannot be healed by anyone other than yourself for x seconds", it should just be immediately deleted from the game, no one likes this limitation being in the game.

Mist Form
1) Give us back the toggle with damage reduction, it was a fun and useful ability, and different from Ball of Lightning. Now it's a significantly worse version of Sorcerer's Bolt Escape, and especially clunky when trying to cast on un-even terrain.

Mesmerize
1) Absolutely useless cc ability. Almost always fails to work in PvP due to desync/latency issues because it has the requirement of your enemy looking directly at you. Neither morphs offer anything that could compete with all the other significantly better class CC abilities.

*) One morph makes it an AoE, why? It's just so bad by default that increasing the AoE doesn't do anything... Why even give us mesmerize when we had Drain Essence as our cc... I'll never understand the Greymoor changes.


Sorry for all the hate, but reviewing all the vampire changes from update 26 just reminds me of how absolutely awful this all felt and why i quit the game for over a year back when Greymoor hit live with all of these changes bad changes. Even after all this time, the vampire is still so absolutely bad. I really hope we can get the same quality/time/attention as the werewolves and dragon knights have received.

cyberjanet wrote: »

As of 18h47 today, I have abandoned Tomes entirely.

I read this as a old time explorer log.

Day 645. We have not seen land for 45 days. Supplies run short and the men lose hope. I have cried out to tomes for guidance but am met with only silence.

Day 702. Our water is gone and the men have turned to eating shoe leather. I have abandoned Tomes entirely. The silence deafens.

Edit spelling.

randconfig wrote: »

tomofhyrule wrote: »

What is the point of this poll?

1) See if the community agrees.
2) Please provide sources where devs talk specifically to necromancer mains about the order of the reworks, because I have not seen or heard it. The last time we were talked to directly was a year ago, after they pushed class breaking bugs to live despite us repeatedly telling them not to for EVERY WEEK of the PTS, and then they said they would continue to communicate, but again, its been radio silence for a year (source: surprise surprise blastbones and animate blastbones ulti are unusable in pvp now.
3) Draw attention to the lastest PTS where we were advertised this:

but we are getting this:

4) 2 years is a long time to wait for anything of quality to be given to the only class I play. Just because of poor management of resources and Microslop's pursuit of AI garbage, I'm expected to just sit on the sidelines and wait for another 2 years (mind you we've received near nothing except nerf after nerf, bug after bug, since Necromancer's release in 2019, SEVEN YEARS AGO).

So that's the purpose of the poll, to make a very obvious point, SO AT THE VERY LEAST WE, SPECIFICALLY THE NECROMANCERS, GET SOME KIND OF COMMUNICATION FROM THE DEVS THAT THEY HAVE A PLAN AND THERE'S A GOOD REASON TO FORCING US TO WAIT A TOTAL 9 YEARS TO GET QUALITY CHANGES TO THE NECROMANCER. :-)

Look, in life there are choices: you can have it fast, or you can have it good. Which do you want for Necros.

I get it. Necro sucks right now. It really really really sucks. It's by far the jankiest class and it's really unfun to play because of all of its mechanics. And it's gotten hit by one thing after another to try to make it less janky, which only made it feel worse. You will not find a single person on this forum who doesn't think that Necro is in the worst state.

But there's a bit of logic that needs to be put in to the thought process here. The next PTS drops in July, so whichever is the U51 updated Class needs to be done by then. That's giving them about two months to fix whatever Class is coming out then. After that, U52's PTS will drop around September, giving them only about a month after finishing the U51 Class to get the U52 Class out the door.

Necro needs a lot of work. Do you think that they can reasonably turn the mess that is Necro into something amazingly cool in a single month? Especially since before they get to making Necro fun, they need to fix the corpse mechanic and the pet mechanics and reorganize all of the skills?

Ask yourself which you want: a Necro that they shove out the door fast which is still mostly broken but in a different way, or for them to be able to fix each of Necro's major mechanics one at a time so they can give the entire three months of updating to making Necro feel better since the mechanics are already fixed.

Syldras wrote: »

Honestly? It's a story about an absolutely untamrielic Mary Sue character depicted as being perceived as perfect and absolutely brilliant in any regard, super talented and intelligent of course, well-respected by everyone (except for the baddies), drinking lots of wine and having many sexual conquests - while having the mindset and intelligence of a small child, asking where cloth comes from, randomly making roaring sounds, and pretending to be a beaver while chopping wood (a contrast which feels super creepy, by the way; or at least where I come from, someone who thinks and acts like a child getting drunk or having "dates" would be perceived as absolutely questionable).

Also using pronouns that clearly differ from the physical form, which is a rare thing in Tamriel - but still, instead of going by the body shape, everyone knows the correct pronouns immediately and uses them correctly, including enemies.

Put short: There is no logic.

At least the same year also had Zerith-var, whose story was much more mature, provided us with wonderful new lore and absolutely fit into Tamriel. This is what I, and I know also many other people who are here for stories and lore, want to see more of. Not quirky, meme-y nonsense that doesn't even fit into the fictional world and its cultures.

Heh, yeah. There's also the question why someone like Wisteria (a hardened and competent spy with a fanatical vision) would be so obsessed with a wilfully childish and irresponsible goof like Tanlorin. Opposites attract and all that, but there are limits. Mary Sue is indeed a good moniker.

I haven't unlocked Zerith-Var, but another great contrast immediately comes to mind. Sharp-as-Night's story is also on another level compared to Tanlorin's. It is tightly and logically plotted, and the character motivations make perfect sense. The story was actually even surreptitiously chilling when one thought about the horror of magically augmented slavery (when even the mundane version is bad enough) and the Reformer's creepy obsession about Sharp. But the text didn't actively rub that against the player's face but let us draw our own conclusions. Also I was genuinely moved by Mevei's development because of her wonderful voice acting, and Sharp himself is a great character. Even Federo and other comic characters were comical in a way that fit the Elder Scrolls world perfectly. I wish that writer had written Tanlorin's story, too. Namely, "they" had great potential as a concept, but the execution indeed fell flat.

The original post admittedly was an attempt to repair something that perhaps is irreparable.

JemadarofCaerSalis wrote: »

I do think that the story line could have been good. But, to me, Tanlorin overshadows it to the point that it just seems, well, trite.

The writer only would have had to tone Tanlorin's childishness down two notches and ask himself a few hard questions about character motivations, then answer them in the text. But he didn't, so the end result is a very lazy story. It is waste of perfectly good side characters, if nothing else. Wisteria, Hyacinth and the Gardener actually interested me more than Tanlorin. I'd like to see more content about them (or, well, about those two who survived).

I don't hate Tanlorin, actually, but the character's infantile writing does grate me at times. I think it's implied that Tanlorin isn't actually at the level of a five-year-old, but only ironically pretends to be like some Gen Z or millennial of our days who fears nothing more than to appear "boring", that is, adult and serious. The character is a symptom of the postmodern fear of seriousness. Even their voice and acting is otherwise good, but for some reason the accent has to be the lazy, annoyingly loose drawl of a modern-day US hipster. Tanlorin is a wasted opportunity.

In fact, I'd like to see a High Elf companion like Wisteria much rather than what we got. Someone competent, intelligent, driven and disciplined. In sum, a character that would embody more traditional Altmer virtues even if his/her story would test and question the value of those virtues. I'd enjoy that. Of course, it would be a bonus if the said companion also would be a pretty lady like W...