ZOS, pls Re-Re-Work the Vampire

schlaflos_inWien

the old vampire was very balanced! 2 good passives (resource reg & resistance on low health) versus 2 drawbacks (low health reg & weakness to fire). THIS IS BALANCED!
now we basically have 3 very big drawbacks versus 1 (resistance on low health). there is no motivation here, to become vampire anymore (other than pure roleplaying, which is fun tho).
the cost reduction for vampire abilities is quite pointless, since there is nothing realy usable to do constant dmg and everything is very situational.
*) vampire should get the old magick&stam reg back - this was ESSENTIAL in beeing a vampire
*) the ability-cost-system also needs a change - eighter take the ability cost increase away, or give us some good dmg skills.
pls ZOS! this CANNOT STAY THAT WAY

CoronHR

i agree that vampirism has sadly taken a turn for the worse. they added 3 new abilities and reworked the other 2 a bit...great. but i can't find much of a use for them (as before). the passives are what really bothers me. the stam/mag regen being removed...that sucks. the new animations are cool. but vampirism still seems to be very much, even more so that before, purely rp with no applicable use for group content

idk

Sorry to inform you that it is highly doubtful Zos will do anything more than tweaking over the next few updates, and probably much longer before a redesign of the line.

The main reason is they will want to see how the skill line is actually used. Especially in light that many had vampire merely for some passives. If they find the skills are actually being used then it will look good for them. Some of the skills are pretty good. One is a pretty good spamable.

Rowjoh

have to agree.

the re-fresh looked exciting at first but once applied it quickly became clear that vampire isn't really viable anymore.

Most of the build videos from trusted and respected contributors have now ditched vampire in favour of mystic ring builds.

Dusk_Coven

It's obvious they wanted Vampirism to be more than another number for min-maxing. They wanted to reinforce the power fantasy. Just go min-max something else since you didn't care about being a vampire, you just cared about numbers.

Dr_Ganknstein

Dusk_Coven wrote: »

It's obvious they wanted Vampirism to be more than another number for min-maxing. They wanted to reinforce the power fantasy. Just go min-max something else since you didn't care about being a vampire, you just cared about numbers.

Well now its just about mixing different numbers...🙄

Jaimeh

CoronHR wrote: »

i agree that vampirism has sadly taken a turn for the worse. they added 3 new abilities and reworked the other 2 a bit...great. but i can't find much of a use for them (as before). the passives are what really bothers me. the stam/mag regen being removed...that sucks. the new animations are cool. but vampirism still seems to be very much, even more so that before, purely rp with no applicable use for group content

Yup, I cured all my stam vamps, because the regen passive got removed, so it wasn't worth getting the penalties of stage 1, and some mag vamps as well, because they were characters that wouldn't use B4B or any of the other skills anyway (on that note, I actually really enjoyed the vamp look, so I think it would be great if there was something like a stage 0, where maybe we couldn't use the skills, but would still look like a vampire, and have no skill cost increase--essentially an RP stage).

Edited to add: I think it's saying something when vampirism gets reworked and a lot of players cure their characters. Yes, many players made new vamps too, but stam DD vamps, and tank vamps are no more.

red_emu

I tried to make a vampire work in PvP. Tried all the skills and slowly took them off my bars, leaving only mist form, which was available pre-Greymoor.

The whole kiss-curse mechanic is pointless when you give us a set of completely useless skills!

1. Blood for blood is a melee spammable which costs magica and synergies best with mag builds. Guess what - most mag builds are ranged (bar DK, and even they have a 7m range)
2. Mesmerise never hits the enemy because they have to be facing you so perfectly. Either adjust the angle of what "facing the player" is or change it to work like the NB fear.
3. Vampiric drain. This one is pure lol. You can choose to die within 3 seconds while dealing 500 damage/s and healing for 20 health (most builds have higher health regen than the damage you can deal with it). The stam morph. Oh dear. Don't get me started.
4. Damage buff skill. I guess it's good for bombers only but useless for anyone else.
5. Mist form: the only useful skill due to the stage 2 passive.
6. Ultimate. While it's pretty cool to turn into a rubber figurine and deal crazy damage (very often a suicide mission), the duration is too short. Perfect scion morph is useless!
You ascend to stage 5 and get no drawbacks. Honestly, that is a completely useless morph. With pumped up stats while in the form, the draw backs basically do not matter. You have enough health and healing and mag pool, that by the time you run out of resources or get low on health, the transformation is over - taking you into a really long animation, allowing enemy players to all gap close you, while you can't move.

I'm guessing eventually we'll see some changes, but as it is, the vampire is an RP thing for me at this stage.

schlaflos_inWien

i think, it could kinda count as a tweak, to take at least the ability cost away and give us the much wanted resource reg back - that basically its just changing numbers

Dusk_Coven wrote: »

It's obvious they wanted Vampirism to be more than another number for min-maxing. They wanted to reinforce the power fantasy. Just go min-max something else since you didn't care about being a vampire, you just cared about numbers.

it is not only about numbers.. its about usefullness! those numbers just represent, what the gameplay as vampire is now. at the end a vampire now runs out of resources very quickly. the vampire basically got a double-nerv now. not only we lost the reg, now we also have cost increase.
i am not a min-maxer by myself, but if youtubers (like alcast) not playing vampire anymore, then i see this very much as a proof, that vampires got a nerved

TheSeraphim

They replaced everyone getting vampire for a passive to everyone getting vampire for a spammable, and some are even starting to decide the spammable isn't even worth it, GOOD JOB.

Everstorm

My stamblade is still a vampire because she always was a vampire. But that's the only reason. Not only losing the extra regen but then also increasing the cost of my regular skills without even a single stam morph isn't fun though. She became a vampire for the sneak bonuses, they are still there and even a little beter, but still... She used to always be at stage 4, now always stage 1. Still a vampire that never drinks.
Maybe I'll switch to werewolf eventually.

hakan

Why? I thought people hated that they had to be a vampire just to get that passive regen.

They became better. Health regen was useless anyway unless you build to it. Flame damage got nerfed even? it was 25 now 20. Resistance also got buffed which got activated at half hp back then

. The 12 cost is a pretty big drawback but im okay with that.

And invis passsive with sprint cost reduction and bonus wd/sd is awesome.

Mist form is way better now.

jm42

schlaflos_inWien wrote: »

it is not only about numbers.. its about usefullness! those numbers just represent, what the gameplay as vampire is now. at the end a vampire now runs out of resources very quickly. the vampire basically got a double-nerv now. not only we lost the reg, now we also have cost increase.

because you just want to be a vampire for passives using non-vampire skills as usual but vampire is a playstyle now and you must play vamp skills or don't be a vamp. and even if vampire is underachieving it's a problem only for ppl who want to have max numbers everytime

SolidusPrime

Everstorm wrote: »

My stamblade is still a vampire because she always was a vampire. But that's the only reason. Not only losing the extra regen but then also increasing the cost of my regular skills without even a single stam morph isn't fun though. She became a vampire for the sneak bonuses, they are still there and even a little beter, but still... She used to always be at stage 4, now always stage 1. Still a vampire that never drinks.
Maybe I'll switch to werewolf eventually.

I'm in the same boat. I have been playing and remaking my Argonian rogue vampire since Morrowind. That's just who he is. I never took it for any type of particular bonus, but now it just feels like a huge weight hanging around my neck. No real benefits and the powers are just kind of "meh". There is literally no reason to ever leave stage 1 for me - the reduced health regen and extra fire damage just aren't worth the minor benefits and reduced cost on powers I will never use.

Feels like an actual curse now, so there is that I guess.

Fischblut

I have only two vampire characters, cause I actually loved the look of 4th stage of those characters. I have 18 characters, all classes and specs, and only 2 of them were vampires all these years - this shows that "vampire benefits" like regen bonus from passives were not important for me.

I don't like the look of my magblade (it is my first character and I just wanted to create some khajjit fast and start playing at that time), and becoming vampire saved him from being removed back when he was still 10th level or something.





I created my magsorc purely with vampirism in mind - without her pale skin and bright feral eyes she is now not the character I had for many years She was born a khajiit and changed to high elf, looking awesome (for me) in both cases:





Now both of these characters are at stage 1, and there is no point in making them stage 4. I don't use any vampire abilities, so I only get negative things from vampirism now. Even at stage 1 with it's uninspiring look, I get penalty to cost of all my normal abilities

The only problem I had with vampirism over the years - the pale look of body art. If we could use body art on vampire skins and keep vivid colors, I would be 100% happy with old vampires.
I never used vampire abilities.
I was glad for getting some regen from passives, but it was nothing game changing. On my magblade, I never had any regen boosts besides basic potions, so vampire regen bonuses were non-existant for him. On magsorc, I have not bad mag recovery anyway, so loss of vampire passive regen didn't hurt much in her case.
I loved the look of Dark Stalker pasive (liquid darkness surrounding the character's body when in sneak).

The looks are the most important for me in games, so new vampires are heartbreaking :'( It feels like I've lost two of my loved characters.
I sent feedback in-game asking if we can get skins of all vampire stages as reward from mastering Vampirism to level 10 or simply from crown store - I would be ok with any option just to have their looks again.

Vevvev

The main issue is they created a toolkit that is mostly utility and then geared all the debuffs and passives to make being a vampire an active play style as if it was its own separate class. What we get is an incomplete mess like this that forces players to pick the abilities they need, but then fix all the issues with their class, weapon, and guild skill lines. It makes for a very unfun play style that is very unadaptable to different situations.

I honestly didn't worry too much about the changing of the recovery passive but the addition of the non-vampire cost increases was going way too far. This is an example of ZOS's love for over tweaking things and we all know what happened during and after the DoT meta. Getting rid of the non-vampire cost increases would be a step in the right direction for making vampire more fun and viable again, and then they could revert the old values on the PTS the vampire cost reduction buff was at to encourage players to use more of the skills. These two things combined would make players want to feed to progress their stage instead of sit at stage 1 like many are doing now.

Another thing they should do is either ramp up the damage of vampiric drain or have it heal a % of your max health instead of a % of your missing health. As it is right now there is a diminishing return the longer you keep the drain on and its a huge risk because you can be interrupted.
Also with Mesmerize they should really make the angle your target has to be at to be "looking at you" to something like 180 degrees instead of 90 degrees, because that's the same angle required in order for the game to have a character's head look at something. This means a character's head could be pointed at your character, but because you're like a couple degrees off from that 90 degree arc in front of them that they don't count as "looking at you". Its honestly ridiculous and stupid. Please change the rules of this skill ZOS.

Nova_J

jm42 wrote: »

schlaflos_inWien wrote: »

it is not only about numbers.. its about usefullness! those numbers just represent, what the gameplay as vampire is now. at the end a vampire now runs out of resources very quickly. the vampire basically got a double-nerv now. not only we lost the reg, now we also have cost increase.

because you just want to be a vampire for passives using non-vampire skills as usual but vampire is a playstyle now and you must play vamp skills or don't be a vamp. and even if vampire is underachieving it's a problem only for ppl who want to have max numbers everytime

Lol you literally are gimping yourself if you use the other skills outside of BfB. These changes are underwhelming af and we saw this coming from miles away.

jm42

Nova_J wrote: »

Lol you literally are gimping yourself if you use the other skills outside of BfB. These changes are underwhelming af and we saw this coming from miles away.

lol you are literally proving my opinion by this post

Lixiviant

NOOOOOO! I was going to get a Vampire bite today!

DrSlaughtr

Personally I always thought it was cheesey that people only used it for the passives. Now most mag DDs are using blood for blood in their rotation. This isn't a bad thing.

ArchMikem

Whatever makes 90% of players being Vampires change to less than 90% of players being Vampires is a good thing to me.

A Curse is supposed to be something you REALLY wanted, and were willing to live with the consequences.

TheSeraphim

TheEndBringer wrote: »

Personally I always thought it was cheesey that people only used it for the passives. Now most mag DDs are using blood for blood in their rotation. This isn't a bad thing.

Classes choosing to use a universal skill over their classes own is pretty bad. Now mag is going full dizzying swing.

Nova_J

jm42 wrote: »

Nova_J wrote: »

Lol you literally are gimping yourself if you use the other skills outside of BfB. These changes are underwhelming af and we saw this coming from miles away.

lol you are literally proving my opinion by this post

Nah, I'm saying that the changes arent having the effect the devs wanted. By having a skill like BfB is equivalent to the regen passives pre-patch. It's just gonna be mandatory on most mag builds and become the standard, no one will play vamp like an actual vamp because it's not viable outside of overland content. Especially if you plan on increasing your stages.
Me personally I havent been enjoying the changes because of how limited everything is, I really want to play as a stage 4 on my mag blade but it's a clunky mess with more than one vamp skill on the bar. I dont feel vampiric at all with these changes, only thing I really like skill wise is blood mist. And that's only because I think its looks cool.

Jeremy

schlaflos_inWien wrote: »

the old vampire was very balanced! 2 good passives (resource reg & resistance on low health) versus 2 drawbacks (low health reg & weakness to fire). THIS IS BALANCED!
now we basically have 3 very big drawbacks versus 1 (resistance on low health). there is no motivation here, to become vampire anymore (other than pure roleplaying, which is fun tho).
the cost reduction for vampire abilities is quite pointless, since there is nothing realy usable to do constant dmg and everything is very situational.
*) vampire should get the old magick&stam reg back - this was ESSENTIAL in beeing a vampire
*) the ability-cost-system also needs a change - eighter take the ability cost increase away, or give us some good dmg skills.
pls ZOS! this CANNOT STAY THAT WAY

I disagree and much prefer the new Vampire to the old one. Just being able to freely use my vampire skills without having to worry about advancing to a stage I don't want is in itself a huge buff. And this isn't even to mention all of the new skills and improvements to existing ones.

People who only used Vampires for a regen passive and don't care for their skills (like you) are probably going to be dissatisfied. But look at the bright side. Now there is no pressure to be one. So I don't see the problem.

Jeremy

Nova_J wrote: »

jm42 wrote: »

schlaflos_inWien wrote: »

it is not only about numbers.. its about usefullness! those numbers just represent, what the gameplay as vampire is now. at the end a vampire now runs out of resources very quickly. the vampire basically got a double-nerv now. not only we lost the reg, now we also have cost increase.

because you just want to be a vampire for passives using non-vampire skills as usual but vampire is a playstyle now and you must play vamp skills or don't be a vamp. and even if vampire is underachieving it's a problem only for ppl who want to have max numbers everytime

Lol you literally are gimping yourself if you use the other skills outside of BfB. These changes are underwhelming af and we saw this coming from miles away.

Drain is a great way for certain builds to get their health back and Mist Form is good for PvP. I use Vampire Skills outside of Blood for Blood all the time and they in no way "gimp" me.

itscompton

My thoughts on vamp rework:

1) The animation after your ulti transformation runs out is ridiculous. It's basically a self applied, undodgeable, unbreakable stun that occurs just as the extra 10K health drops off, I mean really WTF? This makes using the crazy expensive ult in PvP a huge gamble since you draw everyone's attention when you transform and if there are still any enemies around when it runs out there is a good chance you'll get jumped and burst down while defenseless.

2) The mechanic on the stun is terrible. Your servers can't even reliably keep our actual positions synched with other players on the screen and you guys think it's a great idea to put in skill mechanics that depends on being able to tell which way someone is facing as we fight them? lol. 4/5 times I try to use it I just wind up wasting magic. People gap close me and are right in my face hitting me yet I still miss the stun? If you're going to make it that hard to land the stun at least have it return the magic when it misses.

3) If the changes to the passives were supposed to encourage us to feed regularly it was a massive fail. The drawbacks for going up in stages far outweigh the benefits so instead of staying at stage 4 all the time almost everyone stays at stage 1 now.

4) Mist form is the ultimate troll move now. If someone was spamming it to get away before you at least had the chance to stun them if you timed it right in between casts, now just toggle it on and even stage 1 stam characters with only 9k max mag can stay in it for 8 seconds. I put together a tanky health regen build with infused cost reduction enchants on jewelry and with the magic back from minor magic steal and my templar rune I can stay in mist form pretty much permanently, just popping a pvp health pot with invisi so I can come out long enough to recast those two skills every 20 seconds. Kinda fun but this is going to wind up being abused big time in PvP.

Nova_J

Jeremy wrote: »

Nova_J wrote: »

jm42 wrote: »

schlaflos_inWien wrote: »

it is not only about numbers.. its about usefullness! those numbers just represent, what the gameplay as vampire is now. at the end a vampire now runs out of resources very quickly. the vampire basically got a double-nerv now. not only we lost the reg, now we also have cost increase.

because you just want to be a vampire for passives using non-vampire skills as usual but vampire is a playstyle now and you must play vamp skills or don't be a vamp. and even if vampire is underachieving it's a problem only for ppl who want to have max numbers everytime

Lol you literally are gimping yourself if you use the other skills outside of BfB. These changes are underwhelming af and we saw this coming from miles away.

Drain is a great way for certain builds to get their health back and Mist Form is good for PvP. I use Vampire Skills outside of Blood for Blood all the time and they in no way "gimp" me.

Drain is a joke lol. It does give alot of heal but I have better heals on my mag blade that arent interuptable and actually provide more than just health. I swear it is so mind boggling that so many people are satisfied with these skill when they couldve been sooooo much more smh.

Glurin

red_emu wrote: »

4. Damage buff skill. I guess it's good for bombers only but useless for anyone else.
5. Mist form: the only useful skill due to the stage 2 passive.
6. Ultimate. While it's pretty cool to turn into a rubber figurine and deal crazy damage (very often a suicide mission), the duration is too short. Perfect scion morph is useless!
You ascend to stage 5 and get no drawbacks. Honestly, that is a completely useless morph. With pumped up stats while in the form, the draw backs basically do not matter. You have enough health and healing and mag pool, that by the time you run out of resources or get low on health, the transformation is over - taking you into a really long animation, allowing enemy players to all gap close you, while you can't move.

I don't think that the ultimate morph perfect scion is as completely useless as people think. I run a tank/solo build where my resources are split between magicka and stamina along with the high health pool, as well as being stage four pretty much all the time. I took perfect scion for two reasons. One, as a necromancer the ult is a bit redundant anyway. And two, specifically because people keep saying it's useless, so I wanted to test it out for myself because when I do I often find that people are underestimating the thing in question.

I can tell you that there is a very noticeable difference in resource consumption when I use it. Yeah, it probably won't be as noticeable on a min/maxed build with everything thrown into magicka, but on a hybrid or a tank where resource pools and regen is split, you can definitely feel it. The health recovery and flame damage aspects get buried under the expanded health pool and extra healing from the base skill though, so can't really say the same about those. They'd probably only be noticeable if you could rapidly switch between the two morphs to get a proper comparison. So I wouldn't call perfect scion useless, but it is extremely niche. I don't know that I'd say it's really on par with the other morph. But I do think there's just barely enough there to put it on the table.

In addition, the ult together with the damage buff makes a rather potent combination in any situation.

Vevvev

Issue with the Perfect Scion morph Glurin is that the Swarming Scion morph does the job better for several reasons.

• The bat swarm's damage heals you which makes up for whatever health recovery debuff you're suffering through.
• It applies pressure to everything around you with a very large AOE.
• Mixes better with Blood Frenzy since you end up with more healing to keep it up longer.
• Awards the same 10k health, stamina, and magicka perfect scion gives.

Sure there are times you might think Perfect Scion would be better but all its really doing in the end is reducing the flame damage you're taking and makes your non-vampire abilities cheaper. At stage 1 the thing is whopping 314 ultimate which means there are better ultimates out there for DPS, Healing, and Tanking. If you're staying stage 1 and using Perfect Scion to activate all of the stage based passives you only get them active for about 18 seconds due to the long transformation into the Scion form. That's a massive down time for very little gain.

Sephyr

Vevvev wrote: »

The main issue is they created a toolkit that is mostly utility and then geared all the debuffs and passives to make being a vampire an active play style as if it was its own separate class. What we get is an incomplete mess like this that forces players to pick the abilities they need, but then fix all the issues with their class, weapon, and guild skill lines. It makes for a very unfun play style that is very unadaptable to different situations.

I honestly didn't worry too much about the changing of the recovery passive but the addition of the non-vampire cost increases was going way too far. This is an example of ZOS's love for over tweaking things and we all know what happened during and after the DoT meta. Getting rid of the non-vampire cost increases would be a step in the right direction for making vampire more fun and viable again, and then they could revert the old values on the PTS the vampire cost reduction buff was at to encourage players to use more of the skills. These two things combined would make players want to feed to progress their stage instead of sit at stage 1 like many are doing now.

Another thing they should do is either ramp up the damage of vampiric drain or have it heal a % of your max health instead of a % of your missing health. As it is right now there is a diminishing return the longer you keep the drain on and its a huge risk because you can be interrupted.
Also with Mesmerize they should really make the angle your target has to be at to be "looking at you" to something like 180 degrees instead of 90 degrees, because that's the same angle required in order for the game to have a character's head look at something. This means a character's head could be pointed at your character, but because you're like a couple degrees off from that 90 degree arc in front of them that they don't count as "looking at you". Its honestly ridiculous and stupid. Please change the rules of this skill ZOS.

^This. I also love how people are going "It's a curse, get over it" without actually understanding what the actual problems are with the current iteration of vampirism. We accept that there's a curse. That's not the point, nor the issue. The issue is that there are too many downsides for little to no reward. There's no power fantasy in being a suicidal thing that doesn't even feel vampiric. I'd rather take sun damage at this point for something better.

YandereGirlfriend

I was poised to hate the changes just from looking at the PTS but on my magBlade I have come around to generally liking them.

Granted, I agree that there are still huge problems with many of the skills, such as Drain (make it a DoT that heals), Frenzy (too much health cost to be worth it), and Mesmerize (cone is way too narrow as you say), but the others are solid and the passives are amazing.

I'm glad though not to be "forced" to take it any longer on characters that don't intend to use the skills.