Decent Vampire Suggestion?

Ryuvain

Been thinking a lot about how stage 4 doesn't feel like a strong point to be at right now. Imo stage 3 Is best of you want the damage reduction (which helps against fire) or stage 2 If you want the sneak/invis buff.

I don't want to touch the cost increase/reduction since it's a great tradeoff and we don't want vamp to be a free take again.

What if we switched the health regen debuff around but buffed it as well? For example it would be -95% at stage 1 and 150(?)% at stage 4. This would help quite a few things with vamp overall.

Full vamps would get help with self healing and have regeneration to use with all their health costing abilities.
Stage 1 vamps would feel a bit weaker since you don't heal up passively but it's also not turned off completely.

Cost changes are still in place so that stage 4 isn't a straight upgrade, but would be better if you like vampire moves.

Would this be a good change or no?

wild_kmacdb16_ESO

No, bad idea.

I believe the reason stage 4 has no health regeneration is to convey that the vamp is totally undead at that point - their blood has stopped flowing. I don't think it makes sense to flip that effect with Stage 1.

If anything, I'd make vamp abilities get slightly more powerful with each stage, maybe with stage 4 giving a bonus effect to vamp skills. Of course, slightly better mediocre abilities still isn't a real compelling case for stage 4 either.

But at the end of the day, even stage 1 vamp will be a hard sell after the BfB nerf. You will be incurring multiple penalties for a bunch of trash skills, so adding another penalty on top will kill off the vamp pop even more.