Vampire Rework - Concepts and How to Realize Them

Kardrik · July 2020

Hello everyone! First post!

So I have a lot of vampires at this point, largely because I love how playing one is just a bit different than playing said class. (I.E how Vamp Magplar is just a bit diff than regular magplar), and I love the concept, I'm just more than a little unhappy with its execution.
I like playing Vampires in general, I also love playing Vampire hunters too! I just love the stuff in general

So I got some concepts that I am unhappy with and will address them in this order, and many of the problems and proposed solutions overlap!

Stealing Life - Vampires steal life from their enemies, but ESO vamps right now are more about stealing life from themselves? Lets introduce some more stealing life into the tree!
Squishiness and Durability - Lore about vampires is that they very hard for common weapons and methods to kill, but they are very vulnerable to some specific things. Right now Vamps are just squishier, lets fix that!
Vampire Stages - Stage 4 Vamps are too similar to Stage 1 vamps in gameplay, and for most content most of the differences are downsides! The two problems can be fixed together!
Blood for Blood - 'Nuff said!
STAMINA - Why are they left out of most of the vampire fun! Stamina builds should be able to go Vamp, too! #StamVampsMatter
The Minor Complaint - Stage 4 lasts way too long!
Summary - The summary! This is where I kinda detail out what I see the end of all these changes turning into!

1. Stealing Life

Vampires are bloodsuckers! They take other living things health to make them stronger or sustain their life, yet in gameplay the ESO vamps are much about being squishy and sacrifincing what little we have for a big burst of damage? I think Vamps need more draining the enemy in their skills!

Arterial Burst - Heal for a portion of the damage done

I like this idea a bit because having the vamps main spammable steal some health makes sense! Because Vampire, I feel like they should be constantly draining some health! It also gives a little health to the health seesaw that the devs want it to have. It also makes the execute a little harder to get, which encourages you to use stuff like blood frenzy more! Synergy!

Blood Mist - Heals for a portion of the damage done + increase the speed a bit (and I echo that blood mist should have more of a bat effect!)

This one is dicey, I know. It would have to be super small, but if its small then it would be neat to have without it being a "You can't hurt me while I heal to full", especially with magicka costs in mind.
I think it should be just as fast as that jog you do when you're not sprinting, and Elusive Mist should be just as fast as sprinting

2. Squishiness and Durability

A concept I like about vampires in general is that they are really hard to kill in most circumstances, but if you know what you're doing they'll downright fold. Take a steel axe and the Vampire will laugh at you, but some silver and fire will change the sound its making at you from a laugh to a cry!
Is there a way to make this reflect in game? Not quite to that extent, that would be unbalanced!

Blood Frenzy - decrease damage taken (or could be just physical/poison damage taken)

Decreasing damage taken would make it a smidge less risky, and then it would be used more! Combine this with Arterial Burst giving a slight heal and Vampiric drain being useful, this ability would actually see some use!

Passive - Physical Damage taken half of their increased flame damage (at Stage 4 -10% Physical Damage Taken, +20% Flame Damage Taken)

This makes the damage taken profile for vamps different, not just squishier than a standard character, which I thought was more the point? To make vampires different, not necessarily stronger or weaker!
This works really well for Blood Frenzy, which easily allows a vampire to die during a stun! Blood Frenzied vamp + stun + flame damage equals dead vampire, doofus whacking at vampire with an axe equals kill happy vampire. Again, vampires are durable to most things that commonly kill a human, but properly fight a vampire and that thing is dead! (I like playing Vampire Hunter characters as much as I like playing Vampires) (Ritual of Retribution nerf hurts me, too )

3. Vampire Stages

Stage 1 Vampires are much closer to their humanity (and whatever Mer refer to their personhood as) than Stage 4 Vampires. Reducing the cost of the abilities was a good start, and would suffice for the Vampire non-damaging abilities! But for the damaging abilities I think they also need to hit harder as you go higher in stage, so that they lean more on them in higher stages than in lower ones!

Eviscerate - Make the damage equal the tooltip for other class spammables, and increase the damage slightly per vampire stage

That way eviscerate is an option to the class spammables for the Stage 1 vampires that want to play more like a standard class, but isn't forcing them towards either one. Options! They do get more forced to choose the Eviscerate morph of their choice as they feed more and go higher in stage.

Vampiric Drain - Does higher damage and heals more at higher stages than lower stages

Making this more worthwhile for damage and healing for the stage 4 vampire, combine that with the cost decreases means the Stage 4 would also be using their ultimate a lot more than Stage 1 would if using Exhilirating Drain!
Making Vampiric Drain give more stamina per stage may make proposed Stamina builds use Vampiric Drain to get their stamina back, more on that later!
This alongside the cost decreases to higher stages would mean that stage 4 vamps would be using that ultimate a lot more than their lower counterparts with exhilirating drain!
Like I said, making vamp abilities largely stronger (not just cheaper!) as the stage increases means a real difference in gameplay between a Stage 1(fights much more like a standard class) than a stage 4 (more vampiric!) and even between Magicka and Stamina vampires!

4. Blood for Blood

I don't like that this is carrying the Vampire skill line, and I don't like that nerfing it makes vampires unusable. That being said, I also don't like that it can singlehandedly carry some builds sustain, and I am not particularly fond of it taking health to use, but we can work with that. BfB should not be a free pass for builds with terrible sustain, but it shouldn't make the vamp unusable in group content! Let the healer heal the vamp some, but stll make the vamp more reliant on selfheals.

Reduce the healing done by party members for 3s after BfB, but not eliminate it

I don't like the idea of adding minor defile because that also reduces the healing you do yourself, no? The idea behind removing all healing done to you for a time after using it is to make the vampire more reliant upon self healing. One of the major problems, which I address a little later, is that Vampires at the moment have straight up abysmal self healing!
Make the healing done by party member reduced for higher stages.

Make Blood for Blood scale off of max offensive stats

It neither uses Magicka or Stamina, but its inacessible to stamina builds? No reason for it not to work for stamina builds! Why can't my stam builds have some bloodsucking fun, too?

5. STAMINA

If Vampires are meant to be an addition to the class, why can't stamina builds join in on the fun? Only thing stamina gets much of from being a vamp is the cost increases and the increased damage intake!
Sure you could go vampire for just the non-damage giving skills, like Mesmerize and Mist, but you're biting that overall class cost increase!
This game likes to do magicka and stamina morphs, not a particular fan of that kind of shoe-horning from a game that (at least at first) was kind of a "build your class your way" kinda way, but that leads to a few straightforward fixes for stamina builds.

Make Blood for Blood scale off of your highest offensive stats

both builds can use eviscerate!

Make that weird stamina giving morph of vampiric drain actually scale off of max stamina/weapon damage

That will make it actually useful for somebody!
Of course keep it as a magicka cost, combine this with the proposed damage and healing increases and Stamina Vampires might use drain instead of heavy attack in some cases to regain their stamina!
That would be a significant difference in play between Magicka Vamps (Exhilirating - using vamp ultimate more) and Stamina Vamps (Regening Stam with Drain)

6. The Minor Complaint

And now something relatively minor that bothers me
The promotion material said basically for the higher stages you need to be dedicated to the vampiric way, draining mortals left and right! Greymoor gets released, and the stages all last... 4 hours? Thats like once a login or more for most players! That's not dedication!
I would think that it would take much more blood to sustain a higher level of vampirism, so if we want to go the gameplay time between feedings route I think Stage 4 should last a significantly shorter time than Stage 2 does.

My idea would be to stagger them!

Stage 2 - 4 hours
Stage 3 - 2 or 3 hours
Stage 4 - 1 or 2 hours

I really want stage 1 to only last an hour, but I think thats the filthy causal in me speaking! For questing and solo content that makes the most sense, but for longer group content that would be quite the pain. I'm thinking for longer raids that run into issues that might be harder to sustain. Into a multihour raid some players would be unhappy if their vamp powers got weaker while waiting for people to go bio!
But at the same time I feel like if I wanna stay stage 4, I definitely need to act more like a bloodsucking monster feeding on NPC's left and right!

7. Summary
So in summary, the way I see the vamps working with all my proposed changes works something like this

Stage 1 Vampires function more or less how they do now except

Arterial Burst also heals a little bit[
Frenzy is a little less risky, since it decreases some damage taken.
Mist is slightly faster, and blood mist heals a little bit
They take 2.5% less physical (and maybe poison?) damage taken to go with their 5% increase in flame damage taken
Stamina Vampires can join the fun, too! BfB and that stamina drain are accessible to them now!

Stage 4 Vampires would play a lot differently than Stage 1's

Regular abilities are more costly, So using Vampire abilities is a must now, but now they're actually better!
Much more Eviscerate and Drain use!
For Magicka Vamps (Exhilirating), they become Vampire Lords a lot more often than their stage 1 or Stamina counterparts)
Stamina Vampires regen their Stamina pool with drain as well, and its viable to do so!
They take noticeably less damage from Physical attacks, and a lot more damage from Flame and Fighters Guild abilities! So as a stage 4 you are really ducking that DK or those Flame Walls!
As stage 4, you are a monster! You need to feed! You use lots of Vampire Abilities, and you feel strong on top of the world until some clever sod throws a candle at you!

Now I am not a numbers guy yet, so I know its really easy to unbalance things and make Vampires too strong!
But I think with the conceptual benefits listed above it gives the devs more things to tweak to make them good!
And I think this nudges Vampires right in the stronger direction!

I like a lot of the concepts the devs have for Vampires here, but they need some tweaks for the concepts to make it to gameplay!
What do you all think?
I think I spent way too much time agonizing over whether or not to italicize the contents of the lists!

Algorax · July 2020

Hey there and welcome in this den of depraved toxicity and embarassing censorship.
I will try to address each one of your points:

1. Stealing Life: They do steal life, the concept is given by the skill called "Vampiric Drain" and its morphs.

2. Squishiness and Durability: All vampires are naturally harder to kill thanks to the undeath passive while also being more susceptible to other damage source (fire and fighter's guild abilities and perks).

3. Vampire Stages: Stages can't and should not be considered separated from the relative perks. Through them you have the requested differentiation and progression.

4. Blood for Blood: Yes, there is room from improvement (specially after the undeserved upcoming nerfs) but please keep in mind that vampires ARE NOT and were never ment to be stamina based, as werewolves were not ment to be magika based.

5. STAMINA: See the point above

6. The Minor Complaint: The main reason to not lower the stage's duration is bc it would force players immersed in an activity to reach for an available source (an hard task in some scenarios)

Vevvev · July 2020

You have some good points in there but changing the vampire stages like that would bring us back to the dark ages of vampires in ESO where using abilities didn't change our stage and you had to wait in real time for 30 minutes to hit stage 2, an additional hour to hit stage 3, and an additional hour and a half to hit stage 4. Although technically we are in similar situation but in reverse....

As for giving stamina vampires something to work with all they truly need is a stamina spammable or make BfB scale off the highest offensive stats. Blood Frenzy and Strike from the Shadows does award weapon damage so its still possible to make a stamina vampire, of course as you pointed out they suffer from the cost increases. Giving them a spammable would help them greatly, keep with the lore of vampires, and differentiate them from werewolves. Vampirisim while magic in nature helped boost an inflicted person's physical attributes as well.

Kardrik · August 2020

Algorax wrote: »

Hey there and welcome in this den of depraved toxicity and embarassing censorship.

Thank you! I look forward to all the fun!

Algorax wrote: »

1. Stealing Life: They do steal life, the concept is given by the skill called "Vampiric Drain" and its morphs.

True, they do. That is one ability that does, yet they have two abilities (or an ability and a morph) that sacrifice their own health.
And this ability is very lackluster, hits like a wet noodle, barely heals, and is interruptable.
All Exhilirating drain needs is a bit of a damage boost and heal boost, the interruptability allows for counterplay which will keep its power in check in PVP.
The stamina drain morph is purely useless, however. There is no reason to take it over exhilirating, since magicka vamps have no reason really to fret about their stamina pools!

Two of the problems here can be solved while fixing two other problems! The lack of stamina-build friendliness of Vampires, and the stages being fairly indistinct from one another (especially 3 and 4)

Making the stamina drain morph at least scale off of max stamina/weapon damage (even if it still took magicka to use) would make it accessible to the builds that ACTUALLY need to regenerate stamina! That would give some builds reason to use the drain over the Exhilirating Drain, or use it at all!

Making the damage scale a bit with the vamp stages would add some more distinction between the stages aside from the perks.
Right now Stage 3 feels really similar to stage 4, stage 4 just doesn't have any passive health regen and has the vanish on sprint, which is not too useful for a lot (or I would say most) content.

Algorax wrote: »

2. Squishiness and Durability: All vampires are naturally harder to kill thanks to the undeath passive while also being more susceptible to other damage source (fire and fighter's guild abilities and perks).

Thats true, but thats only stage 3 and 4! Why are stage 1 and two vampires easier to kill than your average joe? They have no added damage resistances at all, but they are weaker to fire? They fall as easily as a man to a blade, but also weaker to fire? Sounds like a bad deal!

Algorax wrote: »

3. Vampire Stages: Stages can't and should not be considered separated from the relative perks. Through them you have the requested differentiation and progression.

There is some, but it seems to me like its not enough! When going to stage 4 I would say most players really feel the lack of health regen, the extra flame damage taken, and the decrease in sustain (or they will with BfB's nerf!) much more than they feel the cost decrease to vamp skills (6 skills total, in the game!), the damage resistance which is only noticeable under 50% health, or the 3s boost to damage at the start of each fight!
Stage 4 doesn't feel much stronger than a human in the ways its supposed to, but all the weaknesses are really hitting home!

Algorax wrote: »

4. Blood for Blood: Yes, there is room from improvement (specially after the undeserved upcoming nerfs) but please keep in mind that vampires ARE NOT and were never ment to be stamina based, as werewolves were not ment to be magika based.

I don't at all see why they shouldn't be! The gameplay for this game is (or at least was) marketed as a kind of "play your way" kind of game, sporting all kinds of versatile builds!
Granted the whole magicka/stamina build system goes against that (I would much prefer that this game scaled all DPS and heal abilities off of a combination of offensive stats instead of one of the other, but thats a separate discussion!

But also speaking of Vampires, there is lots of Vampire lore that talks of augmented physical abilities! Almost all vampires are physically stronger than their human counterparts, in many cases faster and more durable as well! So why would Vampirism's perks only be reserved for robe-toting eggheads?
This is not the case in general vampire lore, but in Elder Scrolls vampire lore as well!
Furthermore, in the promotional material for Greymoor there wasn't a single staff-toting Vampire that I saw.
Most Vampire NPC's are using dual wield, two handed, bows, or sword and board, yet player Vampires are confined to only staff builds? That doesn't make sense!

There is no reason for most of the Vampire skill line to be completely useless to Stamina builds!
I don't like Werewolf being confined to Stamina builds either, but thats a different discussion! Unlike Vampires, werewolves are in a pretty good spot right now (as in they are useful outside of one or two stupid specific builds) so I am going to focus more of my energy on Vampires.

Also I still don't like that Vampirism is a largely melee skill line, but its inaccessible to the vast majority of the game's melee builds (Stamina builds!)

Algorax wrote: »

6. The Minor Complaint: The main reason to not lower the stage's duration is bc it would force players immersed in an activity to reach for an available source (an hard task in some scenarios)

I get that, I still think the stages are a bit too long! 4 hours is a really long time to be logged in, to not have to feed! I still think it should be shorter, esp for stage 4.

Vevvev wrote: »

You have some good points in there but changing the vampire stages like that would bring us back to the dark ages of vampires in ESO where using abilities didn't change our stage and you had to wait in real time for 30 minutes to hit stage 2, an additional hour to hit stage 3, and an additional hour and a half to hit stage 4. Although technically we are in similar situation but in reverse....

We are in a worse situation, really. In reverse, 4x worse!

(Stage 1: 30mins) + (Stage 2: 1hr) + (Stage 3: 1.5hr) = 3 hours.

You go from stage 1 to 4 in 3 ingame hours!
Right now that same time frame won't even change your stage once! 4 hours per stage means

(Stage 4: 4 hrs) + (Stage 3: 4 hrs) + (Stage 2: 4hrs) = 12 hours. (4x as long!)

In the current system you could go from 1 to 4 in under 5 minutes (like you could go from 4 to 1 in the dark ages!), difference is if you change your mind you have to be logged into your character for 12 hours to fix that (Or pay ZoS $40)

Under my most drastic change it would go something like this:

(Stage 4: 1 hr) + (Stage 3: 2 hrs) + (Stage 2: 4 hrs) = 7hrs (Still over twice the dark ages time!)

Vevvev wrote: »

As for giving stamina vampires something to work with all they truly need is a stamina spammable or make BfB scale off the highest offensive stats.
Blood Frenzy and Strike from the Shadows does award weapon damage so its still possible to make a stamina vampire, of course as you pointed out they suffer from the cost increases.
Giving them a spammable would help them greatly, keep with the lore of vampires, and differentiate them from werewolves.
Vampirisim while magic in nature helped boost an inflicted person's physical attributes as well.

That would be the easiest solution! Even if they just did that Stamina vamps would be viable, even though Drain is still inaccessible to them (Even that Stamina morph that no magicka build wants!) (Okay, maybe I'm being unfair, that stamina morph would be useful to a tank that wants to take extra flame damage!)

Blood Frenzy and Strike from the Shadows right now do not help enough to justify the hit to sustain that every Stamina build takes to go Vamp.
Making BfB accessible to them would fix this.

SlimeBro1 · August 2020

Kardrik wrote: »

Hello everyone! First post!

So I have a lot of vampires at this point, largely because I love how playing one is just a bit different than playing said class. (I.E how Vamp Magplar is just a bit diff than regular magplar), and I love the concept, I'm just more than a little unhappy with its execution.
I like playing Vampires in general, I also love playing Vampire hunters too! I just love the stuff in general

So I got some concepts that I am unhappy with and will address them in this order, and many of the problems and proposed solutions overlap!
Stealing Life - Vampires steal life from their enemies, but ESO vamps right now are more about stealing life from themselves? Lets introduce some more stealing life into the tree!

Squishiness and Durability - Lore about vampires is that they very hard for common weapons and methods to kill, but they are very vulnerable to some specific things. Right now Vamps are just squishier, lets fix that!

Vampire Stages - Stage 4 Vamps are too similar to Stage 1 vamps in gameplay, and for most content most of the differences are downsides! The two problems can be fixed together!

Blood for Blood - 'Nuff said!

STAMINA - Why are they left out of most of the vampire fun! Stamina builds should be able to go Vamp, too! #StamVampsMatter

The Minor Complaint - Stage 4 lasts way too long!

Summary - The summary! This is where I kinda detail out what I see the end of all these changes turning into!

1. Stealing Life

Vampires are bloodsuckers! They take other living things health to make them stronger or sustain their life, yet in gameplay the ESO vamps are much about being squishy and sacrifincing what little we have for a big burst of damage? I think Vamps need more draining the enemy in their skills!

Arterial Burst - Heal for a portion of the damage done
I like this idea a bit because having the vamps main spammable steal some health makes sense! Because Vampire, I feel like they should be constantly draining some health! It also gives a little health to the health seesaw that the devs want it to have. It also makes the execute a little harder to get, which encourages you to use stuff like blood frenzy more! Synergy!

Blood Mist - Heals for a portion of the damage done + increase the speed a bit (and I echo that blood mist should have more of a bat effect!)
This one is dicey, I know. It would have to be super small, but if its small then it would be neat to have without it being a "You can't hurt me while I heal to full", especially with magicka costs in mind.

I think it should be just as fast as that jog you do when you're not sprinting, and Elusive Mist should be just as fast as sprinting

2. Squishiness and Durability

A concept I like about vampires in general is that they are really hard to kill in most circumstances, but if you know what you're doing they'll downright fold. Take a steel axe and the Vampire will laugh at you, but some silver and fire will change the sound its making at you from a laugh to a cry!
Is there a way to make this reflect in game? Not quite to that extent, that would be unbalanced!

Blood Frenzy - decrease damage taken (or could be just physical/poison damage taken)
Decreasing damage taken would make it a smidge less risky, and then it would be used more! Combine this with Arterial Burst giving a slight heal and Vampiric drain being useful, this ability would actually see some use!

Passive - Physical Damage taken half of their increased flame damage (at Stage 4 -10% Physical Damage Taken, +20% Flame Damage Taken)
This makes the damage taken profile for vamps different, not just squishier than a standard character, which I thought was more the point? To make vampires different, not necessarily stronger or weaker!

This works really well for Blood Frenzy, which easily allows a vampire to die during a stun! Blood Frenzied vamp + stun + flame damage equals dead vampire, doofus whacking at vampire with an axe equals kill happy vampire. Again, vampires are durable to most things that commonly kill a human, but properly fight a vampire and that thing is dead! (I like playing Vampire Hunter characters as much as I like playing Vampires) (Ritual of Retribution nerf hurts me, too )

3. Vampire Stages

Stage 1 Vampires are much closer to their humanity (and whatever Mer refer to their personhood as) than Stage 4 Vampires. Reducing the cost of the abilities was a good start, and would suffice for the Vampire non-damaging abilities! But for the damaging abilities I think they also need to hit harder as you go higher in stage, so that they lean more on them in higher stages than in lower ones!

Eviscerate - Make the damage equal the tooltip for other class spammables, and increase the damage slightly per vampire stage
That way eviscerate is an option to the class spammables for the Stage 1 vampires that want to play more like a standard class, but isn't forcing them towards either one. Options! They do get more forced to choose the Eviscerate morph of their choice as they feed more and go higher in stage.

Vampiric Drain - Does higher damage and heals more at higher stages than lower stages
Making this more worthwhile for damage and healing for the stage 4 vampire, combine that with the cost decreases means the Stage 4 would also be using their ultimate a lot more than Stage 1 would if using Exhilirating Drain!

Making Vampiric Drain give more stamina per stage may make proposed Stamina builds use Vampiric Drain to get their stamina back, more on that later!

This alongside the cost decreases to higher stages would mean that stage 4 vamps would be using that ultimate a lot more than their lower counterparts with exhilirating drain!

Like I said, making vamp abilities largely stronger (not just cheaper!) as the stage increases means a real difference in gameplay between a Stage 1(fights much more like a standard class) than a stage 4 (more vampiric!) and even between Magicka and Stamina vampires!

4. Blood for Blood

I don't like that this is carrying the Vampire skill line, and I don't like that nerfing it makes vampires unusable. That being said, I also don't like that it can singlehandedly carry some builds sustain, and I am not particularly fond of it taking health to use, but we can work with that. BfB should not be a free pass for builds with terrible sustain, but it shouldn't make the vamp unusable in group content! Let the healer heal the vamp some, but stll make the vamp more reliant on selfheals.

Reduce the healing done by party members for 3s after BfB, but not eliminate it
I don't like the idea of adding minor defile because that also reduces the healing you do yourself, no? The idea behind removing all healing done to you for a time after using it is to make the vampire more reliant upon self healing. One of the major problems, which I address a little later, is that Vampires at the moment have straight up abysmal self healing!

Make the healing done by party member reduced for higher stages.

Make Blood for Blood scale off of max offensive stats
It neither uses Magicka or Stamina, but its inacessible to stamina builds? No reason for it not to work for stamina builds! Why can't my stam builds have some bloodsucking fun, too?

5. STAMINA

If Vampires are meant to be an addition to the class, why can't stamina builds join in on the fun? Only thing stamina gets much of from being a vamp is the cost increases and the increased damage intake!
Sure you could go vampire for just the non-damage giving skills, like Mesmerize and Mist, but you're biting that overall class cost increase!
This game likes to do magicka and stamina morphs, not a particular fan of that kind of shoe-horning from a game that (at least at first) was kind of a "build your class your way" kinda way, but that leads to a few straightforward fixes for stamina builds.

Make Blood for Blood scale off of your highest offensive stats
both builds can use eviscerate!

Make that weird stamina giving morph of vampiric drain actually scale off of max stamina/weapon damage
That will make it actually useful for somebody!

Of course keep it as a magicka cost, combine this with the proposed damage and healing increases and Stamina Vampires might use drain instead of heavy attack in some cases to regain their stamina!

That would be a significant difference in play between Magicka Vamps (Exhilirating - using vamp ultimate more) and Stamina Vamps (Regening Stam with Drain)

6. The Minor Complaint

And now something relatively minor that bothers me
The promotion material said basically for the higher stages you need to be dedicated to the vampiric way, draining mortals left and right! Greymoor gets released, and the stages all last... 4 hours? Thats like once a login or more for most players! That's not dedication!
I would think that it would take much more blood to sustain a higher level of vampirism, so if we want to go the gameplay time between feedings route I think Stage 4 should last a significantly shorter time than Stage 2 does.

My idea would be to stagger them!
Stage 2 - 4 hours

Stage 3 - 2 or 3 hours

Stage 4 - 1 or 2 hours

I really want stage 1 to only last an hour, but I think thats the filthy causal in me speaking! For questing and solo content that makes the most sense, but for longer group content that would be quite the pain. I'm thinking for longer raids that run into issues that might be harder to sustain. Into a multihour raid some players would be unhappy if their vamp powers got weaker while waiting for people to go bio!
But at the same time I feel like if I wanna stay stage 4, I definitely need to act more like a bloodsucking monster feeding on NPC's left and right!

7. Summary
So in summary, the way I see the vamps working with all my proposed changes works something like this

Stage 1 Vampires function more or less how they do now except
Arterial Burst also heals a little bit[

Frenzy is a little less risky, since it decreases some damage taken.

Mist is slightly faster, and blood mist heals a little bit

They take 2.5% less physical (and maybe poison?) damage taken to go with their 5% increase in flame damage taken

Stamina Vampires can join the fun, too! BfB and that stamina drain are accessible to them now!

Stage 4 Vampires would play a lot differently than Stage 1's
Regular abilities are more costly, So using Vampire abilities is a must now, but now they're actually better!

Much more Eviscerate and Drain use!

For Magicka Vamps (Exhilirating), they become Vampire Lords a lot more often than their stage 1 or Stamina counterparts)

Stamina Vampires regen their Stamina pool with drain as well, and its viable to do so!

They take noticeably less damage from Physical attacks, and a lot more damage from Flame and Fighters Guild abilities! So as a stage 4 you are really ducking that DK or those Flame Walls!
As stage 4, you are a monster! You need to feed! You use lots of Vampire Abilities, and you feel strong on top of the world until some clever sod throws a candle at you!

Now I am not a numbers guy yet, so I know its really easy to unbalance things and make Vampires too strong!
But I think with the conceptual benefits listed above it gives the devs more things to tweak to make them good!
And I think this nudges Vampires right in the stronger direction!

I like a lot of the concepts the devs have for Vampires here, but they need some tweaks for the concepts to make it to gameplay!
What do you all think?
I think I spent way too much time agonizing over whether or not to italicize the contents of the lists!

I just want vampires to have the bat-swarm gap closer man.

Or Blood Mist to turn the player into a swarm of bats tbh

Kittytravel · August 2020

As someone earlier said, WW isn't meant to be played Magicka, Vampire should not be played Stamina. These are two pretty clear lines that's been established for awhile now and allowing Stam into Vamp would require WW to be given the same treatment.

As for the post itself; I'd just like to ask basically.
1. Why should I play a "Vampire" build with these changes? What makes this better than a normal kit?
2. What about this will make "Vampire" a separate play style and not just a supplement line like Psijic, Fighters Guild, Mages Guild, etc.
3. What will prevent this from just once again making vampire a "Must take for all Magicka" skill line rather than a choice like WW is?

Just something to think about, from what I can tell these changes would either result in the same poor lackluster vamp skill line we've already got or it would bring it back to must-have as magicka DPS.

Kardrik · August 2020

Kittytravel wrote: »

As for the post itself; I'd just like to ask basically.
1. Why should I play a "Vampire" build with these changes? What makes this better than a normal kit?
2. What about this will make "Vampire" a separate play style and not just a supplement line like Psijic, Fighters Guild, Mages Guild, etc.
3. What will prevent this from just once again making vampire a "Must take for all Magicka" skill line rather than a choice like WW is?

Just something to think about, from what I can tell these changes would either result in the same poor lackluster vamp skill line we've already got or it would bring it back to must-have as magicka DPS.

1. The point is not to make this better than a normal kit, just different!
If its better, then it becomes a must-have as magicka DPS! If its worse, it results in the same poor lackluster skill line.
That's balance! It needs to be not better or worse, just different!
As for why would you use a build with vamp abilities, hopefully not to be better or worse than normal kit! Because maybe playing a vampire magplar would be different than a normal one!
2. Well the main point for the changes in stage progression is so that more or less Stage 1 plays very similarly to a normal kit! Damage profile is similar, you have the vamp skills but they are similar in cost and effect to your normal skills, but if you want to use the skills you absolutely can! By the time you get to stage 4 the Vamp skills are much more worthwhile in cost and effect, whereas your normal skills are a bit more costly, so it encourages the vamp skills a bit more as a stage 4 than a stage 3. Because of sustain! I probably should have included something in the post that makes it clear that I am not a fan of the way BfB carries a build's sustain the way it does now. Devs are already working on that, so I didn't really mention that here.
Anyhow, the thing that will make it not a must-have for magicka builds is because it doesn't help the sustain on your normal abilities, and the penalties for them just increase with the stage! Without BfB as a cruch to sustain, becoming a vamp won't be a straight help to vanilla magicka builds!
So we don't want it to be a crutch to vanilla build's sustain, but we dont want the vamp abilities its supposed to encourage to suck either!

I don't see how really it would force it more one way or another! As I mentioned, issues to sustain, and I don't think these buffs are so strong as to eclipse current magicka builds!
I more focused on aspects of the vamp tree that are really weak, except for Blood Mist and Mesmeriize, the former which is completely unusable.