Vampirism (NPCs and appearance)

onyxorb

I have both werewolf and vamp toons in games, and I've seen the amazing changes for Werewolf, so just hoping to see some of that love for vamps.
I would love to offer some suggestions for the 'rework' (not using that other word, nope) of the Vampirism skills.

A lot of these are probably already on the list, but it doesn't hurt to put them all in one spot 'just in case'.

Appearance:
Can we PLEASE address the issue of having a skin or 'skill style' to hide vampirism? It's just silly that this is not something we can do in an era where we have multiple skill styles for even the silliest of skills. Let us design our toons the way we want. Not everyone wants to hide behind a polymorph, heavy armor, or a very limited number of skins.
I nearly cried when my new fancy crown crate hairstyle was ash gray and not the pitch black hair that was pictured.

NPCs:
Also, please address the issue with NPC merchants not talking to stage 4 vamps.
NPC merchants can somehow tell we are a vamp, when the guards we stroll by can't?
NPC merchants who are so afraid of us, choose to anger us, instead of serving us so we can leave them alone?

Please either disable this 'feature', or give us a setting to turn this option off. Not everyone has the time to slot a mesmerize skill on their bar just to use a merchant.
Honestly, It's hard enough keeping track of armory builds (which still have a per toon cost and are not global), without having to worry about which skill I removed to slot mesmerize, so I could fix my gear.

Bleed:
Please add bleed damage to the vampire skill lines. So many of the skills reference blood in their name, but we can't make an actual bleed based build because none actually do bleed damage.

Honestly, I can't wait to see what you all pull off. Just hoping some of the above issues are addressed in the process.

randconfig

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.

onyxorb

Ah, you reminded me about mist form tanks. I created a toon just to try that playstyle, then they nerfed mistform the nextt patch.
I tried to convert that toon into a vampiric bleed build, but found out none of the actual skills do bleed damage, sigh.
Not to mention the new Mist form is honestly just weird, the delayed movement part of it makes it hard to work with (for me).

Your comment on Eviscerate also reminded me of how well it used to work with pale order for solo builds, before nerfs, ah.... what a pattern... Nerf Fun.

Honestly, along with giving Bleed to more of the Vampiric skill lines, it would be amazing if Vampires HEALED from doing bleed damage. Well I supposed mist form did, but it was so weak that it was basically not there.

I always pictured vamps being bathed in blood as they killed their victims, while feeding on both the blood and the victims. So healing from bleed just feels right, maybe my vision of vampirism is wrong.

Active or passives related to healing from bleed would be an amazing perk though.
If that breaks PVP, then just check battle frenzy or make it only apply to PVE zones.

<minor rant> It's totally fine to have some perks that are PVE or PVP only. Don't penalize everyone because one aspect of play has issues. </minor rant>

Anyways I hope to see some good stuff done with Vampirism.