And to absolutely no one's surprise, I find the dev's response to why we as Blood Scions don't have wings to be quite dumb [snip]

Now onto why I dislike the reasoning:

It is one thing to say blood scions are not vampire lords, yet it is another to purposely DESIGN blood scions to look like vampire lords and constantly tease that we'd be looking as cool as the vampire lords in game. (During the reveal live stream one of the dudes literally pointed at the vamp lord statue and said we'd be turning into one of those, literally until last week we had NO promotional material that showed the real blood scion player form, etc.) For the record, I am all for them making blood scion its own UNIQUE and special-looking thing. But with that said, if they're going that route, then it should look different and unique.

As it stands it just looks like a vampire lord literally with no wings. That is it. That is the only main difference appearance wise. Very bizarre design choice to preach about it being totally different from a vampire lord, yet in reality if you compare the base model to the vamp lord model they look almost identical, just without wings. Considering the quest text for the vampire tutorial still specifically calls you a vampire lord, I wouldn't be surprised to learn that sometime in development players *were* actually going to be able to come vampire lords, but changed it to blood scions because it would save time and money. Would also explain the lackluster re-used/basic effects of the ultimate. Also the reason for this one specific line of quest text existing also HIGHLY contradicts their reasoning for removing the 'wings' in the first place.

On stream they mentioned the animation designers thought wings would look cool, but were told by the lore team to remove them because we aren't vampire lords. This leads me to believe the lore team must not read their own quest-text, then. Because surely they would of had that part edited out, right? Blatantly calling us vampire lords....

Either way yeah, happy to have a response from them, but it isn't a good response and it doesn't make too much sense. This is like saying a shark can't have fins because it isn't a great white. Or a bird can't have wings because it isn't a bald eagle. They could of easily just made them flightless wings that were there for aesthetic purposes only.... Very much feels like just a thing they decided on just so they wouldn't have to do much more work with the model and could then just re-use/make basic ultimate effects. No need to make the 'vamp lord' form feel wicked and sick if they can just market it off as some lesser transformation.


My Absence

[snip]

Once I discovered how the skill used to be, it might be easy to guess what my thoughts were. For those that don't know, in pre-pts the animation for vampiric drain was cooler (subjective, but I really liked it. Fit better.), but objectively the skill was an actual skill. Did around 2-3 times more damage than the current live vampiric drain and healed for 60% of missing health every tick. Also the drain-vigor morph was brain drain and restored a good chunk of missing magicka during the cast instead of stamina. It was basically a long-range damage heal alternative to Eviscerate from my understanding. Didn't deal as much damage as eviscerate, but considering it did way more damage than on live, I could see spending the time to channel it now being worth the effort.

After this post I will not be making anymore vampire rework threads unless something about them is touched upon in the future, I gave it my best shot during the testing period and failed, so that's that.

In case the bit I did mention about my recent absence gets me in more trouble and I'm left not being able to speak on here again, I was wanting to thank @Sephyr @Thevampirenight @TX12001rwb17_ESO @ShadowHvo @Vevvev @Lord-Otto @Cameron991 for the many discussions we've had and even though I've disagreed with some of you on some things, at the end of the day we're all just big passionate fans of vampires in ESO. There was probably a few more of you that I spoke with a lot, but I think I got the majority of them. Apologies if I left you out.

We can only hope some changes will happen in the future, regardless of how long that might be. I have a feeling the people that designed this rework are in for a rude awakening when it releases and many people become disappointed. But who knows, maybe everyone will love it and we will of turned out to be the fools instead. But as it stands, whoever designed this rework, from my personal perspective has failed the people that wanted vampire to be an actual play style. Without melee magicka weapons, I don't think people understand how much being forced to take eviscerate as your spammable without a gapcloser or any other real damaging abilities if you want to play as a full vampire absolutely sucks. (I play a necromancer, even with class abilities I will have no way to stay on top of an enemy to melee them to death in PvP.) Kind of ironic that even though they reworked the entire skill, we still ended up with with only 1 ability that has good damage. Also nerfing the vampiric ability cost reduction was also quite rough, should of left it at 40% as that is the only stat-related buff the stages give you.

Anyways, that's only one of my many complaints with the skill line, but I'll end it here. If I don't, I'll go on about it for way more than a few paragraphs. Bizarre design choices all around and to the balance guy who said on the live stream all smugly 'Yeah Im the guy that nerfed your favorite class' and explained in an equally smug tone to Gina that vamps don't rejen HP at stage 4, frick you. That whole interaction and live stream was rough to witness.

[Edited to remove Conspiracy Theory and Discussing Disciplinary Actions]