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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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

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.

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.

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.

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 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.