Depends on class and playstyle. Sneak speed is always helpful in PvP, and vamp in general works for nightblades. Mist form and the ultimate are generally good in PvP. Spammable is nice if your class doesn't have a good one.

I would say try it for yourself instead of dissing it due to complaints.

Vampire has strengths and weaknesses so whether its worth it or not is up to whether your build requires it.

Strengths:

• Faster Sneak (Both entering it and moving around)
• 960 spell and weapon damage. (300 of which is earned from the stage 2 passive and 660 from Blood Frenzy)
• Unique damage mitigation up to 30% based on missing health at stage 3
• Cheaper Sprint and you turn invisible after sprinting for 3 seconds at stage 4.
• AoE stun
• Mistform
• Incredibly strong ultimate that can reset the fight (It becomes a true reset as a Dragonknight thanks to Battle Roar)
• Cheap/Health Cost spammable
• Vampire abilities decreasing in cost by -6%/-10%/-16%/-24% depending on stage.

Weaknesses:

• Fire damage taken increased by +5%/+8%/+13%/+20% depending on stage.
• Health recovery going down by -10%/-30%/-60%/-100% depending on stage. (And before you ask, yes the -100% health recovery is non-negotiable. It bypasses all HP regeneration boosts, food, and sets.)
• All non-vampire abilities increasing in cost by +3%/+5%/+8%/+12% depending on stage.
• 20% increased damage from Fighter's Guild Abilities.
• Able to be hurt by Prismatic glyphs
• Channeled missing health scaling heal.
• AoE stun has a requirement for the target to be looking at you (Queue server positional desyncs).
• While vampire gives weapon damage, as well as the ultimate giving 10k stamina, there are no physical damage scaling abilities in vampire's tool kit. Everything scales off magic offensive stats.

More details on passives:
Feed can no longer be used in combat and functions like the blade of woe. Cool animations but this means you can't use it on other players. Feeding also increases your stage instead of decrease it and the stage timers are each 4 hours long. Only way to reduce your stage is to use the fountain from the Vampiric Libations bundle, drink a Purifying Bloody Mara, or wait 4 hours.

Dark Stalker, the old stage 4 passive, is now universally active regardless of your stage. It also no longer functions on whether the game is day or night so you'll always enter sneak 50% faster and ignore the speed penalties while in it.

Stage 2's passive gives you 300 spell and weapon damage for 6 seconds when you leave mistform, invisibility, or sneak. This synergizes very well with Nightblades who can cloak at will, but is less effective on other classes who will have to either use mistform to proc it or other alternate methods like sneaking, potions, or the stage 4 passive.

Stage 3's passive gives you up to 30% damage mitigation based on missing health. When you're at 50% hp this means you have 15% damage mitigation. This stacks with your other forms of mitigation which gives you more effective health allowing you to be much more tanky.

Stage 4's passive decreases the cost of sprint by 50%, and after sprinting for 3 seconds you turn invisible. This is the ultimate PVE cheese and lets you set up some aggressive ambushes in PVP. The 50% reduced cost of sprint is very helpful on magicka classes who don't have large stamina pools.

The active abilities:

Evisercerate and its morphs are melee range (5 meters) spammables that deal incredible amounts of damage that scales up based on how hurt you are up to 33% damage. Arterial Burst and Blood for Blood are its morphs and both of them are actually good.
Arterial Burst is for vampires that wish to be healable by their allies and it scales up by 1.1% damage up to 3.3% bonus damage at rank 4. This means Arterial Burst has the highest base damage of any spammable in the game when you're sitting at max health. Also this ability is a guaranteed critical hit when you're below 50% health.
Blood for Blood is where things begin to get freaky as this ability costs health instead of magicka and has its damage scale up far past the 33% of Eviscerate and Arterial Burst. It starts off at 60% bonus damage based on missing health and each level adds on another 5% till its sitting at 75% bonus damage at rank 4. Since it costs health you can use it without putting pressure on your magicka bar, but it comes at the cost of no longer being able to be healed by other people for 5 seconds after using it.

Blood Frenzy is a health cost toggled ability that gives you 630 spell and weapon damage, while its morphs give you 660 spell and weapon damage when maxed out. This ability scales up in its health cost by 20% every second you leave it on, and while its active you cannot be healed by other people. Simmering Frenzy and Sated Fury are its morphs.
Simmering Frenzy on top of the ability scaling up by 20% in its health cost also scales up the 660 spell and weapon damage by 10% every second its on. This means if you have the self healing to keep this thing up it'll boost your damage values to insane numbers!
Sated Fury takes 34% of all the health its siphoned off you and stores it as a heal. This means if you have the self healing Sated fury becomes a burst heal, but be warned that if you turn Sated Fury off while stunned, unable to cast abilities like when sprinting, or otherwise incapacitated you will not receive the healing.

Vampiric Drain.... oh boy..... probably the single worst ability in the rework that's a shadow of its former self. They took the stun off it, reduced its damage by more than half, scaled up its healing, and then removed Accelerating Drain and replaced it with Drain Vigor. Don't expect to do more than 2,500 magic damage per tick unless you seriously boost your offensive stats to insane levels, and you cannot boost the healing the ability does as it'll always heal 23% of your missing health.
Exhilerating Drain does what it did before but restores 1 less ultimate a second than its old version, Invigorating Drain.
Drain Vigor replaces Accelerating Drain and instead of giving you minor expedition it restores 5% of your missing stamina. I've found very few uses for this morph on a magicka toon which the vampire skill line is built for. The 5% is also so minuscule even on a stam character a heavy attack is better if you need the stamina than this ability.
(Update on Vampiric Drain) The ability lost it's 3.3% damage scaling while leveling up, but increased the stamina regeneration on Drain Vigor to 10%, the ultimate generation on Exhilarating Drain to 5 a second (original value), and boosted the missing health heal to 25% over 23%.

Mesmerize is a cheap little stun that shoots out in a 10 meter cone in front of you and stuns all targets who's 90 degree cone in front of them lines up with yours. It keeps them stunned for 5 seconds which is actually incredibly long and this ability can be used on merchants to make them talk to you at stage 4 or if you have an incredibly high bounty.
Stupefy adds a 5 second 53% snare when the 5 second stun ends. 10 seconds of CC is incredibly strong on such a cheap ability.
Hypnosis costs a little less than Stupefy and the 10 meter cone gets reduced to a 7 meter 360 AoE around you. Your foes still have to be looking at you but now you can stun everything around you instead of where you're looking. The 3 meters less range could be a problem but the ease of use counter balances this.

Mistform is now a toggle and costs slightly less than before. Still comes with the 75% damage mitigation, can't be snared or stunned, and now it procs the stage 2 passive! Can't be healed while Mistform is active and your magicka recovery is disabled.
Elusive Mist is Mistform but cheaper and even better as it gives you Major Expedition while its toggled on.
Blood Mist creates a weak damage dealing aura around you, but you are healed for 100% of the damage that aura deals. Great for when you get cornered by a large group of enemies for instance.
(Update for Mistform) Mistform no longer has stamina and health recovery alongside magicka recovery, and next patch after this edit Mistform will only mitigate player based damage. Environmental and NPC damage will hit at full damage thus negating this ability's reward for it's cost in PvE and some PvP scenarios.

Blood Scion replaces Bat Swarm ((*Cries*)) and its a very expensive ultimate. It costs 314 ultimate at stage 1 and 254 ultimate at stage 4, but what it does is it instantly puts you at max health (Yes, this bypasses Battle Spirit), gives you 10k max health, 10k max stamina, 10k max magicka, makes it so you heal for 15% of all damage you do, and then to top it all off it lets you see enemies through walls. It does stun you going into and out of it, but while in that transition phase you cannot be harmed. Lasts for 20 seconds.
Swarming Scion reintroduces the bat swarm around you that deals an incredible amount of damage to those around you. Since you heal for 15% of all damage you do that means this bat swarm is also healing you! And yes, the bat swarm damage scales up thanks to the 10k magicka/stamina given to you by the form so the tooltip is a little wrong when you look at it in your mortal form ingame.
Perfect Scion is like Blood Scion but you enter stage 5 which has all the benefits of stage 4 with none of the drawbacks. So for 20 seconds (18 if you subtract the time it takes to transform) you take no additional flame damage, have all your health regeneration back, all your regular abilities cost their normal values, and all your vampire passives are active. Also this morph costs a little less ultimate to use.

Additional notes
If you have access to antiquities I'd definitely look into getting the Ring of the Pale Order as it gives you the necessary self healing to sustain vampire's toolkit. Its so good you can actually sustain Blood Frenzy and Blood for Blood at the same time if your damage is good enough. The new CP system on the PTS is coming with a perk that heals you for 7% of all direct damage you do which might help in not making the Pale Order ring such a requirement to make the vampire skill line enjoyable. We'll see if the CP system goes live with that perk we can use.
(Update) The new CP system went live with the perk, Reaving Blows. It does indeed help, especially after the nerf to the Pale Order Ring where it loses 4% of the 20% healing the ring gives you for the damage you do. This means with 5 people grouped with you the ring doesn't heal you at all.

Vevvev wrote: »

snip

Oh hey an old post of mine.... sorry past self, but Mistform is going to be come a joke with it only mitigating player damage. Environmental and NPC damage will hit at full strength making the ability a super expensive and inferior version of Race Against Time that nerfs you for using it. (No regeneration, no outside healing, can't sprint, and can't cast other abilities)

But hey they buffed Vampiric Drain!!! Not really, they nerfed the damage alongside buffing the rest of it. Oh and they also nerfed the Pale Order Ring so that it loses 4% of the 20% healing it gives you per person you're grouped with.

Oh, and the Mistform nerf went through and we found player sourced pets don't count as player damage so.... r.i.p vampire.