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+--- Thread: Vampires (/showthread.php?tid=7370)
Vampires - Perdition - 11-09-2020
It dawned on me recently that in exchange for sanguine crest, which is 2 str, 2 wil, 2 ski, 2 cel, and 2 def and the ability to use lunar lunatism (which honestly isn't that good, SAN is less worth on vampires now), and 25% dark res, you receive...
50% holy weakness, 25% light weakness, and 75% healing effectiveness outside of silvermists. This seems like a very uneven trade to me.
I consider the Vampire rework to be a thematic success. It honestly was great in terms of making vampires feel more flavorful, but honestly the race feels like it got weaker. Like, yeah you don't get dicked by holy or light damage in your regular state and you get full healing, but so does every other race (barring Dullahans) and they get all their normal racial benefits. As it stands, you're just a worse human in your normal state, which would be fine if "activating" your vampire powers put you in a genuinely powerful state.
In addition to that, Vampire feels like it's being tugged in different directions of what it wants to do, which leads to you not being able to feel the full experience of the race. For example, Lunar Lunatism effects scale off of SAN, and bite effects scale off of SAN. However, Banquet is very much a basic attack focused ability. Banquet is also the sole way to maintain essence mid combat. If you're reliant on life drain to activate sanguine crest you have no way to rebuild your essence. At all. Unless you use banquet, but that'll likely do 5 damage and it's just highly inefficient.
It feels like you choose to do the basic attack thing, but then have to forgo any semblance of a useful Lunar Lunatism or any of the bite effects. This isn't necessarily a bad thing at its core. Racial abilities usually if not always scale off SAN, so I don't think the scaling should be changed. But because the SAN scaling favors a more magic oriented playstyle, or at the very least something likely not going to be good at basic attacking, allowing Life Drain to build essence would go a long way to improve the vampire experience. This way you have two defined, but equally viable playstyles for the race that feel more complete.
Moving on from all that, we have Sanguine Crest... as I mentioned before, the benefits don't come anywhere close to the negatives. Holy really isn't uncommon. Many people have the exact same weapon but holy enchanted on their item bar. Light damage also isn't that uncommon--certainly much less so compared to dark damage. On top of that, now your healing is reduced in effectiveness, making you more reliant on silvermists for sustain. However, there's no way you're sustaining through any halfway decent holy or light damage even with silvermists.
One possible change could be that after activating the Crest, any subsequent procs of it raise the stat gain by another 2 effectively making the Vampire a slowly escalating threat that still holds a glaring weakness that can be exploited before it can get truly out of control. Either that, or the stat boosts can be changed to things like raw hit, SWA, crit evade, etc. Not all of these at once maybe, but something in the line of those. It's unlikely your build will use all of str, ski, will, cel and def. And of those stats, it's likely you're stacking whatever is relevant to you. Thus with diminishing returns, your Crest quickly becomes an inconsequential buff.
Perhaps traits could be given for your Crest to determine what raw buffs you get if the stacking thing isn't ideal. Like, with enough STR you can choose to have your crest raise your SWA or something. With high Will your crest can give you spell power on all of your spells. Skill can provide Hit, and so on and so forth. These are just rough ideas but I think they'd go a long way to make exchanging a huge, relatively easily exploitable weakness worth it.
RE: Vampires - GameMaster85 - 11-12-2020
I really do agree that vampires need to have a bit of tweaking regarding Sanguine Crest and Lunar Lunatism. When someone pulls out ye olde holy weapon to smack a vampire, it should definitely be a vampire that had to go into Lunar Lunatism mode, and the negatives of being hit with 50% more damage from almost all sources should be outweighed by the power Lunar Lunatism gives. Besides, it's very classical that vampires are strong until they have to face their racial weaknesses.
I really love the rework because it gives vampires a chance to not only be a bit more stealthy in their combat, but also only be affected by their harsh negatives when they go into, effectively, a vampire form. But yeah, LL and Sanguine Crest needs that tweak to make it feel like it's actually "good" to hit a vampire with it active. They're "strong" now, so we gotta use their new weakness to compensate!
Ideas I have off the top of my head is similar. Have Sanguine Crest start with +1 in each stat, raising every turn that passes and capping at +2. Lunar Lunatism then raises the cap to +4, and once your stats reaches the full cap, the status effects Lunar Lunatism would inflict become unresistable by specific status effects (Looking at you, Recklessness). Scale the Essence Cost of LL per round with Sanguine Crest's current stage * 5. (+4 in each stat = 20 Essence per round). Have the stat cap also be dependent on every 10 San the vampire has (20 San = +2 Max, 40 San = +4 Cap), and maybe if it allows, have the weaknesses scale with the current stat level as well.
Making Life Drain also give Essence is a good change. It allows non-basic-attackers to actually have a good way to generate Essence, and is only really strong on full-WIL builds. Banquet has the potential to do damage with crits for manual hit boys. Give the love for all builds.
RE: Vampires - Snake - 11-12-2020
I'd rather Lunar Lunatism made them more impactful, since it's such a limited resource that toasts your only ability to reliably heal. For example, making the Vampire in question gain the following while LL is active:
- HP Regeneration and FP Regeneration equal to SAN, to compensate for the Essence loss.
- 5% + SAN/4 resistance to all damage types, but double any Light weakness.
- Remove the Charm-for-looking-at. That's not necessary nor effective. Make it instead: 'While in Lunar Lunatism, the LV of any Charm inflicted is increased by SAN/4, and have its duration increased by 1'.
Beyond that, I'm okay with keeping Sanguine Crest boring, since all the fun of Vampire will be curled into those 3 rounds of awesomeness.