[Cat15]

Vampires are difficult to compare to other races due to being the only one that has strengths offset by weaknesses to the degree it does. It has the greatest racial strengths, but at the same time it also has, by far, the greatest weaknesses. There are other races which, in certain builds, tend to be much better than effective vampire builds usually are, some of them with little-to-no weaknesses. Vampires are definitely one of the stronger races, but there are many I would consider overall on par with them.

The healing reduction really shouldn't be downplayed. Not when tankiness is all but mandatory in PvP, and damage is often taken slowly enough that healing is extremely strong. Not nearly so bad as pre-healing nerf, of course. However, it still locks vampires out of many extremely strong builds and item. They're the only race that doesn't have access to a 0 fp, 5 round cooldown 75% heal at the cost of 3m and one battle item slot, on every class combination. For context, depending on a vampire's hp and SAN, a PR-High Potion can be roughly as strong as Silvermists after the 75% reduction, without the costs. Taking an extra 50% damage from all basic attacks from a highly-common enchant is also often a highly crippling weakness.

As for their strengths, Lunar Lunatism requires inflict checks, the fear and hesitation levels can be roughly cut in half by talents, and the charm is removed by physical damage and can often by avoided by facing away from them at the end of the turn. Depending on one's build and one's opponent, it can range from highly overpowered to completely worthless. For better or for worse, like many other aspects of PvP, it's a matter of rock-paper-scissors. For the 'immunity to death', this applies to every PC regardless of race. The server rules prevent others from forcing you to kill your character unless you allow it, with the exception of GM-approved executions. From what I've seen, there's actually often more pressure on vampire players to allow their characters to be killed due to every single PC being an expert on how to kill vampires. At the end of the day, whether one turns to mist and reforms or shonens themselves through impossible to survive situations, they still end up equally not killed off. It's not something that should be taken into account for mechanical balance.

Now onto the actual point of the thread. I agree entirely that the darkness resist is far too much. No race should have that much innate resistance to a single element. That just results in skills and weapons using said element being far less useful and causing balance issues elsewhere. Not to mention, darkness resist does seem to be one of the most common resistances, and several classes are stuck with many skills that do dark damage (Hexer, Ghost, Void Assassin). I think that 1 dark resist/light weakness per 6 essence is a highly reasonable amount to change it to. However, I'm not so certain the race as a whole needs to be outright nerfed so much as 'tweaked'. Perhaps some poison resistance would be a good trade off for the darkness resistance (since it was confirmed poisons are ICly less effective against vampires)?