[Snake]

Ahem. Vampires keeping their vampirism hidden is not a 'head canon', it's literally their lore.

The child of Huggessoa are covert for a very clear reason that they don't want attention pulled over to them, which hints that they can VERY EASILY get that done. You can even see that during their Lunar Lunatism when they completely forsake hiding their true identity for power and go on a lunar rage.

Overall? It is exactly as said, IC shouldn't bleed out to their mechanical sense, lest we'll make it canon that Vampires can drink literal lava out of Firespitters or Forgeries. Though it always makes me wonder why Lore demands a Vampire to hide its Vampiric side for uh... 'reasons', yet Mechanics demand them to use Banquet or bust because that's how their kit works now and deal with it.

Do they hide their Vampirism because they're weak sauce nerds who can't team fight well, can't take a hit from a Holy weapon, can't take Light damage, can't drink blood from Cursed People even though they can BITE INTO A FIRESPITTER and not melt inside-out, can't even mechanically fake right their race, etc; Or because they're strong enough to cause a ruckus and ruin their only mean of blending with mortals easier?

This race was once one of the best Ancients to roleplay as, and fun to play as in combat situations given they always had this 'virtual power' you'd see from characters like Arcueid or Remilia, but post-rework all that freedom of creativity to have your Vampire be customized in any way you feel like was kind of stolen away for a predictable and hard to modify gimmick of "bite (and hit) enemy or else you are a Karatynn hooman with ugly base stats". Like a gun pointed at my head.

Not that it's bad, sure, directly drinking blood is a clear answer to their power surge, but I wish that they could access Lunar Lunatism at any time and with that, Sanguine Crest too as a third method to call their Vampiric side. It being not solely dependent on having to use Banquet or Life Drain. This vile power should be a choice, not a risk-reward (that doesn't reward you, instead, debuffs you down). Banquet, also as said from Polk before, has a LOT on it thanks to Traits and SAN, so you shouldn't also further bury the hatchet on making it mandatory for Vampires. It's not fun at all.

Look into the 'easy bandaid fixes' sect. Offer me your opinions, because I strongly believe that, alone, would be enough a compromise between not reverting vampire, not giving it anything new, but adjusting what it has to a point it can be usable in situations beyond you being forced to be a mage, since this will solely buff the side they should be hiding, while also increasing immersion on why they hide it.

I like the dynamic of 'power, but at a cost', and Vampires being a solely "Transformation"-based Race that has their normal state, and their Vampiric state during combat. Too bad Vampires ain't getting any of that "power" vs its "costs", chief.

[FaeLenx]

Vampires are supposed to be strong, not Lich or Dullahan strong given their respective RP opportunities become more limited, but should be considered a force to be reckoned with by the general adventuring populace anyways

Every race should be strong at something and have some mechanical nuance that makes it worth taking. Vampires don't need to be unique in being unique. You can argue to put them in line with other races that have their own gimmicks and abilities (shaitan grab, mechanation agile accel, doriad forest walking, etc) that make them good, but they don't need any reason to be better than other races, and that's the mentality that should be fought. People go from arguing game balance to trying to justify arguing game imbalance for the thing they like.

Ahem. Vampires keeping their vampirism hidden is not a 'head canon', it's literally their lore.

The child of Huggessoa are covert for a very clear reason that they don't want attention pulled over to them, which hints that they can VERY EASILY get that done. You can even see that during their Lunar Lunatism when they completely forsake hiding their true identity for power and go on a lunar rage.

Ahem. It's head canon in that you and I both know that it's not how it functions in the game on a day to day basis. You can enter the arena and start banqueting people in duels in the open and people will just generally accept that as what's happening. You might get a few people doing their 'shocked FI for shocking events' reaction, but it'll just about end there. You can argue that these people aren't following lore and that vampires shouldn't show themselves and people should hunt them down, react negatively, and generally act against them. They don't, though. Liches walk around openly. Dullahan are just those silly guys in armor. Vampires are just slightly sexier and more sadistic examples of whatever race they're branching off from.

If we go into the lore and start trying to find some story reason to steroid random races to be demonstrably stronger than other races, you're gonna get a lot of arguments for a lot of races that should be much stronger than they end up being mechanically and much stronger than any random human person.

[adamkad1]

Right now any vampires hiding it is mostly because there's a bunch of nerds shunning vampires oocly

[Snake]

So what, in the end? What do you want out of that argument? I can't understand the reason behind those rebuttals, friend.

Their crippling Healing reduction, Holy weakness and Buff-loss-on-Banquet should stay as is, and they get no compensation for it? It's as if you're not reading beyond what you wanna reap out of my lines as 'factually wrong' instead of building over my ideas. Rood.

Besides, we don't have more antagonistic vampires compared to Liches and other stuff because the race's horrible for party comps. A group of 4 Dullahans or 4 Liches are much more menacing than a group of 4 Vampires, solely due to the immense difference of sustain between those three races mentioned.

[FaeLenx]

So what, in the end? What do you want out of that argument? I can't understand the reason behind those rebuttals, friend.

Their crippling Healing reduction, Holy weakness and Buff-loss-on-Banquet should stay as is, and they get no compensation for it? It's as if you're not reading beyond what you wanna reap out of my lines as 'factually wrong' instead of building over my ideas. Rood.

Not at all what I said, but if you want to just try to casually strawman out something like that then that's fine. Also pretty rude.

They're currently a race with various unique mechanics and benefits with some large drawbacks, but those drawbacks are mitigatable or actual non-issues if you actually consider what options it opens up. Considering using spirits is still a large part of the meta despite the use of holy weapons, their holy weakness is just an invitation to double dip in that and take some spirits on top for no actual net racial negative. I don't fully believe that that weakness is actually something you can't already build around just by going all in on it with a build meant to punish someone for wasting 3 momentum in the middle of a fight to switch weapons.

How do they get around their masquerade? What mechanical things do they need to do that? They could just not fight in front of people. Doing that would be so unfathomably stupid for someone who wants to keep themselves and their powers hidden. Or they could just start accusing random other people of being vampires if it's actually something that loses people all of their friends and a careless rumor can do that to someone. Once everyone's accused of being a vampire, the accusations mean nothing. Except like I said before, that's not the actual game we're playing and nobody actually cares unless that character is going around biting people illegally outside of duels.

They could use some buffs. Their light weakness needs to be the same as other races if it's not already currently. Their holy weakness needs to be the same as 40% of the playerbase that willingly takes a holy weapon weakness to get impressive bonuses to their DPS for PvE and PvP both (which I think they already are. Do they get double penalized for taking spirits now or something?). Banquet can be made to autohit charmed/immobilized people or something. Cursed blood can give -5% max HP or something. Sanguine Crest sucks but so do most racials people get that aren't their main focus gimmick and SC just seems to be a placeholder buff to trigger other abilities that they tacked a stat bonus onto to make it just a bit more special. Their healing negative can stay because even these minor changes make them already pretty powerful considering the amount of unique possibilities it opens up. They don't need anything huge, and they don't need people waxing poetic about how they need to be the sexier sequel to Dullahans.

[Autumn]

So what, in the end? What do you want out of that argument? I can't understand the reason behind those rebuttals, friend.

Their crippling Healing reduction, Holy weakness and Buff-loss-on-Banquet should stay as is, and they get no compensation for it? It's as if you're not reading beyond what you wanna reap out of my lines as 'factually wrong' instead of building over my ideas. Rood.

Not at all what I said, but if you want to just try to casually strawman out something like that then that's fine. Also pretty rude.

They're currently a race with various unique mechanics and benefits with some large drawbacks, but those drawbacks are mitigatable or actual non-issues if you actually consider what options it opens up. Considering using spirits is still a large part of the meta despite the use of holy weapons, their holy weakness is just an invitation to double dip in that and take some spirits on top for no actual net racial negative. I don't fully believe that that weakness is actually something you can't already build around just by going all in on it with a build meant to punish someone for wasting 3 momentum in the middle of a fight to switch weapons.

How do they get around their masquerade? What mechanical things do they need to do that? They could just not fight in front of people. Doing that would be so unfathomably stupid for someone who wants to keep themselves and their powers hidden. Or they could just start accusing random other people of being vampires if it's actually something that loses people all of their friends and a careless rumor can do that to someone. Once everyone's accused of being a vampire, the accusations mean nothing. Except like I said before, that's not the actual game we're playing and nobody actually cares unless that character is going around biting people illegally outside of duels.

They could use some buffs. Their light weakness needs to be the same as other races if it's not already currently. Their holy weakness needs to be the same as 40% of the playerbase that willingly takes a holy weapon weakness to get impressive bonuses to their DPS for PvE and PvP both (which I think they already are. Do they get double penalized for taking spirits now or something?). Banquet can be made to autohit charmed/immobilized people or something. Cursed blood can give -5% max HP or something. Sanguine Crest sucks but so do most racials people get that aren't their main focus gimmick and SC just seems to be a placeholder buff to trigger other abilities that they tacked a stat bonus onto to make it just a bit more special. Their healing negative can stay because even these minor changes make them already pretty powerful considering the amount of unique possibilities it opens up. They don't need anything huge, and they don't need people waxing poetic about how they need to be the sexier sequel to Dullahans.

When people remark that Vampires should be strong it should be for the a couple of reasons:

1) The inherent risk of playing Vampire and using its racials effectively without being subjugated to the weaknesses it presents
2) The value of its base stats vs its racials.

For example, when I say that I think that Vampires should be strong, I also say it with the same string of truth that I would say that I think that a Shaitan, Lupine or Zeran should be strong, perhaps in a different sense of the word given they're a bit cunning but still.

No one is saying they should be the next Dullahan, or at least, I can assure you I am not saying that as I pointed out in my previous post. What people are saying is that while Vampire fulfills its fantasy, it is currently impractical for its racials, and its base stats do it no better, but because Vampires need to cover a broad range of archetypes given they can be literally any race they want to, its best to just stick them on imperialist-esque stats and beef up their racials in kind. Changing them to be stronger isn't necessary, but updating their systems to be better suited for player understanding or want of retention is generally a smart idea.

Sanguine Crest should be the primary focus of attention, as most of the issues stemming from Vampire are on how difficult it can be to obtain Sanguine Crest, one example of a buff I could present is that Essence no longer can be pooled before a fight, but now you gain a percentage of the damage you deal and take as Essence stored, up to a cap based on your SAN. Sanguine Crest would activate at a certain threshold of Essence and incur the status and all the negative qualities it would also possess, then of course make that a toggleable passive just so vampires can still maintain the on/off switch for Holy that they have at the current moment (Though once you obtain Sanguine Crest you can't get rid of it easily, this should remain.)

One last thing to note, while you are correct in that we should not be imbalancing races drastically on purpose, I also believe that for a successful narrative to be delivered, there should be a power scale of sorts so that there is a bit of stake, Dullahans and Liches present this pretty well, while not being unbeatable for it.

[FaeLenx]

Pretty well put actually and thank you for clarifying some of your points here. I still hold contention with a lot of the weird sentiments other people have put through on this thread that in some way seem to be trying to influence the mechanical discussion, such as the bizarre insinuation that vampires get hunted down or are especially metagamed upon when literally everyone's build is subject to metagame and the only instances of vampires being hunted down to any actual consequence to the vampire would have to be a consensual storyline that the vampire endorses to make their character actually more engaging.

So to you, that's actually a really good point and there have been some good suggestions that you've put forward that would make vampires just a bit more amusing and fun that don't just involve axing their only compelling weaknesses that they have for all of their strengths.

I do disagree that we need some sort of power-scaling by race by-design, though. Let players make their own characters with their own builds. Nobody should want to make a character that's playing with a stacked deck in a game that can, even infrequently, become competitive.

To everyone else.

All of the talk of OOC bullying? Both hilariously bad and hilariously irrelevant and seemed directed at removing or negating vampire weaknesses because they're 'so easy to OOCly metagame' or some such tripe. It doesn't help balance discussion. Contact a GM if you're worried someone is doing something against the rules, and if they're not doing something against the rules but you don't want to deal with them, you can just walk away freely from them in almost every single given RP circumstance with no penalty to yourself.

I'll repeat this in case the implication was missed: If people are going after you OOC, it's not because you're a vampire. People just get salty and weird on this game all the time. You can just walk away from these people too, bar them from your property with the in game mechanic because they only prove that they're not there to actually RP as a storytelling companionship, or whatever else have you. As far as game balance goes, it's an entire non-issue.