Technically decay is a thing that happens when things try to eat you, and is therefore happening to all of us all of the time, and the only reason our flesh isn't rotting off our bones is because we have things like bone marrow cells and immune systems to counter this. Besides, vampire lore is all over the goddamn place on their abilities anyway, so for every thing you say vampires can do someone else can say, "no actually they're like this" and you'd both be correct. There's a reason both Vlad the Impaler and Shining Armor Edward Cullen count as vampires. Let's just give vampires things that will make playing them fun and not worry too much about the lore.
I did just say "fun > lore", didn't I? Weaknesses in this game are like, 1 point per skill level tops anyway, it's not going to be that much of an issue if it does happen.
I have to agree with banjo2E on this. If you die because of -1 , you were probably going to die there and then anyway. I can count on one hand the number of times I have been reduced to less than five HP on a leveled character and not died. And I have invested no less than ~500 hours in the game.
Okay, okay. I got it. However, I still don't like the idea of - for vampires at all. Fire and Righteousness are fine.
I was having trouble thinking of a third weakness and I figured that could associate with the shriveling up vampires suffer from in a lot of settings from blood starvation.
Sorry, noob question. Is vampirism this bad right now ? I have a vamp/dodge/unarmed/perception/alchemy/spellsword/bloodmagic at dungeon level 7 on RR, and he is doing quite fine. There were a few scary moments in the early game, but now that is high, Vampirism seems quite potent, giving back any I may lose (7 per hit/corpse). And I only went for the rogue and unarmed skills right now, I'm still low on wizard skils and so i hope Vamp will be enough for the late game with magic maxed. I've only beaten Dredmor twice, both time on DM, so I'm no expert. Is this build doomed ??? Anyway, dying is the best part of the game
I think Vampirism is difficult. Alchemy and Perception help a lot. But it is still one of the weaker skills at current in my opinion. If you can win with a Vampire, then you have managed something few have managed. But it is certainly not impossible.
Vampirism significantly reduces your ability to heal, in exchange for a couple of poor healing abilities. It makes the game more challenging, since there is really no benefit - you just heal "differently" in a way that is less good overall than basic healing. We're debating a few fixes - many people want the healing to be made better - so that vampires heal "differently" but BETTER than normal healing allows. I'd prefer the alternative - leave the vamp healing poor, but add other benefits to make it an interesting choice.
It's not that your build is doomed, Alchemy will seriously shore up your defenses for the fight with Dredmor, it's just going to be harder for you than it would be otherwise.
Ok thanks guys for the answer, and sorry for interrupting. I didn't realize that the healing abilities of a vamp were so weak, I guess I'll find out soon as I reach the lower floors
So, I've just beaten Lord Dredmor for the first time on GRPD (and for the 3d time overall) with the build mentioned above ! I can see that now. Certainly Vamp doesn't give much apart from healing, and other skill lines give both better healing AND useful stuff besides healing. On the other hand, I'm not sure why many people in this thread say that the problem with Vamp is that it doesn't scale well during the late game. (I'm not saying they're wrong, they probably know much more about the game than I do). During my playthrough, the early levels were very scary, while the late game was comparatively a breeze. The worst part were probably Levels 5 (argh! undrainable, hard-hitting Pumpkins!) and 6 (where more than half of the monsters are undrainable). Then somewhere at this point I finished maxing skills with +, and survivability became much better. By Levels 10-15, I had both 90+ and 60-80 , and I hardly had to drink any health potions until facing Lord Dredmor. A thing to take into consideration is that on the endgame floors, the most dangerous (in my opinion) melee enemies are almost all animals : arch, muscle and thirsty diggles, deep ravens, fishes. This stands in contrast to earlier floors (argh! Pumpkins!) High can give back as much as 20+ each time you hit an animal, so as long as they hit you less often than you hit them, you're fine (and also, obviously, fight a single foe at a time). Also, with each of your hits comes not only draining, but also other procs: stuns, knockbacks, and so on, which may make vamp healing comparatively better than other forms of healing. Anyway, it was really nice playing this character, though the build could certainly be improved. I also enjoyed reading the discussion above, and I hope that we'll soon be able to play more fun and fearsome Vamp characters! In particular, I strongly support the suggestion of giving earlier access to the bat transform skill, and make it summon batties. It would really help at the beginning of the game against undrainable opponents.
I still think they're a bit difficult to play. Play Vampirism with the following skills. Dual-wield, Archaeology, Smithing, Maces, Perception and Burglary. Also, why aren't Pumpkinns drainable? That doesn't really make sense. Other than zombys, deths, robos, and mummies/ghosts, nothing should be undrainable. Gaslamp should fix that. Regarding Vampirism, you basically went through on easy mode. A pure melee build needs a buff to make vampirism useful for them.
Pumpkinn are vegetable, and currently all vegetables are undrainable I certainly went for an easy way to win I spent a good amount of time reading the forums and dredmorpedia before investing time into a successful GRPD character. Mr_Strange's report on the forums that dodging was a very viable option played a big role in the making of the build. Thanks Mr_Strange ! Looking forward to your new updated guides That said, I WAS pure melee, insofar as I had no range skills, and I killed almost every at melee range. The book-reading gish rules (books are awesome) ! But true, 4 out of 7 skill lines were wizard. I thought, as long as vamp draining scales with , and I was going for vamp-gish, this is the way to go. This went well, but I realize now that for instance Fleshsmithing instead of Vamp would have been much better.
Psionics seems pretty flavored for a melee or gish, and magic training is mechanically focused on spellcasters casting casts better. Emomancy is a little of everything, but the magic trees do tend to follow a theme as opposed to mechanics - though with a common denominator of a summon/single target => utility/healing => buffs => AoE damage with single target nukes woven throughout. Re: Montcroix - as a dodge centric build, you're gonna get a lot out of vampirism. Constant healing of low amounts will shore you up when you're only getting hit once in a blue moon, and health potions are gonna be great for burst damage.
I strongly disagree with calling Psionics a Gish skill, its just most people take it for that. It's a generic utility tree that will shine on any mage, see my thoughts on it in the skill guide. I actually like it most for Spellthieves, Rogue/Wizard builds. Besides, gish isn't a mechanic, its a play style. Note that the foremost Gish in the forums, Fax, runs huge stacks of buffs and never seems to touch psionics at all. As for Emomancy, if you see a theme, more power too you. I can't say I do. By the same token, if you want to try and push for skills with heavy mechanical theme, that's fine. But I don't see that everyone needs to make suggestions based on your preferred skill criteria. A lot of people play this game, and they all want different things. Finding ways to give everyone what they want is game design, not pushing for your own design preferences. =/
Well, look at psionics as a whole: There's 2 skills with no magic power scaling (healing and friend), both of which work well as a non dedicated mage - healing out of combat and a way to reduce the number of things hitting you. Nerve Staple is non-spammable, has a low ratio for a single target spell (0.45) but paralyzes - again, stronger for a melee through its utility. Pyrokinesis and Shove are the only two which you could call 'mage' spells, and shove is great for everyone, while pyrokinesis is 3+0.75 + 6/turn, while Gog's is (8+0.45) per turn. Pyro is a weird spell, and I tend not to use it, tbh.
A couple of things.... 1) With 90 and 60 this game is trivially easy with many skill lines. In fact, if any thing vampirism is one of the few ways to make the game challenging with those stats. Vamprirism is a skill line with healing skills just like fleshcrafting and psionics but with the added penalty of not healing naturally and not being able to eat food. For the skill to be balanced not only does the self healing need to be improved (which I would do by buffing eat corpse) but additionally the rest of the line needs to be improved to add something comparable to what the other two wizard lines I listed add to a character. In fact, vamprisim should add just a tiny bit more to combat the penalties. And let's be clear here, psionics and fleshcrafting are great skill lines. Vampirism needs major buffs. 2) Psionics is a gish line. Shove, Crystal Healing, Friend, Narco, and Nerve Staple don't need any spell power to be useful. And I'd argue that utility is better used by a melee.
They all need Haywire to be useful, with the exception of the healing. Really, you're welcome to look at any skill however you want. That doesn't mean everyone else has to be of the same opinion to play (or make suggestions for) the game "correctly". I don't intend to argue that Psionics is or isn't a gish line, I intend to argue that skills can be looked at from the flavor perspective as well as the mechanical perspective, and mindlessly pushing one at the expense of the other is dumb, and does not match with the overall vein of Dredmor deisgn. If you wish to continue that discussion, though, I'd recommend doing it elsewhere. This is a Vampirism is made of fail thread.
