Regarding Wootah's opinon of Transylvation. I have it currently changed to produce more bat companions, and to produce Blink Batty companions because I thought normal Batties wouldn't be enough. Am I wrong? Is that overkill?
For what I can say, normal batties aren't enough if you consider them more than blood bags. I've tried a mid-level vampire back in the days and I've hit the capstone. It was fun and stuff (I didn't realize the chance getting those were 20%, I was very lucky then) but when it comed to punch enemies they just managed to distract them while I hit my hostiles. With a freaking diggle ring of digglish torment. Found in a fountain. It was so cool to wreak enemies from batty form. Then Steam managed to delete my save. It was the first and last time it did it. My heart is still open break. It was one of the coolest characters ever. Anyway blinky batties could work, I need to test them anyway. After all, as pets, they are just boosted batties, since pets cannot into spelldb.
Blink Battys(Batties?) are *probably* fine. They aren't there just to drain, but to give the monsters around you targets that can evade. Don't late game monsters have ? Guess i ought to look it up... brb. After reviewing floors 10-15, lowest is 6, highest was 16.. which means that a blink batty will still have at least 17% chance to dodge (a muscle diggle) which is pretty awesome. Too good? Possibly for a caster, but that is kind of hard to say since we haven't any reports of a heavy caster using vampirism that deep. Edit: then again, if they all land a melee hit and then blink away, they wont serve as much of a distraction if you are using them to make their escape. It would definitely be interesting to play with.
It could be sweet... but pets cannot use any spell ingame. We asked for this ages ago and still no change was made, so we have to stick with more stats only. Anyway both could be interesting abilities. Spoiler: Beat me up And enemy blinky batties should have the vampirism on-hit too. Also. Uhm. What about adding more drain when in batty form? Maybe in the form of , since canine teeth. :edit: !!!! What about a cross-shaped templated persistant buff which enable drain on hit, and blink on being hit? It will not affect the caster, but will make every summoned bat a bloodsucker teleporting pest. This should work. And this workaround could fix half the pets (not the charmed ones, but the summons).
It's related to necrotic energies, and the character is an undead. I see it as a magic skill, but not so strictly. Anyway, what about giving lvl0 vampirism 1 to start with a real "weapon"?
If I am understanding your latest post Vitellozzo, Vampirism does not even start with the ability to restore itself except other skills and potions? How are you expected to even survive? That seems as broken as my finances. *Edit* I put Nacho in there for some reason. Sorry for the confusion.
I don't think you understood my latest post Omni. Or else I didn't understand it. Because one of us is missing something here.
Actually, it does. The healing from drain is pretty token until you get some sort of bonus to health regeneration (take "Tourist"?), but it can still keep you alive. That is, in Essence's version. But isn't playing any other version a blasphemy now or something?
It sure is. But I have not played any version in months. I guess I am hoping Essence' work gets incorporated into the base game next major version. (And I am too busy working on ToME to try DoD at the moment. I will be back. But not just yet.)
It's not that vampires cannot work without any (they drain 1 from demons and others, and 2 from animals), but with it there is a little minor boost that could help them survive a little better in their entire life.
With a starting , vampirism would easily dominate floor 1 all by itself. Not that it is a problem, if you don't have quite a bit of it late game it wont matter. My vampirism build has been doing quite well with shield bearer and arms, but I would still like to see ti work better with rogue and caster builds.
I never tried making a vampire tourist, I don't know if they dominate on the first level. I don't recall behing this force of nature with lvl1 armor buff, anyway. And for the "more builds viable", I'm ok with this, but I really think that with your idea of a slightly different scaling system the vampire could work with many other skills, and not the only and classic armor mastery+shield user build. Because yeah, it's boring.
With the Wootah suggestion: There is one health scaling melee centered, two scaling effects (corpses and sparkly glitters), and a mana regain for scaling. Those are in fact something everyone can use, mages a little less but still could work. It should be better than how it's now, for many other build sets. And after all pure mages can use other more oriented skills for better effects, while having more than 0 advantage to select another wizard skill like vampirism. I could see your point about making it a wizard or a rogue skill, but the vampire already helps in some way magical characters, gishes at his best: health AND mana regain. It's like warlockery, a wizard not so strictly spell oriented.
This would make AoE builds overpowered (more than they already are) as heck, e.g.: Astrology, Master-of-Arms, Vegan Killer, Fleshsmithing, Vampirism, Blood Mage and Communism. Also, the OP said if there was a legit build involving Vampirism for GRPD that worked well... the one I just said is pretty f-ing godlike once you get it going, which isn't difficult, considering you're gonna be having Fleshsmithing, and you can recover a lot of health for Vegan Killer/Fleshsmithing/Master-of-Arms tree, Corpse Drinker (atleast when I was using it, GRPD) was healing me for 20 HP, about the other skills, I agree they should get a buff, specially Sparkly and Transylvation (perhaps make it a different skill?). And I like Wootah's suggestion about Psychic Vampire, it would make it way more reliable.
