At the moment, I would rather leave a skill slot blank for ANY character rather than take vampirism. The lack of food is just too much of a debuff, considering that the amount of regeneration lifesteal (2+ 40% of HP REGEN? WHAT?) provides is nowhere near enough to compensate for such a vital part of the game. Not to mention, lifesteal can be encrusted on weapons. The second level provides around 4 or so hp per corpse, which is tiny compared to the amount of health food gives you. The two (One unless you put 3 points in the tree) necro damage resist is almost useless, and certainly does not compensate for inability to eat. Sparkly doesn't always stun, psychic vampire is useless, as you have to be in melee, and only useful if you're a caster (Might work with the warlock skill tree, but I'd need to try that, and as lifesteal scales with HP REGEN if you want it to be decent you need to get those, not caster skill trees.) and the last skill is only good for getting an achievement. This is an entire skill tree in which, you come out worse for getting, as every other skill tree actually has useful things. The only way I can see this tree being viable is if you do something drastic, like removing the "Cannot eat food or regenerate health over time" debuff, or massively increasing the scaling of lifesteal (Possibly making it scale with base damage, or damage in general? It scales 2 + 100%/60%/40% of hp regen from easy to hard, I think, at the moment, which is useless) and the initial effectiveness of the healing effect, as even on the easier difficulties it is sheer luck if you manage to reach level 2. TL;DR Read it, lazy, it's only approximately 300 words. EDIT: Actually, if anyone has any viable (For Going Rogue Difficulty) Builds that involve vampirism, and thinks I'm wrong about it being useless, tell me and I'll try them out. EDIT2: Thanks, I'll try out some of these. Still silly that it should require very specific builds, IMHO.
Vampirism is already a pretty good tree for tank builds if you ignore the last few skills. Take it along with both Master of Arms and Shield Bearer (for the passive AR and high regen buffs), and you'll be able to cruise through entire zoos without any other healing source. The HP gain from eating corpses also scales with regen, so aside from keeping you topped up between battles it can also be a good way to spend a free turn here or there in battle while waiting for the next dangerous mob to approach. All this without having to worry about inventory management, since corpses are basically everywhere!
Actually, Vampirism is a viable skill tree right now. It is just that you have to know how to use it in order to be able to use it well. Sure, it's not a skill tree of the highest tier, but it certainly is usable and it can be really potent if you build around it. For example, make a dagger-wielding clockwork vampire, with other skill trees being of whatever sort for as long as they are warrior/rogue. Sounds weird? Maybe, but the ability to attack twice or thrice during your turn means that you will be healing at accelerated pace. Still not enough? Add Fungal Arts, it gives you healing mushrooms which don't count as food. Encrusting for life steal? Sure, do that too, it's not like the effects don't stack so if you have both the innate life steal and the one from encrust it will increase your chances for surviving. Now the only question is, had you tried it with Essence's rebalance or without it? Because his rebalance is how it will look, so playing without it might give you the impression that it's bad. But with it, it's actually a decent skill tree, just one that requires knowing what you want to do with it.
I don't think it's underpowered, BUT i really dislike how it forces the player to specialize and focus on specific builds (must have master of arms or a similar tanky, and skill). Almost all of the other skill trees in the game are not super focused like Vampirism-- they always have some other abilities that give utility or other bonuses. Vampirism is 90% skills that give you life drain, plus one capstone that is kind of ehhh. Dredmor skills in general do not bottleneck the player; they are flexible enough to give you multiple uses and methods of play. Vampirism is not one of those; you're either all-in and it is great, or it sits there and is more of a hindrance than help.
This is exactly right - some skills (like Werediggle) don't work very well unless you specialize your build to play to their strengths. Vampirism is frustrating in that you can't just ignore it - so you're either playing a build focused on Vampirism, or you don't take it. That said, I find that pets really help my vampires - because it creates situations where I can melee enemies without letting them hit me back. Daggers & Communism do the same thing in a melee-centric way.
There's no guarantee that GLG will use my rebalance, Kazeto, don't get your hopes up. They'll probably fix it, but I don't think they've realized yet that "regen life effect 1" gives you 2 HP per go, not 1. They'll probably, if they fix it, fix it so that it triggers "Regen Life Effect 0", which is what they wanted in the first place. That said, Vampirism is a beast of a skill, and if you want a simple Vampire-friendly build, do this: Vampirism Master of Arms Shield Bearer Axes Dual Wield Communism Berserker Rage The idea is this: Master of Arms and Shield Bearer give you procs and abilities that add to , which improves your vampiric lifegain, as well as adding to your defenses, meaning you need less lifegain. Dual Axes gives you a decent bonus to Crit, which works with General Winter to provide a nasty AoE in addition to Axenado and Cogito Ergo Splat, so wading into the fray isn't an issue. Berserker Rage gives you some extra to help you survive General Winter as well as a surprising amount of to go with the couple of points you get from Master of Arms. Finally, an exploit: Bersker Rage's final spell gives +100 Crit, which puts General Winter on overdrive as long as you don't attack anything in melee -- which doesn't count non-adjacent enemies hit by Axenado and Cogito Ergo Splat (but will still cause crits on them). It's a straight up power build, and it works like a charm. Just be prepared to kill Dredmor at range with Clockwork Sawblades and/or Clockwork Drill Bombs.
Still, I dare say the chance is pretty high, and even if they don't then they are going to do something similar. Why would they fix something that didn't want to work specifically in your rebalance if they didn't plan on doing that, after all?
I hear vampirism is 'alright now. After the revamp, i looked at the scaling to and immediately thought 'still not worth it' Here is the thing with vamprisim: It is TOO niche. It works with too few builds to be 'fun'. It should have more synergy with other builds. I would like something small to go with casting potentially or something to work better with ranged attacks. I would possibly like to see it Or my preference is to allow the player to eat meat only items. Or possibly just ground meat.
Psychic Vampire works with casting. Uhhh...Batty Form goes with ranged attacks insofar as you can use it to get away from enemies over water and then throw back at them...? Point being, I'm not sure I agree.
But spells don't proc, right? So if you are going a melee build unless it is egyptian magic heavy, I don't know many casters that want to be melee for the benefit. Plus the scaling is pretty bad. And batty isn't justifiably that great in range. There aren't that many water circumstances, and since it is so deep in the tree i don't consider it great compared to most teleports since it takes moves to get to where you want to go.
Well, sure, but you're talking about a vampire here. You want to be in melee for the healing -- if you're playing a straight caster, you don't want to be a vampire in the first place. Melee-oriented casters will love Psychic Vampire. Batty...you're right.
Communism 2 --> Master of Arms 3 --> Vampirism 2 --> Shield Bearer 2 --> Communism 3 --> Axes 6 --> Berserker Rage 5 --> go from there.
I've had success as a Vegan Vampire. Vampire is such a powerful tree if supported, that giving up animals still doesn't impact health recovery and has actually been one of the easiest run I had on GRPD. Maybe not the easiest vampire build, but its just an ironic build. That build was Killer Vegan Vampirism Shield Bearer Master of Arm Unarmed Combat Communist Tourist Every single skill but Unarmed has some amount of health regen to boost Vampirism, though Communist/Tourist could probably be swapped out for Smithing to get Emerald Rings for health regen. Worked on putting one level to Tourist for trap detection/disarming. Then one level in Communist to get health regen/heal. After that one level in Master of Arm for a health regen/armor buff. Next, I put in 2 level into Killer Vegan to take advantage of the Rutabagas on the second floor, though a safer course would probably be put one level into Vampirism to get Drinker of the Dead. From there, it was just go straight up Killer Vegan for the stat/regen boost, then Master of Arm, with occasional levels into Unarm for the dodge reduction. Really relaxing build as there was no need to think about gathering smithing item, managing food and drink. Just playing through as a tourist, knowing that everyone you meet is just dinner on legs. Only real trouble was trying to keep from being swarmed by peaceful animals.
Which rebalance, dear? Anyway, vampires can quite well synergy with just your equipment, instead of just skill trees. It's we are talking about, not obscure . Also, batty form gives you a way of escape: 4 summons with dodge, and it gives you as well. Anyway, any thoughts of how to improve it?
personally, i always feel very hesitant to use batty form because it lasts for only a few turns. im always worried about accidentally drowning. adding even just two or three more turns to it would make a huge difference.
Vampirism is fine once you get further down in the dungeon and have leveled up a few times. The problem is that you probably won't get that far because you rely heavily on food on the first dungeon level. It should come with some starting equipment or something to compensate.
