I loved playing a similar build - I ran it at first as a test to see if you could use the tourist "eat anything" skill as a vampire (you can!) I also threw in Perception, for junk to eat...
So after reading this thread, i decided to go balls to the wall and try and do a full on caster build with vampirism in the mix. GRPD - +15 Levels (no NTTG). OH CRAP, IT IS HARD. I decided to pick a build and MAKE it work. No changing after I died, ie NO subbing out skills. It is Vampirism Necroeconomics Shield Bearer Emomancy Leywalker Egyptian Magic Tinkering (Dealing with Traps, Arrows) I have dozens of deaths already. Diggles are HUGE pain in the ass. Not being able to heal(from food) as you get chased blows. As mentioned in the bugs thread you don't start with a shield if you have wizard skills, which means I don't even get the bonus block from the first talent. Level 1 really depends on what you come across early. Deathly Hex kills well but there is lots of downtime as the debuff comes off. The monster toughness gap between 1-2 is another slap in the face. I had to go down stairs, kill 1 thing and then come back up to look for stuff to heal. This makes it take forever. Also, 100% of the attacks should trigger Vampirism attack. Do the abilities in the spell triggers column (dredmorepedia) only go off if something in the effect columns happen? Because right now I am not getting Life Regen Effect 1 every attack(like on robots or undead. Is this intended? I guess it works like when you miss deathly hex, You don't get any of the spell triggers. Drinker of the Dead is the Only redeeming skill in the tree and does scale with with . In Dredmorpedia (both versions) it says that it scales 3 +(1.2) which can't be right, because I have 22 , which should be giving me a ludicrious 29.4 Per use... and it isn't. One hidden side effect is that the -1 health from minor blood debt actually HEALS you. If you were at 1/35 health and then cast 34 of these things, once they wore off, you would be back to 35/35. Not to mention that Deathly hex also drains for a small amount. Unfortunately, even this drain doesn't work on undead which there are tons of on floor 2. The sparkle aura is terribly weak and does scale off . probably good for destructible walls and that is about it. With a cooldown that long you would think that it did more damage. It is kind of like the old remember your Charlemagne. Personally I would rather have it do more damage (since certain monsters are high resistant to vampiric ) instead of the stun. I still haven't gotten the psychic vampire on my caster. I need the levels in other stuff first. I am pretty squishy though so I don't think I will be meleeing much. We will see.
That's because Vampirism is actually completely broken right now. If you read carefully, you'll see that it's triggering Regen Life Effect 1 on the target, not on the player -- so unless you go in and manually fix it, Vampirism is grotesquely inept in that it makes killing things much harder and doesn't actually help you at all. Also, Drinker of the Dead doesn't scale off of . It scales off of at a scale of 1.3, so you basically get 4 points of healing for every 3 points of .
What!? How long has it been triggering on the target? Has this been discussed/reported anywhere? How come dredmorpedia was updated to show for Blood Sucker but not Psychic Vampire? Finally is there somewhere that explains how to change this? I am sure with enough work I can figure it out.
whoa, so you're saying that it is healing those enemies? i did not know this. Drinker of the Dead is really excellent early game, but it quickly becomes useless late (when healing even 20 hp in one shot is piddly).
Nacho: just replace your Vampirism Attack spell with this: Code: <spell name="For Effort" type="self"> <effect type="trigger" spell="Regen Life Effect 1"/> </spell> <spell name="Vampirism Attack" type="target" > <effect type="drain" necromantic="1" necromanticF="0.6" secondaryScale="13" taxa="Demon" /> <effect type="drain" necromantic="1" necromanticF="0.4" secondaryScale="13" taxa="Other" /> <effect type="drain" necromantic="2" necromanticF="1.0" secondaryScale="13" taxa="Animal" /> <anim sprite="sprites/sfx/glintA/glintA" frames="5" framerate="60" centerEffect="0" sfx="fleshbore" /> <effect type="trigger" spell="For Effort"/> <!-- a free point of health, for effort. --> </spell>
Thanks Essence! You are the best! I will definitely play with it more. Maybe we should put this in the 1.1.3 thread so that maybe it gets rolled out with it?
It really bugs me that Vampirism's healing scales off of . I think it's a real missed opportunity. It would be much more interesting if it scaled off some other stat. Then it could have synergy with other skills that raised that stat, and vampires would prioritize certain equipment differently than non-vamps. As it stands, if I can somehow gain enough to make Vampirism start to feel powerful, I can't help but wonder how much more powerful it would be to just ditch the vampirism and use that high to heal naturally between fights. I stand corrected. It has plenty of synergy, just with very different skills from those with which it had synergy before the switch from to .
Oh, vampirism healing FAR outstrips normal healing once you get some Regen points. The scaling is pretty obscene.
On GR, sure. But on DM or EE it doesn't take much to get yourself to healing 1 per round. And on GR, it's darned hard to get a vampire to survive the first floor or two. Or at least I'm not any good at it. Or wasn't the last time I played a vampire, which was a while ago. Okay, maybe I need to boot up Dredmor now. My experiences are not fresh enough to speak authoritatively.
Vampirism is actually a pretty good skilltree. If you're like a mage, you can use it with some AoE spell and blood mana for huge hp and mp restoration.
I'm...not sure what you mean, Alistaire. Vampirism triggers off of melee attacks, not kills like Blood Magic does. And the problem with health regen, to reply to bergstrom, is that it's limited to 1 HP/turn. Vampirism currently gives 2 HP per round provided you hit something in the face during that round, and significantly more if you have some and are hitting an Animal/Demon/Other. Sure, you get to heal outside of combat, but a properly defended vampire will basically never end a fight with less than full HP -- and when he does, he can go back and eat some corpses to make up the difference.
You're right, I was wrong. My previous vampiric efforts were wizard builds, 'cause, y'know, it _is_ technically a wizard skill, and there's that one level that gives you mana, and stuff. Heh. In such builds, the vampirism doesn't give a lot of early-game healing and the lack of HP makes that flaw rather pronounced. It had always felt dicey and dangerous, at least until you leveled up into some solid area-attack in your other skills. From that perspective, making it scale on just made it that much more risky and dysynergistic. Since reading your (first quoted) post, I launched up a new GRPD game with a vampire-vegan-master of arms-shield bearer-demonologist character and completely owned the first floor. With all the spare and increased combat stats from the warrior skills, I never dropped below 20 even in the fights with named bosses, and I was playing fast and reckless. So, it's not that the skill lacks synergy in its current form, it's just that the synergy it has is predominantly with skills I'd previously never considered taking with it for completely foolish/flavor reasons. My bad. That's pretty cool, actually. Thumbs up, Gaslamp.
Also with a non vampire build though you don't get any benefit for Health Regen points beyond the first six (give or take, depending on the game's difficulty setting.)
Yeah, nowadays the fact that Vampirism is a wizard skill is almost like a payment that you have to make to earn the healing goodness. It does provoke thoughts of some sort of super-draining gish that stacks Vampire, Necro's Fleeting Pact, and Blungecaps, though. Bwahahahahahahahaaaa.a..aa......
A recent successful GRPD build of mine had slaying as a vampire as the only condition. I found it great fun and it made me realise one of the unsung qualities of being a vampire is the reduction of the burden on the seams of your swag bag. I had similar skills to what others have mentioned as good: Vamp -> 5 every skill is at least mildly useful but I mainly wanted psychic vampire to keep warlockery fueled. Corpse drain keeps you going until you get better ways of gaining life. Sparkly is always good at breaking walls and the stun is often all you need to kill a tough single adversary. Transylvation is great now as the spawned friendly bats make tasty snacks especially when you are faced with the fact of fleeting life. Necronomiconomics -> 6 this skill goes very well with vampirisms buffs. Deathly hex keeps you alive on floor 1 but the fun begins when you can stack Mark of Chthon and garnish it with the pact of fleeting life. Tenebrous Rift allows easy Zoo clearing on later levels. Warlockery -> 3/4 Puissant Touch was my main weapon (along with vampires innate buff and any old evil chest weapon) Kept Maille running. Warlocks challenge is great for getting hold of awkward casters. And its fun to see how long you can keep essence of battle up by killing alone. Tourist -> 2 for traps and the level 1 bonus is nice Perception -> 5 for the , , and and second sight is useful. Artful Dodger -> 5 Aikido is a nice bonus plus lots of and knightly leap for islands and getaways Burglary -> 6 I think I took perception instead of burglary and burglary still managed to smuggle itself in..all great skills and Lockdown may work when Sparkly Glamour fails and goes well with Eldritch Inhabitation and/or Eye Lasers for killing corruption or boss enemies. Equipment wise I didn't focus on getting but , and 7 total with armour focused on (had 90 odd at the end) and getting extra damage is useful too. I therefore often wielded a staff and (clockwork) orb combo. So a predominantly melee based character (who even enjoyed having to hit the same thing lots of times as it gave more bonuses) with no warrior skills. Lots of dodge and wonderful escapism. But the most refreshing thing was having a mostly clean and organised pocket dimension and being able to sell off nearly everything and keep just the finest of booze to quaff at a leisurely pace...though I did miss my cheese. However, I had wanted to engage Dredmor in hand to hand...but had to resort to clockwork bolts. As for vampire needing a nerf I don't think so..I'm not even sure it needs the extra effort on my part to get the 'for effort' HP.
