The big problem that Vampirism and Blood Magic both suffer from is that they do not scale with damage done. Kills count. Nothing else. This makes them both worthless by mid game. And less than worthless by late game. (It has been several revisions since I used either skill, so correct me if that is no longer the case.) If you hit monster A for 10 damage you should heal X and/or . If you hit Monster A for 20 damage you should heal X*2. It really should be an even scale. That way it remains useful all the way through. Unless I am mistaken, by the end, you simply cannot keep up with those skills. Vampirism is a terrible skill since it prevents the most common heal method in the game. BM is more reasonable, but still worthless by the end since it is a flat amount restored and by the end it will cost much more mana than you can hope to restore in order to kill something.
I would love to see Vampirism look like this: First level: Disables eating and gives a passive -50 , 2, 3, -2, and -5 . 100% proc of 2+(.1*) and drains life like is already does. Second level: Corpse Drinking like it currently is but with a 10-20 turn buff that adds +50 Third Level: Summons 4-5 bats with ~30 and turns you into batty form. Maybe batty form is weakened a bit. Fourth Level: A single target missile spell that deals and drains life. It also has a 50% chance of paralyze. Fifth Level: An un-resistible charm spell. It last about 30-40 turns and has a 100 turn cool down. It shouldn't work on dreadmor
I'll disagree with you a bit - I do NOT think that the first skill in Vampirism should carry you all the way through - I think the first skill should provide decent healing on the first ~4 dungeon levels, but then players should start to need other skills - and the rest of the Vampirism tree should provide some of those. We're already part-way down that path now. Sparkles do pretty significant health drain from a huge area-effect. It can't be used very frequently, but it's an essential part of playing a Vampire through to the later game. I think that's a great sort of evolution. I don't want Vampirism to be a "take it and never put points into it" sort of skill, the way Blood Mage usually is. A great way to achieve that is to make the first skill not scale very well.
I say instead of giving make the healing and such scale off of it. That means that the stat is useful and desirable without giving any actual regen. The draining could be something else but for instance the consolation healing and corpse healing should scale on it. Later levels can even give some.
Blood Magic is most useful for Monster Zoos, where your most powerful single-target spells can't be used as effectively and you have to resort to area-of-effect spells that aren't quite as strong and/or cost more mana. Food and drink don't scale with level either, and nobody complains about them. And anyway, blood magic doesn't stop you from regaining mana in other ways, so it doesn't need to be buffed quite as badly as Vampirism does. Besides, with every rank of Wizard your spell costs decrease anyway. Last time I killed Dredmor IIRC I had 1-200 mana and my spells cost maybe 10 mana, except for a few AoEs and capstones, and each spell I cast usually killed at least one thing, if not several things.
That is absolutely awesome! It should just give some kind of 'note' in a tooltip to let the user know they should value that stat in some way as it is not intuitive at all (even if that note is vague and flavor-texty).
An alternative could be to change into a completely different stat when you are a vampire. Maybe automatically scaled off of a base stat like , with items that can add to it. That might be a bit complicated though.
But that removes the entire purpose of it. Items can't really give you more (vampire only items won't happen) and skills can't give you more. At that point it just scales off savvy.
That's a good point. It might even be more boring that way. Also, incorporating the poor, misbegotten stat would be equally tricky.
I don't know... This seems like a good way to make vampirism completely useless. Also, -5 ?! When do vampires face an Existential crisis? That's a bit overpowered on the weakness. Keep the fire and righteous weakness, but piercing, I guess because of the heart, makes it too weak to survive past the first floor without finding steel curiass or better in the first room. Also, keep in mind, not all vampire myths are the same. Some can drink blood in the noon-day sun in Death Valley, Arizona on the hottest day of the year. Vampirism in this game needs a huge buff, not any kind of nerf. Also, Vampires have a huge constitution/regeneration bonus, so giving them a health regen penalty is against vampire lore. I mean, even Twilight Vampires aren't weak to cyanide. They can regrow severed limbs you know.
I do not think there is any real agreed upon Vampire details whatsoever except that they devour the life of others. In some mythos it is not even blood, just life. Nonetheless I agree that they *Should* regenerate. Why do I say such blasphemy? Because this is a game where you only have seven skills. If one of them is vampirism, it should *Benefit* the character enough to justify it. I suggest leaving most things alone. But otherwise let them passively regenerate slowly and possibly give them an ability to bottle the blood of slain enemies to heal from. (Not a major heal, but a bottle of blood should add a buff that gives 1HP per turn for a while. In *ADDITION* to normal regeneration.)
I'm not going to make any claims to intimacy with the balance of the game. But I do like vampirism, and have always seen issues with it, so bear with me. Firstly, one of my biggest issues with it has always been the fact health regen, as a stat, is wasted. This makes it poor with Master of Arms, some of Fleshsmithing, and items. I think it feels really bad when such a vital (no pun intended) stat is made useless on a character. If consensus states Vampirism is underpowered, I believe health regen working on vampires is the most preferable buff, since it will not only make you more survivable and less dependent on getting in constant fights, it will make you synergize with other trees better. Finally, it adds gameplay by giving you these new options. Vampirism is a wizard skill. It scales off of Magic Power but it necessitates melee attacking, so it seems like it's pigeonholed in as a gish skill tree. We could alleviate this by changing how it scales (obviously). This would allow warriors and even rogues to pick it up, and I believe it could have potential synergy with both playstyles. This would have the effect of more people picking vampirism since it's overall more compatible with other kits. One thing that I've always noted about vampirism is that it's a skill that helps carry you through the early game. It doesn't scale that well, and that was part of its schtick. Admittedly, I've never gotten past mid-game, so I can't give much input on just how egregious that is. But I think it'd make sense to give it scaling skills later in the tree. It's quite meager now, why not give it one or two more skills? I can see a balance issue with giving vampires health regen, since the sacrifice you make as a vampire (similar to blood magic, which I view as sort of a sister trait to vampirism) is that you always have to be in the fight. So why not this: the healing you do (lifesteal, corpse draining) scales off of health regen? This wouldn't replace existing scaling, but merely add to what's there (magic power, or whatever else should it be changed). It would both solve the issue of a wasted stat, as well as lategame scaling in one fell swoop. Hopefully I had at least one good idea! :3
I actually kind of like the idea of scaling how much health you get from a vampiric attack off of health regen as well as magic power. It would give the skill some more synergy with existing Warrior archetype skills, at least...
Me too. I think that would work okay. Now, can anyone tell me why Vamprism was a mage skill to begin with? Has anyone here ever heard of Vampire Magi? Most things I know about Vampires proves that they're warriors and rogues more so than mages. Their superhuman strength and agility would allow them to dual-wield greatswords with the ease of someone dual-wielding short swords. While they do know some mystical abilities, most of them would askew magic unless it could make them immune to the sun and fire. Maybe at the time, there wasn't enough of a balance between mage/rogue/warrior.
