Vampires – neither fun nor easy

[Asterix_von_TWC]

Hi,

I had 20k in the bank, 12 well armoured and equipped veterans between levels 11 and 7, and I was on my way to take out an Orc Stronghold for a contract when at the base camp I started being set upon by wave after wave of vampire (robots).

The fourth wave had left only 4 members alive, and my glorious 142 turn game ended at the hand of a pack of 12 raiders (managed to kill 8 of them) shortly after that as I retreated to start over.

The vampires all look identical, they all play identical, and to be honest they need loads of work still:

Negatives:

1) The AI is very flat, they do the same thing over and over and over again. Nightfly or whatever its called and stab… then rinse and repeat. No magic, no biting, no minions (vampires should have minions).
2) Equipment is identical and boring. In my world Vampires should have magic armour and knightly weapons, or fight in diverse style given that they are intelligent monsters.
3) The nine lives perk on ALL vampires is too much… the groups that decimated me basically needed to be killed twice, which I understand, but its boring and repetitive, also most of the vampires that killed my lads (some with 9 lives also) had already used their trait once… but when combined with their teleportation ability and strike first this becomes very very overpowered.
4) In the end there was no pleasure there, getting killed by orcs of raiders is fine and entertaining, getting prodded to death by vampires feels like a desperate and robotic effort from your PC to cut back on your success.
5) The loot was pathetic… vampires hoard treasure and should have magic items on them

Positives
1) It was very difficult, but in a linear way.

Please rework vampires completely

[Danubian]

Yup i agree, they are hard. Yet another thing that could easily be solved by either devs adding more subtypes of enemies, or creating a modding system that would allow us to easily script more enemies ourselves. I would love to make a mod that does this…

[spamtaboo]

That kind of makes sense. In my opinion vampires should definitely be more difficult but yet way more rewarding. There is another option though, you can leave life leech on these guys (you may just lower the %), remove blink and nine life, introduce elder vampires to the game (with better equipment and armor and with blink) and add vampire patriarchs with unique equipment, blink and nine lives (the same approach used in other species). So basically there will be to branches of undead, ghouls, vampires, elder vampires, patriarchs and zombies, skeletons, skeleton warriors, necromancers.

[Meeky]

I think there WERE tougher vampires before? I forget, but I remember early on fighting Withered Vampires and some sort of other, less emaciated looking vampire as well. I might be going crazy, though.

That said, yeah: vampires are really freaking predictable to fight. They’ll turn into bats and attack the weakest member of your party. Really, the ONLY viable solution I found to facing them when I have weaker folks in my group is to make a big circle with no gaps and let my beefy dudes take the hits. Even though, DAMN do they hurt, and DAMN am I jealous of their mobility.

And then their loot is REALLY boring, yes. Vampire dust – that’s all I get is vampire dust? It doesn’t sell very high, either. I’m cool with getting ghoul’s teeth for murdering ghouls; they’re easy to kill; but simple vendor trash for killing one of the hardest opponents in the game? That makes me sad every time.

I think they’re gonna be reworked hard, note. There was a picture I saw a while back that had undead in more Roman-ish equipment with ancient looking weaponry. Assuming I’m not a crazy coconut, it’s very possible vampires will get reworked alongside them.

But until then, I’m going to be very, very disappointed with the loot table every time I fight a band of vampires.

[Author]

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