ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

***EDIT: updated. Additions in italics***


I picked up, and agree with sentiments among players that vampires (NPC, and let's not forget the elder vampire summon from the CoD) are not as menacing as they should be.
Playing as a Doomed, I really felt that the Doomed skills have a vampire feel to them.
So my first suggestion is quite simple: make the Doomed skills available to the various types of vampire NPCs

And ofcourse, vampires could do with a nice racial tree, and intrinsics as well.
I gave it some thought in the past week, and here's what I've come up with. I did my best, when creating the racial talent tree, to keep balance in mind, as well as the possibilty of vampires becoming a playable race (since they are mentioned with the description of undead, at the character creation screen). Please, discuss

Perks and Intrinsics
- Vampires thrive on blood. So, let's give them a race-specific resource bar: Blood.
Blood is the resource used for the vampire's racial talents, see below. The Blood resource is simply filled by killing living (warmblooded) creatures. A normal kill would add one Blood to the pool. Elites would add 2 Blood, and uniques would add 10 Blood. The Blood pool's max is equal to the vampire's level, starting at 1, and naturally maxing out at 50 for PCs, no max for NPCs (ofcourse, egos/artefacts could be added that increase the max for PCs)

- Creature of the Night: The hated rays of the Sun will cause grieveous damage to a vampire. It starts with -50% light resistance.

- Hydrophobia: Vampires hate water. With good cause, for they will be damaged by it, by 4*(AircapacityMax-AirCurrent) per turn, for 1 turn.


Talent Tree: Vampire
1) Blood Rush (Sustain):
- Everytime you are damaged for more than 25% (at talent level 1) to 5% (at talent level 5) of your max HP, your global speed will increase by 5% for the next 3 turns. (Cumulative, it stacks). Also, a random talent will have it's cooldown counter reduced by 1.
- Also, as long as Blood Rush is sustained, you can freely swap between your current and backup weapon. Special courtesy to certain people I overheard wishing that other classes besides timewardens could do that
- Cost: 1 blood per turn at talent level 1, to 5 blood per turn at talent level 5. More power is more costly here!
- Cooldown: about 10 turns

2) Form of the Bat (Activation):
- your size category is reduced by 2 (this is beneficial for your defense, right?)
- your movement speed is increased by 100+(20*talent level)%
- you gain a bonus to infravision (sonar), power 2*(talent level)
- at talent level 5, you can smell blood from afar: gain telepathy:living creatures
- you cannot use your weapons or talents in Bat Form. Instead, you can Bite your victim, damaging it for 5% of it's max health blight damage (victim's resistances will reduce damage).
- Living creatures killed with a Bite multiply the Blood gain by your talent level. Finish off those uniques in Bat Form 5/5 to instantly replenish your Blood!
- you cannot use runes in Bat Form. Infusions are allowed
- Cost: 5 Blood
- Duration: (talent level) turns
- Cooldown: about 50 turns

3) Form of Mist (Sustain)
- upon activation, removes one negative status effect from the caster
- grants pinning resistance. Scales with talent level
- allows you to walk in walls. However, for every tile of wall/obstacle passed, you lose HP equal to 25% of your max HP. Note that even this self-damage has it's benefits, when Blood Rush is sustained
- you cannot attack, or use talents in Mist Form
- your HP cannot be reduced below 1 in Mist Form
- You cannot use runes in Mist Form. Infusions are allowed
- Cost: 10 Blood per turn (quite a lot, but hey, it makes you immortal, with the ability to use infusions to heal up)
- Cooldown: about 40 turns

4) Coven Call (Activation)
- Summons a levelled vampire to your aid. Has a small chance to summon a second vampire. Chance scales with Willpower and talent level.
- Cost: 20 Blood
- Duration (summons): 2*(talent level) turns
- Cooldown: about 100 turns

Blood resource: Sure, why not?

Creature of the Night: Don't forget damage from outdoor levels during daylight hours. Exclude the world map, for convenience.

Hydrophobia instakills your character, which is not fun. Maybe instead water could just damage you, or reduce your resource bars, or inflict some status effect on you. Anything but instakill.

Blood Rush looks interesting. I want to try an effect like that.

I don't think size category helps your defense, but Bat Form should do it anyway. Speed is good, senses are good (maybe add blindsight or blind resist). Bite shouldn't deal percentage damage - against a 2000 hp midgame boss, Bite would do 100 damage per hit at double or triple speed, making bat form your primary boss killer from then on. The words "bat" and "awesome melee fighter" don't belong together. Bats have telepathy and speed - they don't need a decent attack.

Form of Mist: Can you make a walk through walls talent, rather than probability travel? It suits mist better. This could be good sustain. Come to think of it, the bat form would also make a good sustain, if you paid your blood cost to activate it and didn't get the blood back at the end. Both forms would stop you from using talents, so you'd have to turn back eventually.

Coven Call: It's a useful meat shield. Like most other summons.

All told, I like this idea. You should make a vampire like this and see how it turns out.

How does that help vampire NPCs at all ?
A ressource just for them, but NPCs usualy only ever kill between 0 and 1 creature: the PC. And if they do so they dont realyl care what energy they have left.

Bloodrush: on an NPC that will probably die in 3/4/5 hits it wont have much effect
Form of the bat/mist: fun but how do they help npcs ?

darkgod wrote:How does that help vampire NPCs at all ?
A ressource just for them, but NPCs usualy only ever kill between 0 and 1 creature: the PC. And if they do so they dont realyl care what energy they have left.

Well, I did say that I wrote it up, with the idea of vampires eventually becoming playable races in mind
However, NPC vampires should spawn with a full blood bar. So higer level vampire NPC's would not need to kill first to be able to use the new talents.
You are right in that NPC character should not care about regaining blood.
That said, making the Doomed talent trees available to vampires would help NPC vampires the most, the racial tree would mostly benefit player characters, indeed.

darkgod wrote: Bloodrush: on an NPC that will probably die in 3/4/5 hits it wont have much effect

Not much, true. Still some. Some more in the case of unique vampires that spawn to last somewhat longer than 3/4/5 turns. Also, when the player attacks a vampire that has 5/5 Blood Rush, with a lot of DoT / area effect damages, that are not really high, but still more than 5% of the creature's HP, I can see it having quite a bit of effect, when it starts stacking.

darkgod wrote: Form of the bat/mist: fun but how do they help npcs ?

Form of bat would allow NPC's to retreat faster. Any NPC that has it's AI tell it to keep distance between it and the player, should use bat form for the movement bonus. Perhaps, for added fun, allow NPC vampires that have any points in Bat Form to be generated with Bat Form active (for free). Especially fun when they got the telepathy.
Form of mist: mainly an emergency escape, when applicable.

Flare wrote:Hydrophobia instakills your character, which is not fun. Maybe instead water could just damage you, or reduce your resource bars, or inflict some status effect on you. Anything but instakill.

Perhaps you're right. However, being instakilled by water should be pretty easy to avoid.

Flare wrote: I don't think size category helps your defense, but Bat Form should do it anyway. Speed is good, senses are good (maybe add blindsight or blind resist). Bite shouldn't deal percentage damage - against a 2000 hp midgame boss, Bite would do 100 damage per hit at double or triple speed, making bat form your primary boss killer from then on. The words "bat" and "awesome melee fighter" don't belong together. Bats have telepathy and speed - they don't need a decent attack.

Well, you would have to wear down your foe enough in the first place, before being able to finish it with biting, seeing that Bat Form has a limited duration (maximum 6 turns, if you are crazy enough to put a category point into extra talent tree mastery). At talent level 5/5, you could do a maximum of 25% damage to any creature, meaning that you would have to bring it down to below 25% HP by other means first, before being able to finish it off in bat mode. It's double/triple speed does not apply to attacking. Bat Form gives bonus to movement speed only, not to global speed. Also, you cannot cast spells in bat form, so no speed gain from Blood Rush either, when in Bat form. I will add to the OP that you also cannot use runes/infusions in Bat Form, to prevent people from using speed rune + Bat Form.

Flare wrote: Form of Mist: Can you make a walk through walls talent, rather than probability travel? It suits mist better.

Yeah, I guess it does.

Flare wrote: All told, I like this idea. You should make a vampire like this and see how it turns out.

Thanks. I would, if I could. I recently tried getting into coding again / learning Lua, but programming really is not my trade. Lua's manual / beginners guides lose me at page 1 or 2

Tried to incorporate your suggestions and comments. Updated the OP (quite a few additions)

Highlights:

- no more max for the blood pool of 50 (except for players). Now that level 99 vampire you meet in a vault will start with 99 Blood to spend (or more if it spawns with vampiric gear)
- no more instakill from water
- Blood Rush gains talent cooldown power
- Mist Form is a sustain now
- Mist Form tweaked a lot
- Talent level influences Coven call summon chance
- expansions/clarifications with the talents

and more. I highlighted the changes in italics in the OP.
It should make the talents, especially Mist Form more useful to NPC, with some decent AI

Also, I got an idea for NPC vampire classes:
- normal vampires, start with racial tree at mastery 1.00
- Elder vampires, tree mastery 1.20
- Master vampires, tree mastery 1.50

I don't like it. In general, the basic idea of a unique resource meter just for your race seems like it's not worth it to me, and the way it works with NPC vampires isn't very good. I'd suggest something a bit more traditional.

Some talent ideas (not in any particular order):

- A short-range teleport to any square you can see, by turning into a cloud of bats and flying there to instantly reform. Deals physical (and maybe darkness?) damage to anyone you pass through, and heals you for a certain percentage of the damage done.

Alternatively, instead of a beam between the two points, it could do a blast from your current location and reform you at any point within that range (in other words, a teleport of range 2->3->4 or something, while firing a blast of that radius from your old location as you turn briefly into bats that attack everything in the area.)

Because it's 'you' as a swarm of bats doing the damage, this talent never hurts friendly targets.

Range and healing percentage could scale with talent level; damage could scale with both talent level and [stat], possibly Dex or Strength.

- A hypnotic gaze power that pulls one enemy to you while confusing or stunning them. Range and confusion / stun duration could scale with talent level; duration and status effect chance could scale with [stat], probably cunning or willpower.

- A blood drain bite attack. Grapples the enemy and damages them each turn while healing you. Fairly obvious, but, well, it's obvious that they should have it. Damage scales with talent level and [stat] (strength?) and duration / healing percentage scales with talent level.

I'd give them a summon, but have it summon lesser undead in larger numbers, not vampires. I don't think that ToME vampires form covens and such -- look at the Master of Dreadfall; he's probably a better example of what ToME's vampires should be.

Actually, in-game lore now (in SVN/pre-b32, not sure about b31) has vampires as being highly social, so covens wouldn't exactly be a surprise. That said, vampires can already summon lesser undead and more vampires, so giving them another talent for it might be a bit overkill.

The only thing I can really add to the discussion (remember, DG has a vampire race planned, at some point in the future!) is that most of the complaints toward lackluster vampires are specifically not directed toward the top tier ones. The two elites that are actually pretty bloody nasty, if for no other reason than their preference toward summoning and summoning and summoning some more.

It might be fair to slip a couple necromancer talents into the master/elder/lord vamps, though. The master and lord descriptions, particular, suggest they could stand some cold talents. Give the elder and lord necrotic aura, and then add progressively the first three talents of the grave tree* and we'd have something even nastier than the current incarnation, without quite so much coding involved.

*Master would get chill of the tomb, elder that, necrotic aura, and will o' the wisp, and lords would get all of that plus cold flames, to be explicit. The will o' the wisp might need to be nudged to effect all allied undead, instead of specifically necrotic minion-produced ones, though.

I like Aquillion's ideas. Especially a grapple that drains blood I know we all love grappling enemies

As to summons not so keen on that. They already summon. It might make sense for a PC vampire race to give them summons but giving vampire NPCs even more summons feels off. Of course if the racial replaced some of their summoning abilities that might not be so bad.