D&D 4E The (Finally Useful) Vampire Class

[Tigris]

The core issue with 4e's Vampire is that it is a class on which they used all their design hours coming up with a custom healing dynamic to make the class extra durable but then forgot to make it a defender.

I think the core issue is more that hardcore optimization boards often fail to understand that you can have advantages outside your "main role".


Also a vampire fits a lot better to be a striker than a defender especially with this mechanic, since a defender can lose potentially several healing surges in a fight if the defender manages to really make the enemies focus on them.


In the end 4E combat is about losing the least amount of healing surges. Strikers help by killing enemies faster. But if one has a defender which has slightly lower damage, but uses themselves less healing surges than normal, thats perfectly good for the team.


A cooperative team game, even if it has roles, still is flexible, and its about working well together in a team, its not about whiteroom situations. A vampire being a striker which can take quite a bit of beating (similar to the barbarian) is a plus.

 

[Neonchameleon]

Honestly the problem with the vampire is that it's a striker with basically no double-tap abilities, reactions, or bonus action attacks. And unlike the thief or slayer it's very hard to smuggle them in. So at low optimisation or in a pure Essentials game it's fine and genuinely fun but when the optimisers comes out it gets left behind.

 

[Tigris]

Honestly the problem with the vampire is that it's a striker with basically no double-tap abilities, reactions, or bonus action attacks. And unlike the thief or slayer it's very hard to smuggle them in. So at low optimisation or in a pure Essentials game it's fine and genuinely fun but when the optimisers comes out it gets left behind.

I think the problem is more that multiattack scales too well. And this just makes 10% of powers too strong compared to all others.

Vampire does have good basic attacks, including opportunity attacks (but not much invisibility to really use it well), and can do charge optimization if wanted, so there is some things, but yeah they will not scale as high as someone who optimizes with multi attack.

 

[Neonchameleon]

I think the problem is more that multiattack scales too well. And this just makes 10% of powers too strong compared to all others.

Vampire does have good basic attacks, including opportunity attacks (but not much invisibility to really use it well), and can do charge optimization if wanted, so there is some things, but yeah they will not scale as high as someone who optimizes with multi attack.

I think that this was one of the improvements Essentials tried to make. Reducing the amount of multi-attack in the game because they really were above the curve. But Essentials flopped to the point that if we consider it a different edition there is only one book post the base ones that was more compatible with Essentials than pre-essentials. Unfortunately for Vampire fans that book was Heroes of Shadow.

 

[Tigris]

I think that this was one of the improvements Essentials tried to make. Reducing the amount of multi-attack in the game because they really were above the curve. But Essentials flopped to the point that if we consider it a different edition there is only one book post the base ones that was more compatible with Essentials than pre-essentials. Unfortunately for Vampire fans that book was Heroes of Shadow.

But the amount of multi attacks was never that big. It is also in pre essential 4e just a small part of the attacks to strikers.


The problem is more that the optinization crowd for some reason assumed that this 10% should be the baseline. If we just assume othet attacks as a baseline then essential classes are fine. Even multiattacks are fine in general if you dont invest too much into optimizing them.

I like what essentials did with the scout, backing in the multi attack into the class as a feature instead of attacks.


Vampire for me has cool flavour and different gameplay and it works well together with warlord or other attack granting characters. He has more control and more survivability than a normal striker, its just the firdt phew levels which can feel bad, and of course the mid levels if you just compare your damage to a striker.