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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Aegeri" data-source="post: 5520544" data-attributes="member: 78116">The problem with the Vampire class is we're shown a house, but we don't see the foundations of that house except for the terrible muddy bog that the house is supposed to be built on. This class has some severe drawbacks and unless the foundations of the house are really solid it's going to collapse pretty easily into the swarmp. Wizards might then go and build a new house on the swamp, but that's no good if you don't learn from why your first house fell over into it in the first place. While it's unlikely that a vampire will go through an encounter never hitting it is possible that it will happen due to circumstance (enemies stun/dominate the vampire, he ends up stuck somewhere) or just poor luck. Remember that the vampire doesn't have to miss all encounter - he can simply miss round one and get hammered into negatives by an unlucky start and be on the back foot an entire adventuring day. So a class like the vampire is swing town: It could be very effective, hitting a lot and managing to be missed so burning surges often to boost their other powers. The problem is the alternative.When this class fails it's going to fail so dramatically and so badly it probably won't be able to recover. Really, that puts a big burden on the parties resources in surges and in combat healing - assuming the vampire doesn't wind up on 0 surges which is "utterly useless" territory. This isn't terribly hard to end up on with only a couple of very unlucky moments. The other problem comes if the vampire relies on spending surges for its powers to be an effective striker - we don't know this for sure - then it's going to really suck if its desperate for them just for basic healing.You might think "Well it's fun to play a swingy character" but is it so much fun for anyone else at the table? Varying between "Kind of useful in some circumstances" and "Terrible" isn't really that great a deal for people playing with you. Really my problem is that if the foundations of these things like the Vampire were sound, I have to wonder why on earth we've not seen them. In the past for many new classes, even those that added fairly complicated new mechanics like the monk and psion we got entire playtests. We could see the logic from the ground up and comment on it. I am not convinced that without a really strong foundation the vampire is going to be a viable class. Right now, given that Wizards have released one of the worst races in HoS, an epic destiny that was absolutely terrible and a bunch of really underwhelming features/powers - I'm not convinced the foundation in this book is good. I really do hope that Kaomera is correct and that the full class in the book will be a lot better - but the sheer "swing factor" of this class has me extremely worried.Edit: To be honest, I have been ragging on most of the elements in this book for a long time now and because I've seen so many poor or outright incomprehensible design decisions in it I just assume the worst by default. I would like to be wrong, but the more I see of the book the more I'm 100% certain I am going to really dislike it.</blockquote>

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