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Message: <blockquote data-quote="WalterKovacs" data-source="post: 5526085" data-attributes="member: 63763">Everyone in the party is a surge sink, the vampire just occaisionally uses other people's surges. During the fights that don't involve the vampire being focussed fired upon and unconcious though, it's quite possible the vampire uses none of it's own surges, and more importantly, uses none of the leader's resources. If the vampire, using a combination of his own regenration, temp hit point generation, and perhaps his allies helping him out with some surgeless healing or extra temp hp, he should be able to last an encounter without needing the leader to use one of his minor action 2/encounter heals to keep the vamp upright. So while between encounters the vampire may be a drain (pun intended) on party resources by grabbing a surge off the sturdiest member ... it's still only one surge. He (like the artificer) allows the party to pool their surges to some extent. The adventuring day ends when the first person runs out of surges normally, so if someone else still has tons of surges, those go to waste. The vampire not only helps make those surges useful, but helps the rest of the party in combat by requiring less of the leader's time. Now ANYONE that gets nova'd and drops unconcious is going to be problematic [It may be a good idea to have a Revenant Vampire ... he can avoid unconciousness to at least be able to grab an extra surge at 0hp if he has none] but outside of scenarios set up to screw the vampire over [let's put him into a bunch of encounters in a row with only traps, and have all the enemies focus on him, etc] in a normal encounter, the defender should be defending, and the controller should be controlling and therefore the vampire should be able to at least stay on his feet for most of the fight.  And while everyone has been comparing the vampire to the Ossassin ... I actually play an Ossassin and while he's got a glass jaw (with our controller being a druid, I'm the one with the lowest hp), my damage spike at the start of the encounter is unmatched. Sure I have to use a number of "one extra surge" feat based powers, and the daily double surge power, but generally I speed the encounter up enough that it doesn't last long enough where I become a liability. We are currently at low paragon (12), but so far I'm outperforming our rogue (now changed to a theif) and ranger (who was admitedly built very poorly). Outside of the Slayer, the Hexblade, the Scout, and the Monk, I've seen just about every striker in play for at least a few sessions. Even the best classes, played poorly, are a drain on the party. For strikers, dpr and ability to spike damage with a nova combo are nice and all, but as long as they are doing solid enough damage, and are self reliant (movement based a lot of time, although having good defenses, self healing options, etc) is also a plus, as the defender/controller/leader have enough time trying to keep each other alive/safe/etc ... that one less person to worry about helps them out a lot.</blockquote>

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