Yes, building it as a race would have been way better. The class isn't bad, if you want the classic flavor, but have it be the race, with the option of the class, or another class, and a rider to the "used to be ____", and the feat that allows partial access to the previous race's feats or race powers.
Heck, have the options for vamp background, theme, race, & class. Go whole hog.
There were better ways to handle it. But the Heroes of Shadow book, as a whole, was mechanically underwhelming. Great fluff and flavor, but meh mechanics.
Yeah, I hear this a lot, but I still think the class route was the way to go. Making it a race would be too limiting in several ways. Races don't have that much mechanical weight in 4e, and you lose the ability to be a vampire OF various races, unless the even less mechanically weighty 'race overlay' concept is used. It just doesn't have the mechanical force to do the job IMHO.
You can still portray things like a 'wizard vampire' either by using a Theme, and or MCing or even using the hybrid version of the Vampire (again, in Dragon 402 IIRC). Otherwise you can rely on things like PP selection and judicious use of a feat or other (for instance all Vampire powers conveniently have the 'implement' keyword, meaning you can use one of many feats to gain access to an implement of whatever type, such as a wand perhaps, and use it with your vampire powers). Its really not that hard to mechanically support being a 'vampire <any implement class>'. Its actually SLIGHTLY tougher with weapons, but there are a lot of weapliment options out there that will work, assuming your DM won't bend a tiny bit and just let you wield a weapon as an implement for flavor purposes.
In any case, if you REALLY want to be a full-blown Wizard AND a Vampire, you've got a whole set of bloodline feats, the Vampirism MC feat (which will let you access the Vampire class' PP/ED) and the Vryloka race if you want to go with that too. I'd think these days that a Vampire/Wizard hybrid, or other sort of Vampire/ hybrid, would suite better, but there are many tricky build options.
I'd certainly have wanted to see builds be a little more straightforward in 4e generally, but IMHO Vampire isn't a particularly bad design. Its certainly easy enough to see why it was implemented as it is. And honestly, while some bits of HoS were not that inspiring I think the real issue with it is more that A) they tried to stick with a more restrained post-Essentials power baseline, and B) there just isn't any ongoing support for anything in HoS. The Binder pretty much bit, being a bad concept from the start, but the other stuff seemed more like just a start that needed to be built on. I think the book really could have used being another 100 pages, it wasn't great overall, but there was a lot of interesting ideas in it and most of it is pretty usable, if you're willing to extrapolate a bit.
