Vgstation13: Vampire change(nerf?) discussion

[kol1th]

Alright, even with #8629 existing and having something done about it, myself and other community members think vampire is STILL unbalanced. I'd say they need removal of abilities, or removal of ability to succ monkeymen.

Being able to cheat death, thrall anyone VERY quickly, and on top of that bat form, rejuv to remove ANY chem from your system (chloral if you're quick), and they can see in the dark, through walls is a bit too much. All of those powers within 10-15 minutes if you have experience with the game, even as an assistant.

This might just be an issue with the people who actually get vampire rolls being experienced with it, but I feel like it's an issue with vampires being overtuned in comparison to other antags.

Honestly I don't know why something hasn't been done as of yet about the monkeyman sucking, since it adds nothing except extending the round and powering up the antag for little to no effort.

I'd like to hear some other people's thoughts on this.

request balance/discussion tag pls

[ghost]

Only way I can see tuning out monkeymen without it being potentially exploitable by people who are against lings/vampires by ghosting and such is to check if the body has HAD a ckey in it at some point, rather than if a ckey is in it or absent.

Problem is, then you'd just get a vampling grabbing a corpse of a braindead from the morgue, applying the succ, then cloning it in their lair to do ad infinitum

[Allspice]

Can't clone braindeads (usually), and vamps get half upgrade blood and zero useable blood from the dead.

[9600bauds]

There's something more nuanced that I don't see discussed about Vampire: It's supposedly balanced around the concept of there being few antagonists, with those antagonists being very powerful.
That works out fine for wizards, but it just doesn't work out for vampires which need STEALTH, especially early on. The result from this is that there are few antagonists and they'll be mostly doing stealthy stuff.
What if one of them flukes early on and gets outed as a vampire? Now there are only one to two vampires remaining and they're in an extremely inconvenient predicament to actually do their required stealth stuff to get their blood, everyone knows it's vampire and will be looking around maint and dragging suspicious people to the chapel. Bam, the round now dips pretty close to Extended.

In my opinion, there should be more vampires and they should be individually not as strong. You can't have so few antagonists and then have them require stealth as well.

[kol1th]

Yeah, thralling costs 150 blood now, with a requirement of 300 total. The whole "more, weaker vampires" thing sounds like a good concept. But once again, with the monkeyman thing still in play, it'll just be more or less the same thing with more people. I feel like that's a core flaw and I really wanted to address it. Also, a longer cooldown to rejuv and removal of cheat death. Cheating death, I feel, should be unique to changelings.

[kol1th]

Trashed