At the risk of a forum warning, "that's what she said." Also I've decided to join the fun of this build, since I've tried almost every other conceivable build. Anyone currently running the build on ladder 1500?
I use a vampire in my puppet master build (which I'm benching for a while after too much success). No shielding, just 3x Shuddering Relic, 1x Glowing Hide, 1x Vamp Blade, and 1x Lifesuck.
Teehee. I run an elven vamp at 1500+, with these items: • Vampire's Blade • Vampire's Blade • Slippery Shield • Angel's Strapping • Black Iron Boots • Wuuna's Vampiric Shroud • Flax's Thirsty Vial (Wuuna's #2) • Shielding Token • Escapist • Focused Healer My other two characters are a warrior and a frenzy-heavy priest. Vampires are fun, so welcome to the party!
I don't have either. I am not sure about St. Portia's Maul; it has better average damage than most vamp weapons but it has three non-drains. The Knife I would definitely not use—adding two non-attacks to the deck? And Penetrating Lunge is wimpy. I know the Knife is super good in some builds, but I don't think there's room for it in mine. That said, you may choose to build your vampire differently! The basic idea behind the items I've selected for my vamp is kind of the same as the idea behind dwarven control wizards: consistency. I have an effective deck size of something like 25 cards, 15 of which are drain attacks. Turns where I have 3+ drains in my hand are not uncommon. Drawing Talented Healer isn't that hard either. The remaining 10 cards are cards like Hard to Pin Down and Quick Run; cards I'm almost always happy to draw. My one "bad card" is the Walk on Escapist, and I have a free major token so when Superb Mobility is live in the big patch I'll be running that instead of Escapist. So yeah, the character build is super focused, and doesn't have much room to do things like healing enemies and drawing them attacks. It's by no means the pinnacle of vampirism, though. I encourage you to try something different and see how it suits you. P.S. In Stexe's singleton tournament, I swapped my Slippery Shield for a Rusty Buckler ( >), my Wuuna's for a Badjeera's, and one of my Vampire's Blades for a Healing Hand Mace (+) . It worked alright, though decreases in consistency in the rest of my build made my party weaker overall. Team Heal is less bad for me than Inspiring Presence, because it doesn't heal opponents and does trigger Talented Healer.
I'm going to keep testing it. I see potential with a wizard instead of a warrior in this build so I'll try it out and let you know how it goes.
Sounds good. I was running a wizard before the Vulcan maps—since I started, actually. But come the Vulcan maps I switched to a Bejeweled/Nifty/Rageblood beater as my third, and my rating went up. Also I have no idea which might be better on the current rotation, because I haven't played the celestial maps since... October? When I was still just a 1200 hero
What do you think of three Priests with Holy Knight Armor? The Arrogant Armor negates both opponent encumbrances and your own Mass Frenzy and Nimbus. Any ideas?
My problem with Holy Knight Armor is that the Arrogant doesn't do anything about Loner or Demonic Revenge, it negates any frenzy buffs (which if we are vampires, we need!) and it also kills Talented Healer. I'm not sure what the point of triple priest is if you aren't going to use any buffs. Basically, the only things you can do is Melee, Draw and Heal. If you are going to Draw or Heal I think that having Altruism or Talented Healer would be much better than avoiding a few enemy attachments. I ran a single priest with Demonic Power/Unholy Wellspring and Arrogant Armor a while back, simply because I had the token. The Arrogant wasn't that great.
I think that if you're running 11 traits like Flaxative does, then cycling off encumbrance with traits + your own buffs won't be a problem and arrogant armor would then hurt you more than it would help. Without talented healer, you can't do fun things like quick run+ drain an enemy to death before your opponent gets a turn. And with life drain attacks, Mass Frenzy is twice as effective since it swings the hp balance in your favor by 6 (you gain 3 more life and they lose 3 more). What is this Superb Mobility item that's coming in the new patch? I've searched for it but couldn't find it. I'm guessing it's Slippery, Elvish Insight, and an actual useful card? Anything but Walk, pleeease!
Kalin, is there a consolidated post somewhere of the new abilities that have either been disclosed or uncovered?
Kind of, but they've made a bunch of changes since then, plus there's a whole bunch of stuff that's not even in the links I gave (yet). The best thing to do is save those links and open them in a decent spreadsheet program (and if you have a stupid program like LibreOffice, you'll have to tell it that CSV means Comma Separated Values).
Yeah, Superb Mobility replaces Walk with a trait. And yes, Arrogant Armor would kill my build. Angel's Strapping is a pretty good blue token armor for vampires, I think. You can also always go tokenless with Glowing Hide Armor if you need more drains.
I assume vampire priests get a lot better with the mass frenzy. You're running it on your other priest, but with the right items I wonder if you could fit it on the vampire, and thus combine him with 2 warriors. Say you swap out the shielding token for Bleneth's Skull (3 mass frenzies). Pull a 4th mass frenzy of your armor ( St Tesrim's Corona gives you a draining attack as well), or even a Bynzer's Black Spear since you have the spare tokens? Alternatively you could go with 3 Shuddering Relic and further amp up the trait cycling I suppose. I expect this would make the vamp priest a bit less consistent, but replacing your other priest with a straight up warrior is a nice bonus. Any thoughts from your experience running them?
Yeah-the lack of consistency is killer. Vampires need to be flush with drains as often as possible. Of course, you can run drains on a support priest in warrior warrior priest parties, and that's fine, but if you are building a striker you really can't afford to draw mass frenzy on it.
I understand your point, you need to focus the priest on attacks so he's viable as an attacker most turns. But with only the switch to your armor and the shielding token, I'm essentially replacing your 2 support cards (nimbuses) with 4 support cards (mass frenzies). It would still have the same number of attacks in the deck, and the same number of traits. Essentially drawing a mass frenzy would only replace drawing armor, life saving block or nimbus. Which doesn't seem to have any more dead draws than you currently have, though bringing in the black spear would be a bigger change. I do think that losing the life saving block and armor could be a potential issue for an elf, this version seems a bit more vulnerable but I'm hoping his life gain will mitigate the risk. It's incredibly item specific and dependent on these legendaries, but my goal is to squeeze out the dedicated support priest (running altruism and more dedicated support cards) for a vampire/ minimal MF support for something closer to a 3 warrior build with mass frenzy.
It's hard to draw a line between a Vampire Priest and a semi-Vampire Priest. I think a good Vampire should focus on being a vampire and leave the Mass Frenzy to a second priest, and although this limits the build somewhat it's more efficient draining.
