question about building my Sampire..

[Mac]

So, my skills for my female human, are getting closer every minute, my imburer, a different toon, is started and stock piling stuff to build his skill. I came across a Soul Seeker for 30 K and snatched it up.

My question, at this moment, is as follows. I have the chance of picking up a Beetle Caprice for 450k. Should I be picking it up and building a suit around it, or should I use one of the race change tokens I have laying around, turn the human into an elf, and go with the elf armor and work around those pieces?

"And what are you hoping to do with this toon Mac?"

Well, I usually hunt alone, not guilded, only friend I have in game doesn't have the opportunity to play anywheres near as often as I do, so solo it is. Would like to work my way up the ladder to the bigger badder baddies, at least thats the plan, as vague as it is, at the moment.

So looking for some guidance from you guys that know what you're doing with the Sampire. I'm learning, but the learning curve can be steep at times.

Thanks folks.
Mac

 

[Obsidian]

I think DCI is more important than LMC so I would recommend going Elf and using Fey Legs.

 

[Gorbs]

Many of us who imbued their suits have one artifact (Mace & Shield) and 5 imbued armor pieces. If you aren't going to have your imbuer at 120 soon I'd say go ahead and use the RBC for now, but I'd otherwise pass. For what it's worth, the soul seeker is great for farming the essence needed for LMC.

I'd skip the race change token. There is a quest to turn human to elf and vice versa.

 

[Rhale27]

I by no means have a tremendous amount of experience with a sampire but I did create one from a scratch account and am currently sitting with mace and shield and 5 pieces of woodland imbued and enhanced.

I have a similar playstyle and company as you do. I only play with my brother and he works all the time and so do I so we sometimes can hunt together but for the most part I fly solo.

Once I got my skills established I needed money to buy the artifacts I needed.

My first suit was a cheap-tastic thing that gave me 70/70/70/70/75, which consisted of Aegis of Grace(20DCI) and 5 imbued pieces of leather with about 2 resists imbued per piece just to hit the resist caps. I also used a soul seeker, for the ramp up of gold and karma. I built this suit with my tailor/smith/imbuer around 100 tailoring and 100 imbuing only.

Each imbued piece looked something like this:
7 Stamina Increase
7 Mana Increase or Hit Point Increase(I would recommend a mix)
8 LMC or 7 LMC if you can grab 5 LMC elsewhere (helps a ton to spam specials)
2 of whatever else my imbuer could fit onto to resists.

The ring and bracelet were:

Ring
+13 Necromancy (stopped at 86) 99 for vamp form.
+12 Fire Resist
+13 HCI
+10 DCI
+Whatever I could fit in damage increase

Bracelet
+13 Fire Resist (25 combined to counteract Vamp Form)
+13 HCI
+10 DCI
+22 DI
+Whatever I could fit in Dex Bonus

With this suit my stats were somewhere around:

110HP/160Stam/70Mana
26 HCI
45 DCI (Quiver of Infinity - 5/Ring and Bracelet - 20/AoG - 20)
32 DI or some other pathetic amount
35 SI
35 MI

I took this suit in vamp form and basically sat in the middle of the painted caves with a bag of sending and let the trogs come to me and die. 400-450 a kill and with EoO you can just loot corpses nonstop with your soul seeker. I saved up a few mil this way and purchased M&S glasses and developed an LJ/Carpenter to one day make Woodland armor. If you are raising an imbuer as well you can collect backpacks full of the junk they drop and unravel them whenever you get a full bag (bout 70-80 items). Lots of residue and some essences.

I was able to make different slayers with my imbuer and when I made an air ele slayer I started farming Unbound Energy Vortexes with that suit and while not the best option, it is possible and takes about 5 mins a kill but great for farming relic frags to imbue the good stuff, also scored a 20 HCI and 20 DCI ring but it is cursed/-100 luck with other crap on there.

With the right weapon and jousting the heavy hitters I could take out things like champ spawns, Rikktor and Paragon Balrons were no problem. I recently crafted my woodland suit and imbued/enhanced and its a whole new level of easy. I do not have the resources to make perfect woodland pieces but I got lucky with a few HCI and DI ones.

I plan to try out dreadhorn with my brother in the next few days. We tried messing around with the fairies and getting keys and found it to be pretty easy. He runs an ABC Archer and hits like a truck. We got a little tank/dps thing going on here.

Hope this helps.

 

[Mac]

Obsidian and Gorbs,

Thanks for the input guys, I am going with the elf, (i have done the quests, but there's something wrong as it won't change me into an elf, even the GM didnt know what was up and is kicking the problem upstairs). Starting to look into fey legs and how they might fit into the scheme of things (yeah right, like I have a actual scheme in mind), but I am trying.

Rhale,
Damn I liked reading what you wrote. Kinda gave me the heart to go on. I've spent a large portion of the day making friends with the trogs in my present suit (definitely not anything to talk about, its not made for a sampire), and have found that as long as I pay attention, its not difficult to stay alive and collect good money and lots of stuff to unravel for my imbueing. I have only just started the imbueing skill a short while ago, and have raised it to 55 simply but unraveling. Easy gig so far, but I know the best is to come, muhahah. The fun work comes real soon. I'm still reading and trying to make sure I understand about weights etc.

To all 3 of ya, thanks for the quick and concise reponses, it is most appreciated.

Mac

 

[Gorbs]

You're welcome. Glad to hear you are having fun. Just a quick note on suits and training - if all you are doing is farming for gold you don't really need a great suit. For Trogs I think you only care about having 70 physical resist. Anything else is wasted. I liked farming Miasma for loot to unravel while training imbuing. On that encounter you only need 70 physical and 70 poison resist (but avoid any patrolling reptalons).

 

[Mac]

Thanks Gorbs,

I remember back in the day my tamer just had to have a Reptalon, and Miasma was just a fun diversion for a few of us while we hunted for the RepPet. I'll be going back there with my Sampire....soon I hope.

Another question for everyone. Want to make sure I have my head on straight. There are times, at least for a newbie Sampire, that I want resist on my toon. If I use resist, I should be switching it out for Anatomy and not with Tactics. I know I read the answer somewhere (can't find it now), and when I was checking damage calcs over at UOGuide, it seemed to bear this out. Is this correct?

 

[NuSair]

Yes, you want to keep Tactics, because you can't use your specials without it.

 

[NuSair]

I look at a basic sampire suit as this:
all 70s after vampiric embrace (70/95/70/70/70)
45 HCI
45 DCI (unless you are running 100+ parry)
25 HPI
40 LMC

At least enough mana to AI twice in a row (like 40 or so) without leaching anything.

Can you go with less than this? Sure- would I? no, not really.

I look at the artifacts I want to use first, then sort out of the rest of the stats.

 

[Rhale27]

Thanks Gorbs,

I remember back in the day my tamer just had to have a Reptalon, and Miasma was just a fun diversion for a few of us while we hunted for the RepPet. I'll be going back there with my Sampire....soon I hope.

Another question for everyone. Want to make sure I have my head on straight. There are times, at least for a newbie Sampire, that I want resist on my toon. If I use resist, I should be switching it out for Anatomy and not with Tactics. I know I read the answer somewhere (can't find it now), and when I was checking damage calcs over at UOGuide, it seemed to bear this out. Is this correct?

Glad my post helped! I found it tough sometimes to keep going but it does pay off. It takes some work and the gear definitely helps, but playstyle can also help you take on the big baddies at a little less then "perfect" sampire gear. Things like knowing when to run and use confidence/close wounds and go back in swinging. Sounds like you are having fun and that is the main part

You are correct on the resist for anatomy type of switch. Tactics gives you more bonus damage for the same amount of skill points.

120 Tactics = 170%
100-120 Anatomy = 60-80%ish? Not exactly sure here.

Some fights resist will make your life much easier and for some you need none at all. There are also a few people I know who swear by Resist over Anatomy because their template has no other need for Anatomy(no healing). I run a similar kind of template(For exacts see Lynk's thread) but am still reworking some skills. The best thing to do would be to just try it out and see if the convenience of resist is worth the loss in damage.

Imbuing is a fun thing but can be kind of confusing to fully understand. I've been doing it for a little and at 112 imbuing I can finally crank out some decent weps that carry Slayer/HML/HSL/SSI/and at least 30 DI. Sure my success rate is around 4% for the 30DI, but with how easy it is to farm essence it doesn't bother me too much. This only gets better the more you unravel an imbue though.

NuSair nailed it on the head, those are the basics you want to make your suit and life much easier. He also has great examples in other threads with pictures of suits he has made. Think the thread is called Sampire in Plate.

Good luck and keep us posted on how it is going!

 

[NuSair]

Just a quick comment- I am doing a spider spawn right now-

I flop in and out resist based on the champ I am doing.

I like having resist for undead(Neria), deamon(Semidar), abysmal(Abysal Infernal) and currently undecided on spider. Rest- I prefer anatomy- I think

 

[Gorbs]

I like resist over anatomy for primevil lich as well

 

[Obsidian]

I use resist for spawns and monsters that cast necro spells. Blood Oath will be the end of you otherwise. So resist for Doom, Undead Spawn, and Primeval Lich. I use anatomy on the rest for increased damage output which translates into greater life leech healing.

And yes, you always leave tactics. You flip flop anatomy and resist. I also use protection on my anatomy sampire. My resist sampire (yes, I have one of each) does not run protection.

This is the template I am using on my 2 Atlantic Sampires:

120 Swords
120 Bushido
120 Tactics
120 Anatomy or Resist
99 Necromancy
81 Chiv (usually augmented via a jewel)
60 Parry

 

[Mac]

Thanks Folks,

Ya'll have been a great help.

I made comment earlier about not getting the heritage quest to work, so I thought I would give ya the answer on how to get it to work.

Seems that if you are doing an old classic quest and it doesn't work correctly while you are in EC...do the quest in the classic client and NOT in EC. I switched over to the Classic client for the end of the quest (getting Darius to approve the switch to elf, it was suggested by a GM last night) and I'm now an elf. Just an FYI.

Thanks again, and if ya think of something else that will help, give a holler.

Mac