Trying to puzzle out the sampire...

[EscherReality]

After hearing folks rage about the effectiveness of the sampire template I went out and built myself one. After putting in a fair amount of time playing it I've come to the conclusion that one of two things is the case - either I'm missing something or folks are talking it up significantly beyond it's abilities. I'm inclined to think I'm missing something.

I see the usefulness of vampire form to any warrior - life leech, immunity to most poisons, and the other benefits are extremely useful. The samurai portion of the template doesn't seem to be giving the benefits I'd want out of 100-120 skill points.

Lightning strike is useful, but doesn't strike me as a "must have" after using it extensively. Spamming it every strike is a significant drain on one's mana.

Evasion... sounds useful, but seems to fall flat whenever I use it. I burn mana but still get the snot beaten out of me.

The five percent parry bonus with a two-handed weapon is a decent benefit, but it takes the place of another item slot and/or the ability to drink potions.

Perfection... seems to add little to no damage in battle. I'm getting the "you have gained perfection"/"you have Achieved Perfection" messages, but the damage isn't going up. I don't *think* I have enough DI on my gear without it to put me at or over the cap. I could very well be wrong, however.

In short, I find myself wondering how this use of skill points is superior to say... maxing out tactics and enjoying a damage bonus every swing, another item slot to shore up your resists or other mods, and cheaper special moves. What am I missing with this template that is touted as the premiere PvM template out there?

For reference, the template and gear I'm using is as follows:

120 mace fighting
110 parry
110 bushido
110 anatomy
100 healing
54 necromancy
85 chivalry
remainder in tactics

Gear is:
Stormgrip
Brightsight lenses
Violet Courage
Fey Leggings
Gorget and sleeves are high-resist crafted armor
Ring/bracelet devoted to stat bonuses and DCI

Thanks in advance for your replies.

-E.R.

 

[imported_Vyrquenox]

What you're missing is some midnight bracers (cursed ones even to stay at home) and the gimp weapon. Yes, you need a high mana leech ssi ornate axe or such, or some other type. With the right one, my samurai vamp can maintain mana through his ls/evade spamming. However, I find him tiresome as I don't really have that perfect weapon and I do much better just running vamp on my paladin swordman. I get the life leech poison resist and mana regen and with my suit (no supreme artis except a cincture, just quiver brightsight royal legs museum order shield heart of the lion stormgrip primer the bt kryss collection soul seeker and tactics/hci/rsesit ring and tactics dci/hci di ring I run 42 hci 45 dci at 90 base tactics /113 with jewels 100 anatomy 120 sword 100 parry 104.9 magic resist (seems to cut it on about anything pvm i do)90 or so heal 70 chiv 34.1 necro)
just keep an insured set of arcane boots on yourself.
would love to get dex to 140 but i sold off jackal's i got from doom for 120 mage scroll and cash. rest of equipment is crafted mr/resist stuff, with vampire and the 7 mr on my brightsights/gorget/arms I keep about all the mana i need. I do seem to be able to solo most anything worth the time (pulled off dark father in doom but not worth the dancing and amount of time) have done dreadhorn solo doubt I am gimped enough to safely play that game either again was the run of my life....but how much do you want out of a dexxer? At any rate, on this one i dropped bushido off for magic resist and have a much easier and still quite capable char to play, have been fighting invasion with the best of them, soloing beserkers at times (which definitely doesn't use vamp leech as a help) and standing in middle of swarm using leech to stay alive. If you want the vamp bonus, this may be the way to go without worrying over all the samurai stress. Surely with invasion going on a cursed set of bracers can come your way, not as nice as normal ones but works.

note since vampire screws your fire resist, you have to play with the crafted parts and resists on jewels even with brightsights to get your 70, a must have. I run 70/70/63/68/69
I've gone through a lot of dicking around with gear getting him to this point, with samurai it can be even more of a pain. I haven't had access to most of the artis and so there are surely other and better combinations but mine seems pretty doable for anyone.

 

[The Real John]

It realy matters what your trying to do really its not the same any more after the nerf were every one would just use evasion none stop and ls. Also if your useing bush and parry you want 120 of both every little bit counts. I think so any ways. Also the key to it is also getting to honor it makes a big deference inless your useing a slayer weapon and eoo. Its all just realy matters on what you want to do and how much your willing to spend playing it to get used to it.

As for the hype I think that died down alot because every ones afraid of more nerfs.

 

[imported_Farsight]

I've decided to convert my "solo" character to a sampire-of-sorts and have run him the last few days to test him out, and this is my conclusion:

The samurai-vampire template is only really good if you're hunting really big things. Against balrons or dark fathers (balrons in Ilshenar, DF's in Magincia), my sampire is clearly the character to bring. However, against cyclopses (or other lower-to-mid level mobs, my samurai-with-tactics is hands down the better character, since he can kill them in 3-4 swings of his soul seeker while the sampire doesn't even get close to perfection against them, making the process a lot slower.

But once perfection is gained against an opponent, it takes an amazing amount of other things to even make my sampire worry about the damage. When I somehow managed to get a dark father solo on Magincia, I finally had to break away when I was targetted by 4 rotting corpses and a lich lord. I was completely shocked to see even the deadly poisons of the corpses not even phasing me. Also, the hit rate improves a lot with perfection, making healing an extremely fast process.

By the way, my Sammy, who is still in the making, has the following template:
115 swords (from soulstone)
70-something bushido (goal 115-120)
50-something healing (goal 90)
70-something anatomy (goal 100)
90 necromancy (+grimoire for the last 10)
100 spirit speak
50-something chivalry (goal 75)

And until now, the chivalry has been next to useless.
He runs with darkwood armor and HCI/DCI jewels.

There are better templates for the sampire, but the one I'm working on will allow me to work with other people as needed. I figure I'll drop the rest (35 I believe) of the points into tactics, then drop necromancy to a more reasonable level to get tactics up to 70. There are some places where the ability to whirlwind is a true godsend.

But the goal of the sampire isn't to do more damage faster than the others, but rather to be nearly impossible to kill once he starts swinging.

edit - Apparantly, the first dark father I fought was a fluke or really weak, since I can't seem to reproduce those results on a DF. I did manage to solo kill a lot of paragon things that I wouldn't dream about with my non sammy warrior. The balron managed to kill me once, but I got him in the end.