Among all the starting classes in Lunacid vampires are by far the most unique option. Here’s a quick list of unique mechanics from my fresh melee vampire playthrough.
Helpful quirks:
- Attacking most enemies in melee starts very slow health regen that’s interrupted by taking any damage. The same effect is also caused by having “water” status in the Sanguine Sea or when interacting with blood fountains in the Castle Le Fanu.
- Blood Wine restores both health and mana. The item is fairly rare though, I only got 3 during the entire game.
- Most doors in the Castle Le Fanu will be open without vampiric symbols.
Problematic quirks:
- Recovery from bleeding and blood magic is really, REALLY slow. It basically makes blood magic very annoying to use.
- Having “water” status in other locations deal constant damage, making the rat area in the sewers really dangerous.
- Holy water deals a lot of damage when used. It still removes statuses though!
Honestly, I didn’t really like how vampires are played - they felt like a challenge class actually. Their advantages are questionable while their disadvantages are disastrous. Also, their heal on melee attacks doesn’t stack with the blade of Ophelia which is a shame because I was relying on it for the second half of the game.
I didn’t see any posts about this game so decided to make the first step myself!
On my first playthrough I had a magic-focused character, and yeah, magic is extremely strong in this game! That’s why on my vampire run I decided to ban any attacking spells, to focus more on weapons.
My main problem with vampires was taking damage when using holy water - it’s really important in some areas like the prison (fucking dogs…), and not being able to just use it whenever I want was… annoying.
I don’t regret playing as a melee vampire, I learned to use blocking effectively (I basically never used it on my first playthrough) and the quirks were neat even if not really that impactful gameplay-wise.
Good luck with it!
I tried out every weapon I could. I leveled each weapon that I could as well, cause I liked seeing what I would get and how I liked playing with it.
I ended up being pretty balanced in play styles and how I leveled my character. Last time I played I was like level 150-something, just to see how high I could go. You start getting very diminishing returns around 120 or so, getting only one point per level, and each of those points only increasing a fraction of each skill.
I stopped leveling when I reached 100 since I was already so OP I didn’t see a reason to continue (also a pretty number).
It still took me awhile to get all the endings on the save file but at that point I was just running around destroying everything with my seemingly neverending mana pool.