In my effort to get back into content design after my work finally ended and I have some free time, here's me returning to my perk ideas. No changes yet, but that's because they've been waylaid by work/DG. Let me know what you think!
As copied from my original post on the development page:
As most anyone who cares enough about vampires to follow this thread knows, DG will be introducing perks. Not any old perks, boring ones! Ones only applicable to vampire lord form! Stat boosts and a few one dimensional spells! Sounds pretttty bland, I say. BSR will be replacing this perk tree with one a little more...hearty. More specifically, behold!
http://i.imgur.com/og1n8.png
Boy oh boy do I suck at paint without a mouse. And with it, but that's neither here nor there. What IS here is the following:
-You gain a "point" (like one handed or smithing) for every (50+5P)% blood damage you soak up. P=your current pointage.
-You gain a "perk dot thing" (you know what I mean >_<) every 10+5(E) kills you make, where E is the # of perks you've unlocked in the tree.
And of course, the perks themselves. They correspond to that abomination of a picture up there, and the numbers following each one is the necessary pointage you need to access it.
1. Lust for Power: Upon reaching starving, you have 10/15/20/25/30 seconds to satiate yourself, or you’ll turn into the vampire lord for 5/4/3/2/1 minutes. 0/20/40/60/80
2. Vitiate: Regression is now automatic should you meet the requirements. (30)
3. Transcendence: Vampire perk points can now be used as normal perk points. (30)
4. Umbral: Draining light from the area now restores 50% as much magica as it did before, in exchange for +20/30 to destruction, and sneak for 2 minutes. (70/90)
5. Bound in Blood: Casting Blood Rend now soul traps the first enemy it makes contact with, placing it in the correct sized gem. (65)
6. Symbiosis: Drain Life now also drain [whichever is highest between your magica or stamina], but requires [whichever is lowest between your magica or stamina] to maintain. Equal levels mean it acts as though there is no perk. Second level drains +1 per second of (random trait), lasting [(V*D)/2]x minutes, where V=vampire level and D=the duration of the drain in seconds. (15/40)
7. Congeal: Hearts are now harvestable for 1.5/2x as long. (30/60)
8. Addictive: Racials drained last for 1.5x as long, but cannot be overridden until they run out. (50)
9. Abstain: Your “Attack on Sight” levels are now lowered by 10/20 rank. (70/90)
10. Crepuscular: While under the effects of Darken, (night hours are now an hour longer at dawn/dusk each and animation triggering kill attacks at night refills half your health). (65)
11. Overkill: Killing via feeds now grants an extra temporary +[(100-Satiation)-(npc%)] health shield to your current maximum. Satiation is…well, satiation, and npc% is the percentage of health they had before the fatal feed. So if you have 80 satiation, and your target had 10% before you drained it all at once and killed them, you’d get an extra (100-80)-(10)=10 health added to your maximum until it’s knocked off by an attack. Second rank grants twice as large a shield. (15/40)
12. Familarity: Raising a thrall is now twice as likely (contingent on thrall success rates being added >_<) (30)
13. Bloodletting: Being hit with poison now subtracts 5 satiation from your current, but your weapon has that poison applied for the next 15 attacks. (50)
14. Corpse Curse: The exact same power from DG, usable only while a lord. (55)
15. Summon Gargoyle: The exact same power from DG, usable only while a lord. (25)
16. Vampiric Grip: The exact same power from DG, usable only while a lord. (25)
17. Mist Form: The exact same power from DG, usable only while a lord. (55)
Notifications
13 comments
Dante, yeah, these are just preliminary. I agree with you though, something about racial abilities seems to...specialized to have it's own perk slot affecting it.
your *8* really seems to have a drawback to it. Considering you can only use the racial once, being able to keep it 1.5 long, or 4.5 hours, would be nice, but if your forced to use it in lets say .002 hours, then for the next 4.498 hours, you cannot obtain another racial power, compared to the 2.98 hours you would have to wait without the perk.
Edit: was also thinking that since these are
"Vampire" perks and not just vampire lord, why not have it to where performing all the vampire activities give experience towards the perks. Not just killing, but feeding in general. Feeding would give a minimal amount of expereince. Attacking Feeding would give a boosted amount of experience, as would sneak feeding(though greater), and Killing by feeding would give a much higher amount of exp.
But I can explain it!
Ok. So, you start out on Lust for Power, which doesn't require any vampire points (the ones going from 1 to 100 in every other tree, and henceforth represented by a P), but it DOES require a perk dot (the things that you get when you level up in vanilla skyrim, here obtained by kills, only usable in the vampire tree, and represented henceforth by a D).
To activate Lust for Power(which is 1 on the tree), you must expend a D(as above, a perk dot). Now, since you don't get these Ds from normal leveling, you have to kill to get them. Since it's your first perk, you need to have 10 kills (as per the formula in the very first post of mine here) to get this D, which you then spend on Lust For Power to start the tree.
Then it gets...well, in my view, interesting. You essentially have 3 choices:
-Rush for Transcendence:
[indent]This would be the path that requires you to get Vitiate. To activate Vitiate, you need to have drained a total of 3675% health from people (formula in first post), which brings your P up to the needed 30 for Vitiate. You still need a D though, but since you've only unlocked one other perk in the tree (Lust for Power), you'd only need to get 15 more kills, or 25 total including those needed for L4P.
At this point, you would be at a disadvantage, since you would have Vitiate, which is, as you duly note, a negative.
However! You would also have direct access to Transcendence (since it's P requirement is only 30; same as Vitiate), and you'd have to make 20 more feed kills to get it (for 45 total). Once you get transcendence, you can go nuts, feeding on anyone and everyone and powering up your vanilla trees by using what used to be vampire-tree-only perk dots. You've rushed to power, having made 3675% drain and 45 total kill, but you'd also have Vitiate to keep you in check. [/indent]
OR
-Avoid Vitiate but Aim for Transcendence:
[indent]Say you wanted that power, but reallllly didn't want the negatives of Vitiate. Notice that this requires you to take a longer path. More specifically, you'd have to get 3 more perks until you reach Transcendence, as opposed to just the one of rushing. That's a minimum of 100 kills (much more than 45) to get the D for Transcendence activation. Not only that, but since the perks in the way of Transcendence in that round about path have P requirements of up to 70, you'd need to drain 15575% health, much much MUCH more than the 3675! But in the end, you'd have the power of Transcendence, none of the negatives of Vitiate, and at least 3 positive perks. [/indent]
OR
-Ignore Transcendence Altogether:
[indent]You could, of course, just forget about transcendence, saying it's not that important or that the other perks seem much more fun. Then you could just meander through the tree as you see fit, but you'd still have the P and D requirements for the perks along the way. You could go to the vampire lord roots of the tree, or the sides, or however you want. You'll have to check the formulas yourself depending on how much you'd want to get, but it could be anything.[/indent]
I hope that's better, or at least only mildly confusing. Key takeways being:
-Vampire perk dots, D, can only be used in the vampire tree until you get the Transcendence perk.
-D are acquired by kills
-The number after each perk in my first post is the perk level you need, P, to be able to spend a D on that perk and thusly activate it.
-P are gained like any other tree level, 1 to 100, by sapping certain percentages of health from people.
-You can get any perk which is connected to a perk you have, iff your P is high enough and you've a D to spend on it.
I really need to expand my acronym library
I NEVER use Vampire Lord form (turns my beautiful character into a horrid beast, with her skin exploding off of her when she turns into it, and it turning into blood and reforming into her normal skin when she turns back? no thank you....), but this looks very interesting! If only for the parts that have to do with normal vampirism. I just wish that Vampire Lord could be formed into a more lore-friendly version (as in, Earth lore)..... An intense, dark aura with bright red eyes or something. Just... No explosion of skin..... When you have skin exploding everywhere and a flabby flying monster as a result, it takes a turn from the sexiness of vampirism, to just plain gross....
If you look at the map, you only get that "perk" if you decide to rush to the ultimate power-perk: the ability to feed to get vanilla perk points. So, yes, you'll have the maintenance to worry about, as we discussed somewhere in the topic, but you'll have plenty of incentive to feed as much as possible. Course, it's possible to get the feed=vanilla perk points..perk normally, but it takes longer to go around the auto-regression.
...also I was kinda annoyed with how pointless the actual physical structure of most perk trees was...might as well have been a simple straight line...not this time! Now you'll actually have to think about it!