Vampire Lord form is way worse than it should be for how cool it looks

[EbonyWarrior]

Okay so I just did my first Dawnguard playthrough in like six years and I forgot how disappointing Vampire Lord actually is in practice. The form looks insanely cool - like genuinely one of the best transformations in any RPG - but the second you transform you realize it's basically a worse melee fighter with a couple gimmick spells.

Compare that to Werewolf which just lets you go feral and murder everything, or even to Morrowind's Vampire forms which at least had that weird charm where you were genuinely fragile and had to play differently. Vampire Lord just feels clunky. The melee attacks are slow, the spells don't hit hard enough to justify the form, and half the time you're better off just staying human and using regular spells anyway.

The flight is cool for like two minutes then you realize you can't actually do anything while flying so it's just movement. And Corpse Curse is fun but doesn't actually change how you approach combat.

Am I just building it wrong or does anyone else feel like they wasted the Vampire Lord perk points?

 

[RiftenWanderer]

Yeah I get this. The form looks incredible but it's kind of a trap - you dump perks into it and then in an actual fight you're just standing there swinging slow as hell while a draugr deathlord is wailing on you. Werewolf at least gives you raw damage and speed so you feel like a threat immediately.

I think the flight thing is the biggest letdown honestly. It should've been way more useful in combat - like being able to dive bomb or strafe enemies - but instead it's just "press this button to slowly hover over to that cliff." Cool for traversal I guess but in dungeons it's worthless.

That said, I found Vampire Lord more fun when I stopped trying to make it a primary combat form and just used it for the utility stuff - the Drain Life spell is actually pretty solid for healing, and if you're doing a pure magic build the spell damage perks can work out. But yeah, if you're expecting it to hit like Werewolf does you're gonna be disappointed. Werewolf is just objectively the better power fantasy.

Not sure if it's a balance thing or just how it ended up, but they definitely could've given Vampire Lord faster attack speed or made the spells scale better. The visual design deserved better.