Overpowered Bloodlines builds

[TheCowburner]

The most difficult clan to play as is probably Toreador. Ventrue doesn't sound hard to play as since they get the domination discipline. I have only played the game as Tremere and Malkavian though so I don't know.

Really? Because everything's still ridiculously easy if you just focus on Celerity.

A friend of mine played the game as a Ventrue and he didn't have any problems whatsoever. I guess the game simply was too easy.

 

[TheCowburner]

Try pop's difficulty mod. It will make you feel like the puny fledgeling you are. Ming Xiao destroyed me. I managed to kill her after I used almost all my ammo and bloodbags. It took me about 30 minutes.

Damn, I'll have to try that one.

 

[Murk]

The unmodded game is easy pickings no matter what you take and how crappy you build your character (unless you seriously just don't use any exp points at all).

Malk's are especially ridiculous for their obfuscate + dementation ability which at higher levels = insta-kill while remaining invisible and dementation's 3rd level = ranged insta-kill. The fact that you can use dementation in dialog for nearly every occasion also makes it unbalanced, and dementation trumps domination in terms of effects in dialog.

Like when dealing with the russian mob - heh, they do your dirty work for you while domination just gets 'em out of your way.

 

[Elwro]

Focus on firearms and the game will become difficult.

 

[Murk]

Focus on firearms and the game will become difficult.

Not really... I only played a melee-ist once and that was with the Malk, otherwise I've played a fire-arms only Ventrue, Tremere, and Gangrel (which kind of goes counter to Gangrel's disposition heh) and I never had a lick of trouble... I think maybe only Bishop Vic might pose a threat for lack of a decent gun at that point in the game - but you can use any 'distraction' discipline to stun him and run up to him with a shotgun and pointblank him in the face.

 

[Serious_Business]

Ah, another pwnd thread. Well, my job is done here.













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When will you niggaz learn

Jesus christ don't ever come back here you useless piece of shit this corner is the only one that's not so much fully stained with shit get the fuck back

Damn I hate this, there's threads for the usual bullshit and there's threads that should be taken with a minimum of seriousness, try not mixing both in doubt stay the fuck in general discussion, thanks.

Anyway, no the game is quite easy, with guns or whatever clan, not sure if you should be playing it for the gameplay but I get where you're coming from. What about mods? That might be your best chance, unapealing as it may sound.

 

[Azrael the cat]

Hate to break it to you, but Toreador with ranged focus is even easier than Toerador w/ melee. It's about the combination of disciplines: auspex is useless for melee but great for ranged if maxed, and whilst celerity by itself is better for melee, when combined with presence you end up with a 'easy-answer-for-everything' scenario: those humans who you'll fight en masse are easily slaughtered with the presence 'mass-stat-drain+paralyse' and automatic weapons. Boss fights are easily handled with celerity and auspex/ranged - most of the boss fights late game are easier at a distance and the celerity makes you virtually immune to any ranged attack they might have (dodging bullets for the win) - the auspex +3 to defence is nothing to be sniffed at in those fights either.

But mostly, Toreador is just insanely overpowered because it's 'natural' stat progression most evenly matches the game's progression. You can boost or persuasion very early, save xp big-time by having perception and wits at 2 while maxing auspex so you can still have 10/10 ranged/defence when needed, and that allows you to get great at sneaking/lockpicking by the time you need to for the Nosferatu quests (which yield a hefty chunk of extra xp). Basically the easiest and most intuitive means of xp progression becomes 'social, then stealth/hacking/lockpicks', and then you end up with your combat skills hitting maximum around the time the game turns shooter-fest.

On my current playthrough I'm reusing that build to check whether I was just overrating it before, and no I wasn't: I've just finished the Giovanni mansion, I've got 10/10 ranged/defence with auspex on, 4 in unarmed with only 1 point invested myself and the rest from research, Nines, etc (so easily enough to drink mid-fight so you can keep auspex on permanently in combat zones), 7 in sneaking, 8 in lockpicking (i.e. maxed to 10 with blood-buff), 4 in dodge (again, helped by research), 9 in research (I cheesed by using prior knowledge of book locations to ensure that I got the most from it - yeah shoot me for not mentioning that straight up) and 3 each in celerity and presence. Persuasion is at 9, which I'm pretty sure gets you through every worthwhile speech check in the game. All I really need to do now is level my other disciplines.

The game is too easy in a straight-out balance sense. Way too easy. But for some reason that has never bothered me like it does in some other - less easy - games. I think Troika did an excellent job of making you feel like you SHOULD be a badass, so it comes kind of naturally when you easily slaughter a room of surfer/drug-dealers on your first fight.

 

[Big Nose George]

"Sakraa"? My Nos is called Ted.

Ted is not gay enough.

 

[GarfunkeL]

Firearms users need the most cash for ammo but even then haggle is useless unless you don't actually put any points into ranged so you waste your full ammo compliment in every combat zone

 

[Azrael the cat]

Firearms users need the most cash for ammo but even then haggle is useless unless you don't actually put any points into ranged so you waste your full ammo compliment in every combat zone

I had that problem the very first time I played the game, but never again after that. There are several easily fixed errors that enable you to have an oversupply of cash as a firearms user. Firstly, don't make the (very understandable) newbie mistake of buying the best new guns as soon as they become available, with a few notable exceptions. Firstly, they are often unnecessary for the game's difficulty and you can do just fine by waiting to pick up the same weapons off enemies or in containers.

The ONLY time that a ranged character is faced with a serious need to urgently upgrade weaponry is when you first hit downtown and you can't just win every fight unarmed (with 1 or 0 point investment) and bloodbuff/disciplines. But you can easily get weapons that will leave you overpowered for ages to come by doing a couple of pretty easy quests: Fat Larry's quest and the one to take out the russian mafia. Those will land you with a glock pistol and your first automatic. The glock will be a perfectly good standard weapon with even a middling ranged stat until you get to the sewers. The automatic weapon is crap at crowd control (but you don't need crowd control until Chinatown at earliest, and you can get a free uzi at that point), BUT it is a great 'boss-killer' when used with celerity, because enemies can't fight back while being shot, and it has a large clip, so you can wtf-pwn most bosses by running up to point-blank, emptying the entire clip into them, running around a corner to reload, then emptying the next clip. Glock ammo is very cheap, and you'll be overloaded with so much free glock ammo from the Fat Larry and russian mafia guys (even if you just kill those that are easily taken down with stealth kills and ignore the others) that it should get you through the pestilence missions and the Malkavian mansion (first big shooty section of the main quest).

Also, it is ABSURDLY easy to get stealth up to a point where you can stealth-kill at least 50% (usually more like 70%) of enemies even as a ranged character with only a small investment in stealth itself (boosted through research, and the fact that most non-vamp and non-tmizizce-creation enemies are absurdly blind when it comes to detecting even low-stealth characters). You shouldn't need to waste your ammo glocking down every freak in the malk mansion - stealth kill most and shoot the rest.

There are rare times when it makes sense to lash out and BUY a weapon - but those times are rare. FOUND weapons will almost always be accompanied by a steady stream of 'found' ammo, where buying weapons ahead of time means you have to buy the ammo as well. The only time you should be BUYING weapons is from Mercurio's 'special request' selection, as some are VERY useful but not available free for a long time, and others aren't available for free at all. So if you like shotguns (like me) then buy the autoshotty, buy the swat sniper rifle (unless you prefer the unscoped Jamie Sue as your sniping weapon). You 'might' buy the Steyr - it IS the best weapon in the game (I'm excluding the flamethrower due to ammo issues), but it is expensive and can be found for free later.

But think about whether you really need that weapon for the next section. Sure you could buy the flamethrower from Mercurio before going to the society of Leapold. But surely the main use for that thing is on vamps, and particularly vamp bosses - why waste the money before going on a human-slaughtering mission when you'll get the thing for free at Hallowbrook where it will actually be useful? Why buy the Steyr or Uzi or ANY gun for taking out human enemies - unless they are carrying much better guns than you, you'll wipe the floor with them, so just take theirs isntead - and that way you'll be able to use the ammo you pick up from each kill.

The other big mistake is not working out the relative economies of each weapon. Pistols are in the game for a reason - they aren't just there for the fun of shooting something less powerful than the shotty and automatic rifle you've got next to them in your inventory. Pistol ammo is almost always very cheap, whereas automatic rifle ammo is pricey and autoshotgun/flamethrower ammo is insanely expensive (ok the desert eagle has expensive ammo too, but you should be swimming in cash by the time you get that - and don't pay money for the dumb thing, pick it up from the Giovanni boss's corpse after you slaughter his party guests and enrage him into making a personal appearance - has to be done before you go fight the chang brothers and get the sarcophagus, obviously). So use the pistols for picking off trash mobs, use automatic rifles for the 'cinematic' fights where you need to clear a large room of humans (chinatown is full of these - I'm thinking the warehouse fight and leaving Johnny's club as two examples), and use the autoshotty for the TWO things it is good at - taking out (a) the standard tmizizce creation (because they get in your face so fast, but explode with a point-blank shot from the SPAS) and (b) taking out bosses with high soak (very useful if you want to kill the flesh-eating Pisha after she gives you the artifacts, to my memory it is the only weapon that lets you kill her by emptying a single clip before she has time to use any disciplines or summon her zombies; your best choice for the first timizce boss fight (espec with celerity, as you want to get to point blank range and empty the whole clip); and decent for almost any vampire character in general).

Don't buy weapons that you'll get soon for free, kill trash mobs with cheap guns or guns that use the same ammo that they drop, and have a sensible variety of pistols/automatics/sniper/shotty weapons and you should never struggle for cash or ammo.