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It's Toreador without a doubt. Auspex+Celerity is the ultimate bullet hell killing machine. Malkavians are alright but there's really not much point in playing one for firearms when Obsfucate and Melee is right there.
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Nov 25, 2013 16:38
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The place that guns really shine is that one sidequest in Hollywood. gently caress trying to do that one with melee weapons, and even with guns I have to make 2/3 attempts before succeeding. Romero, you can go to hell.
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Nov 25, 2013 16:43
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gatz posted:You're right. I didn't even notice that. Fun vampire crossover trivia fact: Darling Violetta did the theme from Angel.
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Nov 25, 2013 16:52
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I tried doing a maxed out gun run once with a Toreador. It featured the easiest endgame I've ever gone through. The final boss fight lasted less than 10 seconds.
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Nov 25, 2013 16:58
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Captain Oblivious posted:It's Toreador without a doubt. Auspex+Celerity is the ultimate bullet hell killing machine. Yep. Toreador and guns is my preferred style. Celerity is pretty much the best skill. You can also do pretty well with celerity and a melee weapon for when you're low on ammo or don't have a good gun available. It works for everything.
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Nov 25, 2013 17:53
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Feinne posted:Fun vampire crossover trivia fact: Darling Violetta did the theme from Angel. http://www.discogs.com/Various-Vampire-The-Masquerade-Redemption-Soundtrack/release/1662572 They also had a song on the Redemption soundtrack. Why Redemption bothered to have an official soundtrack consisting of songs that never played during the game is a mystery to me. Psion posted:Yep. Toreador and guns is my preferred style. Celerity is pretty much the best skill. Celerity with guns? Explain your playstyle to me a little more.
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Nov 25, 2013 18:28
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Gun builds in Bloodlines are similar to mages in DnD. Weak in the early- to mid-game but incredibly powerful by the end. It's not even so much because early guns are bad (though the .38 is terrible), but because your Ranged feat needs to be 5+ before the accuracy and damage start becoming respectable. Compare this to melee weapons which can be decent even when your skill is very low. Funnily enough, the humble Glock is a pretty decent weapon in the mid-game. Its good rate of fire and absurd ammo capacity make it very useful in the game's most infamous dungeon.
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Nov 25, 2013 18:38
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gatz posted:Celerity with guns? Explain your playstyle to me a little more. With celerity, your guns speed up with you. So you can fire a whole lot of bullets, very quickly, and keep away from enemies. Toreador also get auspex which is "press button for more gun damage."
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Nov 25, 2013 18:56
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In my experience, Celerity is way, way more important for a ranged build than Auspex is. Auspex 2-3 only gets you 1 extra point in ranged, which is pretty negligible, whereas Celerity is useful from the get-go for shooting fools and avoiding melee. Later on, high Celerity also lets you dodge bullets. While the Toreador are better straight-up gun users than the other clans, the ability of Tremere to have other combat options should not be underestimated. From the time you get the Glock, the main limitation with firearms is the expense, not the ability to deal damage. Thaumaturgy 4 gets you a low-to mid range spell that can one-shot most humans in the game and replenishes your blood points, so you can save your ammunition for the bigger threats. Having Blood Shield doesn't hurt your survivability either, although Celerity is probably more effective overall in that regard. Samuel Clemens posted:Funnily enough, the humble Glock is a pretty decent weapon in the mid-game. Its good rate of fire and absurd ammo capacity make it very useful in the game's most infamous dungeon. drat straight. Being able to two- or three-shot the mooks there is pretty nice. If any of you readers out there want to build a ranged character, just remember to crouch and they'll be pretty easy to hit. Caustic Soda fucked around with this message at 19:02 on Nov 25, 2013 |
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Nov 25, 2013 18:58
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wiegieman posted:With celerity, your guns speed up with you. So you can fire a whole lot of bullets, very quickly If I was aware of that when I did a playthrough as a Torreador specializing in ranged weapons and auspex before starting the LP, I would have had it a lot easier.
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Nov 25, 2013 18:59
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gatz posted:If I was aware of that when I did a playthrough as a Torreador specializing in ranged weapons and auspex before starting the LP, I would have had it a lot easier. Yeah, celerity is basically The Matrix source game that never was.
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Nov 25, 2013 19:02
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gatz posted:If I was aware of that when I did a playthrough as a Torreador specializing in ranged weapons and auspex before starting the LP, I would have had it a lot easier. Me too. I was pretty disappointed with Auspex' effect on my damage output. Pretty handy for spotting enemies, though.
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Nov 25, 2013 19:03
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Blood Shield made that one area much more manageable to the point where I legitimately made it through. I haven't replayed the game again to really try out other clans, but Tremere is definitely one of the classes to play for beginners. Blood Magic is rad.
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Nov 25, 2013 19:05
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Accordion Man posted:Blood Shield made that one area much more manageable to the point where I legitimately made it through. I haven't replayed the game again to really try out other clans, but Tremere is definitely one of the classes to play for beginners. Blood Magic is rad. My first playthrough was with a Tremere. Blood magic is overpowered as gently caress. Even the high blood cost doesn't offset it.
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Nov 25, 2013 19:06
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Totally. Tremere is ridiculously overpowered. Damage, shielding, and blood returned to you as you deal damage so you can continue to shield more/deal more damage. That's totally balanced! Toreador, though - I was really surprised when you did clan votes at the start of this thread to see Toreador strike out (I think? I don't remember one vote for it) ... I guess if you didn't know about how Celerity is basically magic bullet time nobody else did either? Caustic Soda posted:In my experience, Celerity is way, way more important for a ranged build than Auspex is. Agreed. Auspex is nice, the aura thing is useful for targeting and all (especially when you're flying around at Mach 2 with Celerity 5) but it's the secondary skill. Celerity is definitely the one to pump up first. There's an enemy you fight coming up soon-ish in the LP somewhat known for being frustratingly hard when you're low level. When we get there I've got a story about how Celerity trivialized that fight so hard. Psion fucked around with this message at 19:22 on Nov 25, 2013 |
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Nov 25, 2013 19:12
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Samuel Clemens posted:Gun builds in Bloodlines are similar to mages in DnD. Weak in the early- to mid-game but incredibly powerful by the end. It's not even so much because early guns are bad (though the .38 is terrible), but because your Ranged feat needs to be 5+ before the accuracy and damage start becoming respectable. Compare this to melee weapons which can be decent even when your skill is very low. I have ran through Bloodlines as every clan and have never once played a ranged character. Now I think I'm going to.
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Nov 25, 2013 19:42
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Here's a random moderately spergy infodump about Celerity in oWoD tabletop: Normally, in tabletop, you take one action per turn. You have the option of taking multiple actions, but the penalty is pretty severe - if you want to take two actions, you take a penalty of -2 dice to your first action, and -3 dice to your second. If you wanted to take three actions, you'd take a penalty of -3 dice to your first, -4 to your second, and -5 to your third, and so forth. By default, this is the only way you can attack multiple times or both attack and defend in one round. Celerity changes that - when you spend blood to activate Celerity, you gain additional actions for the turn equal to the number of dots in Celerity. One dot of Celerity gives you a second action without penalty, 3 dots of celerity gives you three additional actions, all at your full number of dice. Much as Potence allowed you to perform any number of supernatural physical feats essentially for free, Celerity serves as the single biggest combat modifier in the game - a vampire with a couple pips in Celerity facing down against a vampire who doesn't have any (all else being equal) will probably win the fight hands-down, all else being even remotely equivalent. Working from my vaguely fuzzy memories, later editions attempted to balance Celerity by requiring more blood to activate it - multiple actions requiring multiple blood points to be spent - but the advantage of having more actions than your opponent is very difficult to overcome in the short term, and combats involving Celerity tend not to last more than one or two rounds.
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Nov 25, 2013 19:59
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I used guns my first playthrough because gently caress if Christof Trustfundsman the Ventrue was actually going to touch the peasants circumstance demanded he kill. It sucked in the beginning but by the end I was slaughtering everything and everyone with pinpoint accurate automatic fire. And I was even playing a terrible clan for it and never even bothered putting points in my Disciplines, just advancing my mundane 'human' stats and barely using powers.
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Nov 25, 2013 20:27
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Caustic Soda posted:In my experience, Celerity is way, way more important for a ranged build than Auspex is. Auspex 2-3 only gets you 1 extra point in ranged, which is pretty negligible, whereas Celerity is useful from the get-go for shooting fools and avoiding melee. Later on, high Celerity also lets you dodge bullets.
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Nov 25, 2013 20:50
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Pickled Tink posted:The thing Auspex does not get enough credit for is that it primarily boosts your Wits, which directly feeds into your defence stat. Having it running, especially when you have pumped it up, reduces the amount of damage you take considerably. That is useful, yes, but outside of boss fights I'd rather kill my enemies fast or dodge their attacks than tank them. Really, Auspex does a number of things moderately well, but none so well that it really stands out. It's never useless, but rarely a game-changer either.
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Nov 25, 2013 20:58
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Caustic Soda posted:That is useful, yes, but outside of boss fights I'd rather kill my enemies fast or dodge their attacks than tank them. Really, Auspex does a number of things moderately well, but none so well that it really stands out. It's never useless, but rarely a game-changer either. I loved the boost for Hacking. Saves you a few EXP there(though I remember most codes by heart by now)
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Nov 25, 2013 21:04
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Eh. Given that hacking is nothing but an xp tax, and you can just memorize the codes, I feel absolutely no remorse about just looking them up on the net. Saving the xp for more interesting skills. If I could skip on lockpicking, I'd do that too. The dialogue skills, combat skills and Disciplines are much more enjoyable, IMO.
Caustic Soda fucked around with this message at 21:24 on Nov 25, 2013 |
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Nov 25, 2013 21:19
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Olesh posted:Working from my vaguely fuzzy memories, later editions attempted to balance Celerity by requiring more blood to activate it - multiple actions requiring multiple blood points to be spent - but the advantage of having more actions than your opponent is very difficult to overcome in the short term, and combats involving Celerity tend not to last more than one or two rounds. In V20, Celerity was actually improved slightly over the original Masquerade printing. Just having Celerity added a die per rank to every Dexterity-based skill roll you made. By spending a BP in a turn, you could trade in those dice for extra actions on a 1 for 1 basis. So with Celerity 4, you could get 2 extra actions with 2 bonus Dex dice. Those actions can only be physical, so no using Dominate over and over until it succeeds. :p In Requiem, the New WoD Vampire line, Celerity was very much a defensive power. When activated with a BP, you subtract your Celerity rating from all dice pools to attack you. Second, add your Celerity rating to your Initiative for that turn. Finally, your Speed is multiplied by Celerity+1 (remember to double that final speed if you run in that turn  ).
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Nov 25, 2013 21:25
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Vicissitude posted:In Requiem, the New WoD Vampire line, Celerity was very much a defensive power. When activated with a BP, you subtract your Celerity rating from all dice pools to attack you. Second, add your Celerity rating to your Initiative for that turn. Finally, your Speed is multiplied by Celerity+1 (remember to double that final speed if you run in that turn There is even a Covenant-specific Devotion (special Disciple derivative) that turns the Speed bonus from 1 vitae/turn to 1 vitae/hour. So you could run your little Obfuscated heart out alllllllll night.
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Nov 25, 2013 21:29
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Olesh posted:the advantage of having more actions than your opponent is very difficult to overcome in the short term, and combats involving Celerity tend not to last more than one or two rounds. This is true in a lot of systems. Any edition of Shadowrun comes to mind, but even in D&D 3e the fight went to whomever's side got Haste off first. More consecutive actions -> better than.
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Nov 25, 2013 22:33
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IMJack posted:This is true in a lot of systems. Any edition of Shadowrun comes to mind, but even in D&D 3e the fight went to whomever's side got Haste off first. More consecutive actions -> better than. Even in first and second edition Haste kicked all kinds of rear end, and its only downside was that it sapped a year of life from whomever it affected (and even then not many people paid attention to that particular rule).
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Nov 25, 2013 22:49
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Kacie posted:The Santa Monica apartment has a poster for Lacuna Coil, who does at least one song on the soundtrack (sadly, we won't hear it until the end of the game). I believe the other bands that have songs in the soundtrack are also featured on posters throughout the game.
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Nov 25, 2013 22:51
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LeJackal posted:There is even a Covenant-specific Devotion (special Disciple derivative) that turns the Speed bonus from 1 vitae/turn to 1 vitae/hour. So you could run your little Obfuscated heart out alllllllll night. The Assamites have a Fortitude/Celerity combo discipline like that too. Costs a point of blood and lasts for one hour per Celerity but only applies to overland movement. And no stops either. If you stop for more than 10 minutes, the power ends.
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Nov 26, 2013 01:22
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Nov 26, 2013 03:40
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The actual Bloodlines thread is pretty much in torpor so maybe someone here would have some insight: I've got the WESP Basic Patch installed, but I cannot for the loving life of me get Histories to work. vchar_edit_histories "1" is in the Config.cfg file as it's supposed to be, but if I boot up the game no histories are selectable and checking the .cfg file reveals that vchar_edit_histories has been reset to 0. Seriously driving me nuts, googling is revealing nothing.
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Nov 26, 2013 03:59
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I remember reading in the changelog that histories were taken out of the basic patch.
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Nov 26, 2013 04:05
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gatz posted:I remember reading in the changelog that histories were taken out of the basic patch. God drat it WESP. Edit: Looks like he removed Histories from the Basic in the most recent iteration. Easy enough. God drat it WESP. Captain Oblivious fucked around with this message at 04:11 on Nov 26, 2013 |
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Nov 26, 2013 04:06
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Captain Oblivious posted:God drat it WESP. It's in the 8.8 changelog, so 8.7 should work. I'm not sure it's a big loss, though, histories seem like they were cut for a reason. There's not much there to be excited about.
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Nov 26, 2013 04:12
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gatz posted:It's in the 8.8 changelog, so 8.7 should work. I'm not sure it's a big loss, though, histories seem like they were cut for a reason. There's not much there to be excited about. Histories were always a handy bit of extra customization. Shuffling around Talents/Skills/Knowledges in their assorted priorities in particular was nice. Edit: It's really more an issue of it being kind of stupid to flat out remove the ABILITY to enable Histories.
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Nov 26, 2013 04:13
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Arguably, it shouldn't be in basic, since it's not really a 'bugfix' to enable histories. I suppose you could argue it either way but it makes some sense, at least, to keep that in Plus.
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Nov 26, 2013 04:21
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Psion posted:Arguably, it shouldn't be in basic, since it's not really a 'bugfix' to enable histories. I suppose you could argue it either way but it makes some sense, at least, to keep that in Plus. I'd honestly agree. It shouldn't be enabled by default in the Basic. What's mind boggling is that it's not just not enabled, but incapable of BEING enabled in the Basic patch under the most recent iteration. It's stripped out altogether. 
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Nov 26, 2013 04:35
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This seems like a good segway to talk about modding, and more specificially, about one of the most retarded internet slapfights I've ever watched. A Tale of Two Modders Once upon a time, there were two aspiring video game modders: Wesp, and Tessmage. Both of them saw the broken, awful mess that Bloodlines was at release a sought to fix it. They each independently developed a bugfix patch. By the time each realized that the other existed, the internet being what it is, hugbox communities had grown around each mod author. And because both mods made different changes (Tessmage's was mostly concerned with bugfixes, while Wesp was merging his bugfixes with his own rather questionable balance changes. Wesp's Plus version today is basically the only version he used to provide.). The normal community "this mod is better than that mod" bickering wouldn't have been so bad if both modders hadn't turned it into a dick waving competition. And Tessmage probably shouldn't have started calling his the "True" patch. Now that we are several years removed, Wesp's patch has won out, especially now that he offers a bugfix only version that has (mostly) kept out the worst of his sperg. And Tessmage runs an adult-only website and forum where he hosts all his naked video game character mods- and the "True" patch.
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Nov 26, 2013 14:55
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Even VtM modding stories sound like WoD lore.
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Nov 26, 2013 15:34
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TINA TURNER posted:Even VtM modding stories sound like WoD lore. It's almost like the guy who's spent almost ten years obsessively attempting to fix a video game might be a little bit weird.
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Nov 26, 2013 16:25
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I think I used Tessmage's True patch then switched over to WESP's bare bones version once he cut out his stupid worthless fanon. The VTMB games thread has delicious drama scoops buried in past posts and I'm too lazy to find them.wiegieman posted:Yeah, celerity is basically The Matrix source game that never was. So I can have Max Payne slo-mo in VTMB? I always moused over Celerity and figured it was too good to be true. Glad to hear otherwise though because I think my next playthrough will be Toreador. I usually went melee or mixed for most of the time then shooty for the end-game. Time for more dakka. 
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Nov 26, 2013 17:47
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This poster loves police brutality, but only when its against minorities!