Vampires?

[Endoperez]

She's a pretender who can kill most Bane Lord thugs, without equipment, most of the time and will come right back after she loses thanks to immortality. If she kills even 5% of your army every turn, as she can, you'll slowly diminish. Agarthan undead Oracle pretender doesn't fly, but is immortal and used in a similar fashion.

[Nerfix]

Oh, the Agarthan lich is a monster. He's pretty lumbering and needs equipment but the HP's are mean. And Agartha can easily forge (on EA and MA) the Fireshield - Elemental Armor - Boots of Quickness Holy Trinity of SC Equipment. On LA they can kit him with Lucky Pendant and Amulet of Antimagic.

[UninspiredName]

I take offense to you saying Blood and Death are useless! They're my favorite paths! (Also the main reason I use VQ in the first place) I always found water to be the more useless school. (And in Agartha, I have no shortage of Earth mages)

[Nerfix]

Certainly they are not useless paths, but they are useless when it comes to combat buffs.

Their strenghts are elsewhere.

And poor Water and Fire have always been at the bottom of the barrel.

[FrankTrollman]

Actually, no, you couldn't. It took a mix of paths that would allow buffs that could be afforded by rare few pretenders, namely VQ, GK, rainbows and nagas.

Vampire Queens are not rainbow mages. They have a pathcost of 50. There is literally nothing that you can afford on a VQ that you can't get cheaper on a Prince of Death.

You're talking about Earth/Water/Air/Fire/Astral spells - a VQ gets none of that natively. Now, she can buy it. But that costs 250 points just for the first pathlevel in each. You can do better with a Phoenix, because even though his Pathcost is higher, he already has Fire and Air - and 3 times 80 is still less than 5 times 50.

The VQ unstoppability is a myth. It was started by Norfleet, and he suckered a lot of experienced people to use a lot of Vampire Queen Strategies. And if you have a lot of experienced players playing a disproportionate amount as Vampire Queens, they'll... gasp... win a lot of games.

But it doesn't have anything to do with the vampire queen being any good at anything. She's not even a second rater. She's a bad god, she really isn't good.

If she kills even 5% of your army every turn, as she can, you'll slowly diminish.

Right. Because she's immortal in so many places with her big bad Dominion score of 1.

Seriously, where are all these points coming from? She has a pathcost of 50, starts with her primary magic irrelevent to super combatanting. What's the killer app?

The legend of the unstoppable Vampire Queen fighter is huge. But it's not real. No matter how much you mess up your dominion, the Vampire Queen just isn't an efficient platform to stave peoples' heads in with. You'd be better off with a Risen Oracle, or a Great Mother even.

-Frank

[Nerfix]

I remember that she first had a significantly lower pathcost. Like 20.

If that's not true, then I'll apologize for arguing for nothing.

[UninspiredName]

Right. Because she's immortal in so many places with her big bad Dominion score of 1.

It's really, really easy to boost Dominion...

[Corwin]

Nerfix said:
Certainly they are not useless paths, but they are useless when it comes to combat buffs.

Their strenghts are elsewhere.

Regarding Blood - I agree. As for Death - Soul Vortex is a great buff. It became even better for Dom3 , due to the nerfing of life drain weapons.

[Nerfix]

But Soul Vortex is hard to get.

[Action]

Nerfix said:
Oh, you seem to ignore that VQ was and is IMMORTAL meaning that she could joyously ignore the possibility of death in friendly dominion AND afflictions!

This really can't be emphasized enough.

One lucky crossbow can make your Olm useless for a looong time.

The ability to heal your afflictions is just incredible.