lamentation for a queen

[WraithLord]

"
Shed a tear with me
oh heartless creatures of the night
for the queen of vampires
reduced from former glory
now a pathetic mite
"

Now seriously (since my poetry suxxs), why oh why was the V. queen punished so?
Yeah, she was over-popular back in the day when dom-II was released. I can understand nerfing her a bit (though I might have preferred a different route towards balancing her) but this?- Her cost increased, her etherealness removed (together with all poor, now worthless, vamps).

So I thought, there must some niche she could be good for and set out to experiment on different SP settings. But, for the life of me, I couldn't find any role she could fill that wasn't much better covered by an existing pretender.

Awake SC - she's an immensely expensive joke. Even with forged armor and weapons she dies quite easily to indies.
Rainbow - too expensive.
Bless - same
and so on and so forth, I tried dormant and imprisoned scales pretender, its workable but the immobiles are much better at it and less expensive and VQ doesn't really bring and worthwhile bonus even when she does wake/break free.

I suggest to return etherealness to her and to all vamps. If not etherealness then something else to make the big bad scary thingis they should be. A slight decrease to VQ price may also go well.

I wonder if CB mode has any stance on this issue.

[archaeolept]

yah, she was smashed with the nerf bat. If she's not ethereal, she needs to be quite a bit cheaper.

[Endoperez]

Hasn't intrinsic mistform been suggested? #onebattlespell finally allows for it...

[Nikolai]

She should at least get CHEAP magic paths. She is a former human mage, why pay 50 points for path?! And 175 cost is retarded anyway, for a low hp, low stats, undead body.

In my book, she is like MA Ulm. Moral judgement. Teutons bad, vampires bad. I won't argue.

[Meglobob]

VQ and indeed normal vampires should get ethereal back or be given mistform, which would be better. Currently the VQ is just a unused pretender.

I only joined with dom 3 but wasn't VQ and vampires originally nerfed by one player dominating multiplayer with them? However, that player was later found out to be cheating by altering the trn/2h files to give himself extra money, gems and whatnot. So it was a totally unfair nerf to begin with? Or is this just dominions folklore?

[zlefin]

or they could be given some base protection.
many units in the game have some degree of base protection, but ethereal units almost always have none.
so i imagine when ehtereal was remoevd, they never changed the base 0 protection.
while humans may be that way, not so for vamps imho
give vamps some base prot.
i pumped vq a bunch in my greater gods mod, dunno how viable it is though, people haven't commented on it yet (maybe not played it enough yet).
i haven't played cb myself yet, so i don't know what that's done with her.

[Endoperez]

Vampire Queen was originally priced as a rainbow, and had rainbow paths. She was like immortal, flying Ghost King, for less than Ghost King is now, which means that she was really, really good.

She was also often used by a player who was found cheating, but she *was* good.

She can't do that any more, for a variety of reasons, but her price hasn't been adjusted.

[Dedas]

She is very thematic for LA Ulm but the price is not even close to reasonable.

[thejeff]

Base protection would need to be significant to help, especially with the base vampires. Commanders can be given armor, so it's less of an issue there.

The original VQ abuse was by a cheater, but I think consensus was that she was overpowered anyway. Her cost was boosted in later patches to Dom2, which most people seemed to see as a good balance.

Boosting the cost and removing etherealness in Dom3, was a huge nerf to something that wasn't really a problem anymore. Ethereal vampires in general could have used a bit of a nerf, since if you could get Vampire Lords summoning them, they'd accumulate without limits.

[cleveland]

thejeff said:
The original VQ abuse was by a cheater

Care to elaborate?