Are ESO's Vampires Getting Nerfed Again in High Isle?

Vampire players in the Elder Scrolls Online have been bombarded with constant changes to their skills ever since the somewhat poorly received Vampire rework in the Greymoor Expansion two years ago.

Therefore there will doubtless be some anxious vampire players concerned with what might be on the horizon in the upcoming High Isle update.

In this article we will look at what changes are coming according to the PTS Patch Notes, and also delve into the wider problems that Vampires have been having over the past two years.

Most of the changes to Vampire since the rework in Greymoor were nerfs to a skill line that has already sharply declined in popularity since it was reworked, leading some Vampire players to declare that the skill line is on the verge of being completely dead. In fact, in the eight major patches since Greymoor (including the PTS patch notes for High Isle) four of them have included Vampire nerfs.

The main point of contention here has been that Zenimax have seemingly been nerfing skills because they were being used in unintended ways by a small minority of very skilled endgame players to bypass various trial mechanics or achieve extremely high damage output, namely Mist Form which was nerfed to barely do anything at all outside of PvP, and Simmering Frenzy which had been used by very skilled players to gain extra damage output but was massively nerfed in Ascending Tide.

The aforementioned problems sadly make vampires pretty much useless for almost everyone who isn’t a regular PvP player or very high end PvE player. Being a Vampire in ESO nowadays basically means reducing your own health recovery, getting fire weakness, increasing the cost of your own skills and cursing yourself with a character reskin that many players find to be very ugly.

What you get in return for this is access to very niche passives and skills like Undeath and Simmering Frenzy that the vast majority of players either don’t need or aren’t able to fully unlock the potential of - and even these keep getting nerfed.

As seen on the PTS Patch notes for High Isle, there is a planned change to Blood Frenzy and its morphs:

This is following on from a previous change in the Ascending Tide DLC and update, which had basically cut the benefit of using the skill in half. With this latest planned change in High Isle, the skill will at least be less taxing for players to use in light of its massively reduced power, but the actual power of the skill remains in its nerfed state.

So you could technically say that vampires are getting a very small buff in High Isle, it might be a small step in the right direction, but at the moment it’s a little bit like trying to escape from a 200 meter sinkhole with nothing but a step ladder.

Players have been saying on the ESO Forums that it feels like Zenimax don’t want people to play as Vampires at all due to the constant nerfs, and to be honest I can understand why.

Before the Greymoor rework, a lot of my characters were vampires because this gave me an extra 10% magicka recovery at the cost of some fire vulnerability and a little less health regen, which I felt was a comfortable trade off for me.

However, I have to add that being a vampire just for a cheap passive sustain buff wasn’t a great place for vampires to be either, but at least they had a way that they could be useful for pretty much all players.

After the rework I cured literally all of my characters immediately upon seeing that the regeneration buff was gone and all non-vampire skills would be hit with a cost increase if I stayed as a vampire, and since then I have been completely perplexed as to why they never get any buffs or skill reworks, only nerfs and occasional number tweaks.

It seems that vampire players in ESO will have to wait at least another three months until the Q3 update for some meaningful buffs.

We hope you enjoyed this article about Vampires in Elder Scrolls Online High Isle. ESO is a massively multiplayer online game developed by Zenimax Online Studios.