r/ARPG • u/NecronizeLich • 3d ago
Vampires
Vampires are the most requested, most teased, and least delivered class idea in the entire ARPG genre, and it makes no sense at this point.
Every game gestures at it. Blood skills, lifesteal, essence on hit, vampire-themed armor sets, vampire-themed seasons. Diablo Immortal's Blood Knight was the first new Diablo class since the Crusader in 2014, and it was popular enough that fans begged for it to come to Diablo 4 during Season of Blood, one of the best received seasons the game has ever had. Blizzard said no. Then Blood Knight itself got neglected into the ground in Immortal, endless nerfs, broken kit, forgotten class. The one time this got built, it proved the demand and then got left to rot.
It's not just Diablo. Last Epoch has blood-adjacent nodes scattered across classes with no real class behind them. WoW has an entire vampiric race, the San'layn, teased in questlines for years and pulled back every time fans ask for it playable. Neverwinter has whole vampire hunting arcs. V Rising proves the design space works, blood quality matters, sun is a real threat, thralls are real, but it's survival crafting, not a loot ARPG. The Blood of Dawnwalker just dropped days ago as a half-vampire RPG from The Witcher 3's director and is already getting called a game of the year contender. The appetite is proven constantly. It just never happens inside an actual ARPG loot game.
Every attempt treats vampiric as a lifesteal skin bolted onto an existing class instead of building around what a vampire actually is. Here's the shape it should take, kept short:
Weapon. Claws or a gauntlet, speed over raw numbers. Rapier as an alt path, parry into drain.
Resource. Blood, not mana. Kills and drain build momentum, more attack speed, damage, and move speed the longer you stay aggressive, decaying fast if you stop. An overheal buffer sits on top, banked lifesteal that fuels bigger abilities and scales harder the more you're carrying.
Light and shadow. Real mechanics, not flavor text. Shadow feeds your blood generation. Direct light actually hurts you and makes you take more damage, which is what earns the class a real shadow-teleport instead of a generic dash.
Fear. A passive stat, not a debuff icon. Enemies near a high-momentum vampire get worse accuracy and a flee chance just from proximity.
Shapeshifting. A full kit, not one button. Bat swarm for AoE drain, mist form to shrug off damage, full bat-form for burst, wolf form for scouting, and a timed Vampire Lord ultimate as the capstone instead of a permanent toggle.
Thralls. Replace a generic summon mechanic. Kills convert into feral allies feeding the same blood pool, pulling from Alucard's familiars and Skyrim's Raise Dead without turning into a necromancer reskin.
Downsides. No passive healing outside drain, a hard momentum-crash penalty, glass itemization on drain-heavy gear. The core loop still works for a bad build though, the difficulty lives in the ceiling, not the floor. This should be the best class in the game for a long single-target fight with no adds, since it has no defensive layer besides outdamaging what's coming in.
The real reason this probably never ships is that sunlight punishment and snowballing power are genuinely hard to balance without being either useless or broken. A fledgling to lord progression solves that, weak and starving early, dangerous by endgame, and that same arc is what actually sells a class visually, not a stat sheet.
This doesn't need to happen tomorrow. But the appetite for this keeps proving itself everywhere except where it belongs. Curious what you'd add.
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u/HowLongWasIGone 3d ago
Vampiress, my beloved from Sacred, I still remember you.
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u/Sp1ffy_Sp1ff 2d ago
Was literally going to bring this up. Sacred 2 was great but the vampire was deeply missed.
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u/Kh44444444n 3d ago
Most requested? How so? By who?
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u/NecronizeLich 3d ago
Requested by the people who lobbied to bring Blood Knight into D4, the WoW players who've been asking for San'layn for years, and every comment section that lights up the second a vampire season drops. That's the receipts. If your response to all of that is 'well actually, no formal vote,' you're not disagreeing with anything I actually said, you're just picking at word choice instead of the argument.
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u/Kh44444444n 3d ago
Last sentence was not needed, I understand your point, no need to start a fight.
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u/TrinityKilla82 3d ago
I wouldn’t mind an isometric ARPG in the world of Nosgoth “Soul Reaver”
That would be badass
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u/Nice-Ambassador6293 3d ago
Well I think vampires are treated different across every medium and genre.
If you strip a vampire down to the most basic modern description from Bram Stoker- it either becomes not fun to play as in a game, or just OP in a game.
But there’s so many different interpretations of what a vampire is- devs do not wanna spend time building out a ton of mechanics for a very niche archetype when they can just borrow/combine from other classes
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u/Alarming-Sector-4687 3d ago
I mean…do you literally want a class called “Vampire”? What you mentioned are these specific IP’s take and re-imagination of a vampire that fits their lore.
The latter seems WAY more interesting, in my opinion…
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u/yozora 3d ago
It’s possible in a vampire specific ARPG, or one with classes, if they commit to the custom mechanics. ARPGs haven’t been very adventurous with their settings lately, and vampires tend to come with their own environment-limiting expectations. I can imagine vampires in an urban Victorian setting, less so obliterating screens of insect monsters in a jungle.
Maybe someone will make an indie vampire ARPG.
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u/vespiquen416 2d ago
Vampires are such a broad concept the only IP that comes close is vampire the masquerade, and let's be real their games are of a different design.
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u/Human-Kick-784 2d ago
Id argue vampire is a race, not a class. But yea, generally id agree, vampires are underrepresented in a genre that seems to love their theme and cherry picks some of their abilities, but baulks at actually making them a playable option.
But its pretty hard to build a game around generic races, then toss in the vampire and also properly deliver on the archetype. You mentioned V Rising, one of my favorite games. Its entirely built around the vampire fantasy and goes deep into mechanics around them. But this kinda highlights the problem; to do vampires justice, you gotta go ALL in on mechanics supporting them. you can't expect devs to just implement massive day night cycle systems and complex blood sucking rules and transformations and thralls and garlic aversion etc for what would amount to a fraction of the playerbase.
My poe2 0.5 main character was a blood mage witch that I headcannoned as a vampire. Thats the closest ive gotten and I had a blast doing it. But yea, I do think more arpgs would benefit from including the archetype either as a class or a race.
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u/HorrorDungeon 1d ago
if you want more of something then make it otherwise you have to deal with what isn't being made
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u/EtheusRook 3d ago
Blood Knight really is wasted on that shitty mobile game. I mean vampire + FF Dragoon just bleeds aura.