Overgrowth

[booooooze]

[The Avatar]

I call your bluff with no first strike!

Anyways, you should be able to kill anything with the spoons and charms in Ick. Just start off with a level 9. Heck 513 could kill a weak boss.

[Blovski]

[The Avatar]

Then it requires scumming for the pacemaker, unless they change the +1 altar to pactmaker spawn.

[Blovski]

well, I can't really see which dungeons you'd *need* to scum for the pactmaker for... I mean, if you really desperately want an ideal run you could scum for it but that's no different to scumming for items, which is possible for all classes really, or scumming for a perfect second altar (so GG->Drac converters, Mystera->EM spikers). It's still probably more bother than it's worth in most scenarios.

I mean, it'll get you, over the course of the game, one of:
+12% both resistances
Overheal and Might on your last 5 level ups
+16 HP (3 for body pact)
+3xp/potion
+100 CP if you've got 10 items to convert.

Which is nice but hardly going to push your regular, pact-free vamp out of business and I think it'd be counterbalanced OK if taking that meant missing out on the faithless badge. Even on NC those boosts aren't obligatory if you get a nice boss order.

[The Avatar]

True. Still, the 100 extra CP if you convert 10 potions is 200 extra CP, which is practically 2 extra levels of life steal. Also, there's the piety from the sparkles.

[Blovski]

Sparkle piety is limited to any you get *after* getting consensus, so you'll lose at least one or two that way. Even the best case Stone Sigil, sparkles, Pactmaker scenario is only a nice lucky boost rather than a complete gamechanger (cf. Platemail synergy, which is fairish with Curse but a waaay bigger deal for vamps than Pactmaker).

You can convert all those potions in a normal run if you want to. Losing all healing/mana potions is still a fairly big exchange (if you run into goo it's terrible). Ideally you'd get the pact earlier so you can work it into normal conversions and you still have to convert quite sacrificing quite a lot of resources to use it fully.

Again, it's a small-medium power boost and I think it's not such a big deal in normal play that the faithless badge isn't a reasonable differentiator between the two.

[Darvin]

[Blovski]

And even with both PM and Stone Sigil it's still not half as big for vampires as the platemail synergy... I mean, if you have the patience to scum for it it will be a bonus, no doubt, but it's hardly unmissable.

[Fran]

A point you have to consider is that scumming is way easier with the vamp, as he isn't really dependent on conserving tiles. You don't have to restart a run after clearing almost all of the map, which somehow mitigates the effort to grind involved with scumming until you get the things you want.

On the other hand, blovski really has a point about the platemail. For most bosses (enemies anyway) one point of DR makes a much greater difference than one point of resists.

Although I'd like to know just how you are supposed to get 50% resists as a vampire?
The only way I can imagine how to get to this number would be a dragonshield, being lucky with patches, stone sigil and pactmaker, which involves quite some luck. But then again, you could always just use a tower shield or the elven boots instead of the stone sigil and be better off.

But to be honest, I'd rather just lower the resistance cap of the vamp to 40% or something instead of disqualifying him from pactmaker altogether. After all, pactmaker gives an important way to twist the playstyle of the vamp a bit, if you go for another pact at least.