New Family Bloodline. (With new Powers, and Curses or Old )

[Cliff Worthington]

I like the idea, naturally.

Particularly about them all being of one Path. It's limiting in terms of grid play, ........

How does a characters path limit anything in gridplay? I have played every path, and never noticed any limitations of what they can do on grid

I've played most of the paths on grid. Only difference is starting stats, and that's quickly fixed after a few levels.

Only limit is RP-Wise.

[Myk]

It does make a difference in the early days, predominantly around feeding.

Blood Boost, for example, is an excellent power for newbies. If you get caught feeding - which is easy enough to do - you're likely to get attacked by a Hunter and have debilitating wounds. This can also happen when you've increased your notoriety and get shot at by Soldiers. These wounds effect your ability to do many daily tasks. This is also helpful as you can avoid spending energy hunting a human to feed from, giving you more time to perform your daily tasks.

A few powers from the Shadow & Allurist path can help you avoid problems too, but Blood Boost v2 is the best starting power in the current game climate.

[Mordechai]

thats why shops sell blood

[Alexandrea]

true.

But I agree with Myk, that there is a difference on grid too, at least to start.

just for an example; Allurists get spotted more than Shadows when they feed but they pay less/get more cash back at shops with silver tongue.
Not a lot of difference, esp., in the long run.
But there's enough of one that some tasks will come more easily to some path, to start. Using Shadows again as an example, they have an edge being thieves.

Mostly yes, it is about the rp... but it isn't ONLY about rp.

[Mordechai]

well pretty much it seems it is all about the rp, as the latest update reads that the grid is meaningless now, it has no affect on chapters

[Alexandrea]

that's true also, for now.

But it's either rp chapters or no chapters right now.

There won't be changes made to the grid from chapters though (from what I understand), those take a lot more time and work for the guys to code than just adding story content.

[Azraeth]

The grid very much still matters to David and me - which is why so much of this month's events are grid related. There's the newbie boost, daily (or mostly daily) community unlocks, triple teamwork bonus, and the newly added end game content. The better weapon loot can only be gotten by people who are high level, so it's predominantly for people who play the grid.

We're going to be adding more end game content when we have the time available. I don't want to get ahead of myself and talk too much about it, but we're definitely trying to give everyone at least some of what they want.

We of course have to priorities A) Slave Dave projects (hours gained through patreon), and B) Community unlocks, so how quickly we get to other projects depends entirely on those. We're doing what we can with the time we have, and really at this point all we can do is hope that it's good enough. <3 <3

[Levi DAmico]

I still don't understand the complaints from people who consider themselves separate from all manner of story activity, but complain when they're not invited to story activity.

Going back to the topic at hand, though. It takes a few years to branch across every Path and unlock all those powers. So having a bloodline that is strictly one piece of the six, makes them a specialised but also limited team. Your powers make you naturally aligned to some tasks and your notoriety is also affected by your base path.

When it comes to the Shadow Vamps, I've noticed that they do take longer to heal than others. When Levi was young, before I increased his healing stat to 20 (which absorbed around 6 level ups), his wounds averaged 3 days. It was a giant pain. Now they average 1 or 2. So he's still at a slight disadvantage and it would be even worse if he couldn't quickly branch to the Necros and learn those healing powers. A Telepath would have a much harder time accessing those same powers because of how far away they are, so, time and effort is required to balance the differences between the Paths when you're looking at certain activities.

Oh and I've been playing, off and on, for 5 years and Levi has only just been able to unlock the Telepath ability of Appraisal. The amount of PXP this involved was incredible. If you consider he had to go from Shadow to Telepath. But, you can pay real money to shorten the time by buying PXP orbs. There are ways around a lot of things, but that's a helpful crux toward balancing the Paths with proof in point meaning that they're different.

If you were going to do a team raid, you generally look for characters who have a variety of powers and skills. A team of 5 Necromancers who are a few month old would be totally different to a group of 5 mixed Paths of the same age.

The RP factor is strong, but this is a game with a storyline and a strong Roleplaying element. So, of course having a team of only Necros would heavily affect the Roleplay element. That doesn't make it ONLY roleplay affecting.

David has tried to balance the grid as much as possible to avoid instances where one Path dominated, but I do believe they still have their unique abilities in game.

It would be nice to hear more detailed feedback on this debate aside from "because I think that way" and "That's what blood packs are for". I always encourage opportunities to learn something new.

[Satu]

Feeding is easy, no matter your path or level really.

It just requires some more effort, when you’re playing a newer character, because you are forced to feed almost exclusively from security 1 to 0 areas, which are around, but you have to step away from your leveling area to do so.

For instance my newest vampire character is a level 10 Killer, which are notoriously bad at feeding. He’s never once been seen or fought off, because I have him pick out loners in low security spots. Tying that into role play, a new vampire isn’t going to have the confidence or skill to pull off a public feeding. They don’t have the experience or influential powers to really get away with it. But the higher you level, the more you allocate points into the proper stats, feeding becomes easier, your vampire gains experience and skill to pull off riskier feeding practices.

That’s the way I always viewed it anyway, because to me that’s what makes sense I guess.

[Alexandrea]

But it is MORE easy for some. Allurists get thralls, Necros get bloodboost and Shadows get Commander of Darkness.

And then there are other powers that can make 'unlife' a little more easy on some newbies, like the Silver Tongue I mentioned before and others.

Killers get Daywalker which is HUGE, Celerity, Jump... I could keep going and list every path's best powers but I don't get why this is even a debate?

Some things on the grid are just are more easy for some paths, at the start.

It's just the truth. And I'm 99.99% sure it was designed that way to encourage us to work together as teams.

& If that wasn't so, why bother with different paths at all?