Combat Tricks

outright, i will admit i don't much like combat.

i am not a warrior.
i am not a fan of the adrenaline rush, and that rush instead of focusing my coordination and reflexes has the opposite effect.

so i have invested time and energy and thought in circunscribing this.

and i came up with these tricks

i am playing a Tremere.

while in Melée combat, i found out that you can incapacitate a foe with either Trance or Blood Purge, then crouch into Stealth mode, and if i am lucky with the lighting of the setting i can find a blind spot, a place where the "vision-meter" is below the exclamation point that means i have been spotted, or probably below 100, and i can dispose of the for outright with a Stealth Kill.

while in Ranged combat, while doing the Nosferatu Warrens i found that the whatchmacallit the things that are head with arms, if i Trance them, they freeze into a seizure, and i have all the time in the world to aim at the center of their heads, and with a single shot they disintegrate, as do zombies with head shots. and if you are being attacked by multiple foes, a Forgetfull Mind breaks their attack, because they forget what they were attacking, namely you, and you can pick them up one by one, maybe then using the Trance trick above mentioned.

well, I'm a Malk, I go mostly for sniping, and stealth-killing. And the last enemy is for feeding if mortal.

for Tremere, all you need for melee is bloodshield combined with with blood purge. That makes you more or less invulnerable, and your opponent helpless. The only problem is, I havn't yet found a way to feed on a victim of blood purge, and as a Tremere you need a lot of blood for your thaumaturgy.

If I didn't resent Strauss nearly as much as I hate LaCroix, I'd probably play more Tremere characters, and try Discipline only combat.

i have never used bloodshield, because it says it cannot be turned off, it will only dissipate when it has taken enough damage (did i understand it wrong?) and i have a nightmare of ending combat with it still on and going to the streets and suffering a masquerade violation.

blood puge is a good way to render them helpless and then stealth killing them.

and it might render them unable to react to theft of vitae, the thaumaturgical tremere ability that allows you to feed at a distance.

but indeed i find myself using more dominate than thaumaturgy... playing a tremere like i would play a ventrue...

malkavian is my favorite clan.
this is only the second time i am playing it through, and the first time i played it as a malkaviana, which was discouraged.
i wanted to try to play with a "normal" clan, without the "loopy dialogue options". and to get a fancy haven.

but the urge has been growing in me to abandon this game, download CE 1.3, and start again with my favorite clan, Malkavian.

Oh you can cut off bloodshield while using the end-discipline key (correct me if i'm wrong, but i think its F8). What they meant is that there is no timer (it gets "broken" for the amount of dammage, whether you fight for 10 minutes or three seconds).

Claudia is absolutely right there. F8 is the standard key to turn off all disciplines. You can select another one in the options menu.
And there is another important thing to remember if you want to use bloodshield: If you are forced into dialogue before engaging your enemy, turn it on after the dialogue is ended because dialogue mode shuts off every active discipline, including things like obfuscate and bloodshield.

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I guess i should have guessed that.

then i guess it will become one of my favorite abilities.

Bloodshield absolutely rocks combined with Theft of Vitae, but thats just my opinion.

i think you need something to keep the target steady and uncapacitated while you are using theft of vitae for it to be much worth. the few times i used either i had to break it because he was still taking shots at me and it was not killing him fast enough or he broke it by charging at me or running away, or at least in the fog of war it felt like that.

i will try combinations of theft of vitae with trance or blood purge or...

Purge and TOV sound like a good combo too!

Purge is meant to get the foe busy vomiting blood, essentially incapacitated, leaving me to steal his blood through TOV at ease. as i pointed out before, as it is pointed out in the very definition of TOV, the victim panicks, she doesn't oblige you by staying put while you steal her blood, she either runs away or engages you in combat and... somehow whenever in the fog of war i tried to use it the effect broke. And i have been trying to figure a way around it. That's a possible solution.