FABIO wrote:

extarbags wrote:

No way, Tremere kick ass, and Thaumaturgy is almost broken, it's so good. Magic bats aren't level one of animalism, and spirit wolves don't clear a whole [i]crowd[/i] of guys. And insect swarm... um... actually sounds a lot like Blood Boil. Plus there's no Animalism equivalent to Blood Salvo or Blood Shield, is there? I blast through [i]everything[/i] with absolute ease.

My experience with Thaumaturgy:

Blood strike: VERY useful against those sagging tit monsters in the warren sewers, not so useful anywhere else. If you have a totally unlimited supply of blood then sure, the rapid fire ranged shots rule, but otherwise it's appalingly inefficient.

2nd level ability: I forget

3rd level: Blood shield. I never noticed that much of a damage reduction with this. Oh well. Fortitude for Nosferatu(?) and Brujah (and Gangrel?) does the same thing but probably better.

4th level: Blood salvo. By the time you get this the only place where it's really useful is in the Kwey Gin (however the fuck you spell those asian vampires' names) temple. So this is useful for one level of the game.

5th level: Blood boil. The description made it sound like you instantly kill a person and their exploding corpse deals massive damage to nearby enemies, kinda like corpse explosion in Diablo 2. I never noticed a single point of damage done by exploding blood boil corpses (plus it takes forfuckingever for the target to explode so you have to keep the other enemies close to him until he does). As far as I could tell it just instantly killed cannon fodder enemies one at a time (something the wolf spell does much more cheaply), and didn't even have the courtesy to deal massive damage to bosses like suicide.


Animalism? Bats deliver blood to you without you having to stand still (extemely impractical during boss fights, which is practically all you face between the sabbat warehouse and 2/3rds the way into the game). Wolf kills single cannon fodder enemy instantly at half the cost of blood boil. That burrowing beetle thing seemed almost as good as blood strike. Insect swarm insta-kills groups of cannon fodder enemies, something which Thaumaturgy never does.


As a Tremiere, the single most useful ability in the entire game was trance, followed by purge for level with mass enemies. Blood strike was only useful in the last half of the warrens and the very end game where I could afford shitloads of blood packs (or rather when that creepy hospital fuck would sell them to me after I let Lily go).