Long as they dont take 'em away, or make them weaker, I'm fine with that.

They don't have to make them weaker. Just make them attack in the wilderness or something instead of attacking cities and killing half, or even sometimes more than half of the traders and blacksmiths, so then at least selling my stuff doesn't get that much harder (I still have tons of loot in my chest that I need to sell bit by bit).

I like the attacks in the cities, so the wilderness thing wouldn't go for me. The only fix I can see is making it to where they only attack you in cities after you join the dawnguard, and specifically only you, and attack citizens like farmers or nobles n' such out of holds.

Or just guards, the main threat to them. Or better yet, me, when I attack them, as I am the biggest threat to them and not some random civilian. The same issue happens with dragons, they don't focus on the one person that can effectively kill them and absorb their very soul, they instead decide to focus on a defenceless blacksmith.

The vampires being too strong for the player was never an issue. The vampires being too strong for reckless NPC's kamikaze'ing into them before player has a chance to do anything about it is. Any NPC's in and out of cities should have some form of adequate protection from these attacks if there is no chance the player being able to intervene in time as what is the point of having NPC's if they just get nuked with little you can do about it?

Do we really need to be calling each other names? And focusing on smithing and enchanting to get yourself better equipped to deal with the pests is not that bad of an idea. Although actually paying more attention to prevent being surprised by an attack in the first place might give your NPC's a better chance of surviving. I am hopeless at fighting with bad reflexes in the hands and even I have plenty of time to get rid of most of them, despite Serana constantly sabotaging and confusing things. The town guards and even most NPC's are capable of dealing with the weaker vampires, assuming they are actually armed with something decent and not just using their fists. Those Cruel-Sea's seem suicidal, and do not like equipping weapons it seems.


Just because your game got harder and some are failing to deal with the extra challenge does not mean there is a problem. The DLC was designed to be that way, so I would not hold your breath waiting for Bethesda to make it safe again for clueless butterfly hunters and tourists to go wandering around Skyrim carefree.

Agreed.

It IS a problem as it is too frequent and forces the player to do the Dawnguard quest when they probably don't want to suffer the Soul Cairn a second time. And the vampire attacks happen straight away, unlike the dragon attacks where you could stop it from happening by just not collecting the dragonstone.

But if you're fine with the frequency, then surely you'll notice the AI problems where civilians (some of which aren't even armed) will charge the vampires mindlessly, getting themselves killed. There's also the problem where vampires will find that farmers and blacksmiths are a bigger priority than a Dragonborn.

Some claim that the vamps are too strong for their low level character to kill the vamps in time, actually, but the quote from me that you used has nothing to do with that, so not sure why u used it. I was saying that a fix for dead npc's could be that they could attack your player after you join the dawnguard like an assassination attempt on you, and everyone else stays out of it much like hired thugs. It would make more sense then a few vampires being bold enough to attack a whole city head on. You dont need to restate the "problem" I know the issue at hand.

No...that has NEVER been claimed.

They have claimed that there is no way to kill them before having the vampires kill some NPCs. A common scenario would be patroling Whiterun to make sure there are no vampires in the city. After completing this tedious task entering the Bannered Mare, upon exiting The Bannered Mare observing a Master Vampire quickly decapitating Adrianne Avinici before the character can stop the attack.

No where in that event has it been said that the player character is too weak to handle the vampires...

You have to go a lot further than just collecting the Dragonstone to be afflicted with never ending dragon attacks. Collecting the Dragonstone got you one scripted dragon attack, and you had a lot of help killing it, or could even just wait for the Whiterun guards to kill it. Yes Skyrim has dragons, the few with set locations are big enough and obvious enough to avoid if you do not want to fight them. You do not get random spawning dragons till Alduin wakes them.

I noticed no AI problems, most NPC's have always defended their towns, as those who did the main questline would know from the Dragon attacks. And those who ran still could die anyway. And a few vampires are a lot easier to kill than a dragon. Whether it is a dragon or a group of vampires, they are attacking the town, so why would they only go for your character? They kill whoever is closest. If you downloaded the DLC presumably you were intending to play it, but I saw no sign of being forced to start the Dawnguard quest. My only high level over achiever who had the vampire attacks straight away could have easily just killed them and continued what he was doing, he had an extremely high rate of random events, so adding vampires into the mix was hardly going to be that much of an inconvenience. But since he had done all the questlines he was the character the DLC was mainly for anyway. My other two characters continued with the main game and never had to worry about vampire attacks on towns, Aussie had to join the Dawnguard to get them. So how you play and what you have done has a big effect on what you get with the DLC.

A few of my characters haven't even started the Dawnguard questline, besides being told the Dawnguard are reforming yet they are still plagued by attacks.

Like I said, all it would take would be to make the AI run away from the vampires rather than making them attack them with knives. Then we're happy and people like ColonelKillaBee who like the attacks are happy. They still get they're attacks, and we get to keep our cities full of people.

I already apologized for calling him an idiot. Dont bring up old arguments and move on.

It actually has been claimed, actually. Not in this thread but others. Some say that the vamps spawn too much. Some say they spawn too far away from them to protect the npc's. Some say that their npc's are too weak and rush in with iron daggers and thats what gets them killed (obviously true for everyone) unless the player can interfere in time. Some say the vamps too tough early in the game on a new character, or even midgame (I strongly disagree), and some say all of the above or none of the above. What you COULD say is that the difficulty of killing the vamps is not the problem of the majority of peoples problems involving the frequent vamp attacks, which I would agree. The primary problem in my opinion that people are having is npc's getting wrecked too fast for the player to prevent it, or happening without anyone noticing.

Offtopic: What does IIRC mean?

Well if you think knives are inadequate to attack vampires with, give them something better!

Giving npc's better weapons actually does work, so this is not a bad idea. Armor would be a problem for those having trouble with dead npc's. Do they equip armor too, like followers?

I never got any to equip armor, I give all mine a good supply of health potions, but have not seen if they use them yet, followers do so I assume NPC's would if they had them. It would actually make it a lot more fun if they added the option to donate supplies, weapons and armor to NPC's since we could then equip our own personal little guard force in each town. As it is you seem to need to have a pretty high pickpocketing skill to arm them better, I had no luck just throwing things in front of them and hoping. My third character is not going to have the pickpocketing skill of the previous two, so he will have to do it different.

Exactly, and giving them better weapons would work, but right now I'm holding on to any good weapons I get, so I don't have a whole lot to give them. I'd rather they just ran away. Again, works for both sides.

I haven't had any issue with vamp attacks. Then again I play on Noobie settings. I noticed my son playing on Adept and he got hit pretty hard in Whiterun, where I've never had an attack ever there yet, dozens of hours into Dawnguard.

The level of attacks and challenge seems to me to be related to the game difficulty setting.

I get the occasional Traveler (easily dispatched) and have had one incident in Markath with a group of vamps that was easily controlled. That's it. But I'm chicken and play on Novice so that's what I'd expect.

Not sure what would happen on Master. I can imagine it would probably be carnage. But that's why peeps crank up the difficulty, right? For the challenge. There you go.

Also, IIRC means "if I remember correctly".

I play on Expert because I like being forced to actually think tactfully about killing a bunch of bandits, rather than storming in swords blazing, not because I like watching a whole town die.

IIRC you can change the difficulty setting on the fly, so you could theoretically deal with the town attacks on Novice or somesuch and then go kill bandits on Expert.

Not sure if your towns would get mobbed behind your back when you set things back to Expert though.

I didn't read through all 7 thread pages due to time constraints so if anything I said isn't anything new or exciting ... my apologies.

I tried that. They still wiped everyone out (or at least one person, but I'm not losing anyone).

What does IIRC mean? Probably a stupid question, but oh well.