Can anyone offer any assistance? Vampires keep attacking the gates of Whiterun and killing EVERYONE. Yeah it makes sense, but I want everyone to stay alive. Even though I'm only level 25, I can take care of myself perfectly fine, but all the townspeople like Adrianne keep getting their asses kicked by master vampires and their thralls. Is there any way to stop them prior to finishing the Dawnguard quests?
So far I've tried:
- Fusrohdah-ing everything and conjuring a flame atronach: they just get up and kill everyone
- Going werewolf and calling in two werewolf ghosts to kill them: not fast enough to avoid townspeople deaths
- Waiting 3 weeks for them to go away: they never leave
- Using Imperial Bow of Fear: only works on level 10 and under
- Setting difficulty to Novice and trying all of the above: townspeople still get their asses handed to them
It's rather pissing me off because I can't stop the damn vampires from killing half of Whiterun....

Whiterun and having vampires attacking my friends on the other side of town (even after the main quest they attack just as much). I explored that area of the city several (ingame) days later only to find ash piles and dead npcs. Wtf? At least with a dragon you ALWAYS know it's happening and they tend to focus on you, but this is getting rediculous......Note that this is NOT a problem for everyone, some people rarely seeing vampires attack at all, but many people find it difficult to focus on anything BUT this dlc when random encounters like these distract from everything else. Regardless, this leaves many players in an endless war of attrition, where towns will EVENTUALLY be left as ghost towns. This could have been resolved in several ways:

1. Make it so that instead of repetitive and mindless vampire killing, you can help the guards FIGHT BACK by training and upgrading them. If you're a vampire hunter, doesn't this make sense? This will decrease the liklihood of attack, make attacks happen outside of the gates with vampires TRYING to get in, and increases guard's chances of killing them quickly should they break in. If this is an "invasion of vampires" they should have gone all the way and let people REALLY fight back.
2. Make defenseless npcs run instead of fight using the system that worked in Oblivion, where every character has a level of courage and aggression that determines whether they fight or run. This is absent in skyrim apperently.
3. Make it so that, instead of making characters essential, important npcs can only be killed by the player, sparing them from dragons and vampires. Fallout New Vegas worked fine with no essentials. Skyrim needs SOME system however, because of all the random attacks on citizens. OR they could have made generic npcs be replaced by new ones. It doesn't make sense that no one ever moves back into houses or works at inns or shops after the previous owner dies.

But none of this was done. Bethesda really didn't think this aspect through. The beta testers allegedly complained about this, thinking it was a bug, but bethesda left this in.

Only thing I can say is go to breezehome (if you have it) and get Lydia.
Bring out the fight during daylight (weaker, I believe) Midday to be sure.

And then pray to Talos that it works.

This is the biggest problem I had with this dlc, it seemed that the entire focus of the game turned to a semi-interesting vampire side story, really wish Bethesda would have fixed the stuff that the beta testers recommended.

I've been trying. They just kill everything too fast. And like that other guy said, freaking Nazeem and Adrianne need to either kick more ass or run, because they don't kick any ass but yet stay and get killed. It's not that I mind vampire attacks- they're kind of cool- but I don't want important people to die. Adrianne is one of the people I get all my iron ingots from to level my smithing, and without her it cuts my supply by 1/3. Let them kill the guards, who aren't named and whose only purpose is to arrest you if you break the law. Let them kill the guards all they want, but the damn townspeople need to just run if they can't do anything but get slaughtered.

I doubt i'll ever have trouble with this, mainly because every out-of-town companion i've ever released inside a city has stood just inside the gates.

My best advice is to put the game on normal and just slaughter them. Try to be as fast as possible. Two death hounds attacked the Whiterun Stables and killed the man who sells horses but luckily the "apprentice" took over and sold me one.

It is on NOVICE and I still can't kill them all in time. I even get Lydia and a flame atronach to help, but they still end up killing at least one person, and I will not have anyone die.

They often spawn on the other side of town, or right next to npcs. You often can't save them fast enough.

I will damn well try!

I just dont see why they let this feature make it past release in the shoddy state it's in.

How is adding a bit of challenge making anything shoddy? If you cannot stand the heat get out of the kitchen, avoid going to Whiterun in the first place and your NPC's will be safe.

Hey that's great! Just don't go to one of the major towns in the core game ever again!

What's the point in NPCs being safe if you can't trade with them or get/turn in quests? They may as well be dead if you never see them.

From what I gather it's not a "challenge" to the player, it's more of an intense irritant.

Apperently you didn't read my first post Aussie. This "feature" could have been improved in several ways:

1. Make it so that instead of repetitive and mindless vampire killing, you can help the guards FIGHT BACK by training and upgrading them. If you're a vampire hunter, doesn't this make sense? This will decrease the liklihood of attack, make attacks happen outside of the gates with vampires TRYING to get in, and increases guard's chances of killing them quickly should they break in. If this is an "invasion of vampires" they should have gone all the way and let people REALLY fight back.
2. Make defenseless npcs run instead of fight using the system that worked in Oblivion, where every character has a level of courage and aggression that determines whether they fight or run. This is absent in skyrim apperently.
3. Make it so that, instead of making characters essential, important npcs can only be killed by the player, sparing them from dragons and vampires. Fallout New Vegas worked fine with no essentials. Skyrim needs SOME system however, because of all the random attacks on citizens. OR they could have made generic npcs be replaced by new ones. It doesn't make sense that no one ever moves back into houses or works at inns or shops after the previous owner dies.

THAT would be a less shoddy way of implementing this

They did this by designing the environment so quest related and trader NPCs were placed where there was at best a slim chance they'd be facing situations where they could get themselves killed. This allowed NPCs to be safe while allowing the player the option of going on a murderous rampage if they so chose without being stuck with a bunch of essentials. The only way NPCs would potentially end up massacred is with stuff like legion death squads spawning near the player, a situation the player directly made happen through their actions in the gameworld. Bethesda seem to have decided to chuck a sensible idea like that out the window.

As I said:
Fallout New Vegas worked fine with no essentials. Skyrim needs SOME system however, because of all the random attacks on citizens. OR they could have made generic npcs be replaced by new ones. It doesn't make sense that no one ever moves back into houses or works at inns or shops after the previous owner dies.

The problem is they decided to make random attacks on citizens in the first place. Dragons presented a risk, but it wasn't a big one in most people's games. The easiest solution is not to have enemies randomly spawning inside towns in the first place. Generating random NPCs - if possible given variables like dialogue - would make the already wooden NPCs even more faceless and make them pretty pointless - you'd just have an endlessly recycling collection of generic clones. Training the guards probably won't help as long as old ladies with daggers remain suicidal. I agree they should run away and from release they should have had the Oblivion courage system. As many people have said, it's dumb the way a market trader with a knife will take on a dragon. They say this was a conscious design decision but myself I suspect it was because it was less work to just let NPCs be aggressive by default and not mess around setting all their different levels of bravery. I think NPCs fleeing would enhance the game anyway - you're supposed to be the Dokakhin, yet when a dragon attacks a settlement you can hardly get a look-in with NPCs flinging themselves into action from all sides. It makes your character seem kinda pointless as some great protector. Far cooler to be standing your ground and taking down the menace as everyone else runs away.

The bottom line is if they didn't deliberately put these new attacks in and instead had one or two setpiece attacks as part of the story and encounters in the wild then there wouldn't be a problem in the first place. But having scripted setpiece attacks at a key points would again be more work - far easier to just chuck in random spawns and it appears they couldn't even get that right given people's wildly varying experiences.

Well, seperately there's a flaw in my solution, but put together each part solves the other's problem. For example, upgraded guards could protect cities and keep vampires from getting in if the weak npcs also didn't attack on sight. It was simple laziness making every npc totally hostile. Are nords really that stupid? You can't say "people from skyrim are tough!" because not every npc is FROM skyrim. It's just an excuse for cutting corners and laziness.

The guards and some NPC's are just there to assist you, you are the one who has to save them. The most you can do to upgrade them is give your beggars and perhaps other unarmed NPC's who do not run a silver sword, or any decent weapon. I had no luck dropping it in front of them so reversed pickpocketed them to get some of my beggars better armed. Since it seems in most cities the first to go are the beggars and the smith. The point is not to make fighting pain free because you know you are not going to lose anyone, you are at war! So you are going to have to do something if you want no NPC's dying. You want them to run, use a fear spell or something like that, use the slow time shout to give you a better chance of getting rid of the most dangerious, since the thralls will just end up dust. try a calm spell to give you more time to kill the vampires. Did the Dawnguard not get any upgrades or extra spells for the things? Or yes avoid Whiterun till you are up to the challenge and always save before going to any city just in case.

And out of curiosity what difficulty level are those getting all the vampire attacks playing on? The level you normally play on with that character.

You have to finish the Dawnguard quests for it to stop happening or well make it not happy nearly as much.

I sided with the Volkihar and once in a blue moon I get attacked by the Dawnguard in the wilderness.

Seriously though, i'm having a similar problem & it's getting really annoying;
there needs to be a way to control this Vamp Attack thing.

I think any random encounters (especially continuos ones like these) would be fine outside city limits, like the original Dragons were. They're a challenge, they come when you don't expect but they don't have the ability to completely destroy enjoyment of your game cause you keep worrying about NPC's dying even when you aren't aware it's happening.

& because it never ends, D.G questline complete or not, it's not like Oblivion gates; it can totally be a game killer for me.

Bethesda, guys, pls if you read this, I love the game & the expansion but you have to do something about this

Braggen is attacked by dragons almost every time he fast travels outside a walled city, it has been that way for a very long time. Thankfully the Dawnguard quests seemed to ease that problem, but he goes and does any other quest, I have to be careful not to fast travel to a friendly location. With the 1.6 patch, he now not only gets dragons, but also a random group of other creatures or bandits appearing to attack him when he fast travels, he has Shadowmere all the time so gets the extras for mounted combat. With Dawnguard he got an upgrade, now he usually gets at least one dragon, maybe two, 4 odd random animals and 4 Dawnguard waiting for him, although the Dawnguard do not always attack straight away. Thankfully he did not get the same frequency with the vampire attacks, although Braggen has always had a high incident of random attacks of everything in Riften, but still the Vampire attacks are not as frequent as thieves and ex Riften guards. The only NPC's I lost was early on and I worked out why I never saw them. I was using the back entrance to Honeyside, being a vampire for the first time and not knowing how it all worked, Braggen was keeping a low profile. Braggen never went out the other door and still lost 2 NPC's.

Finishing the Dawnguard Quests made absolutely no difference to Braggen's bloodthirsty fans, I went and did three small quests and for each one of them still got at least one dragon, the mounted combat extras (animals all three times) and 4 Dawnguard. I am not complaining, there is absolutely nothing wrong with my game, but my second character is never advancing in the main quest far enough to risk getting the same problem, and she has no horse permanently travelling with her. I am still considering what to do with the third character.

Yes we're at war and it's totally realistic that we can't help the cities form a defense and fight back, so it's a one man army, and of course we have to find use spells and exploits to fix the nonsensical npc behavior. At what point does it become bethesda's fault for making defensless npcs run into battle with their fists and iron daggers? Why should we have to focus all this effort on this one thing, jump through hoops to avoid a poorly executed feature? It's distracting and detracts from the rest of the game. It would be much more interesting, but still challenging, if we actually could train the guards and build up city reinforcements. That way we'd feel like we're affecting the world and actually doing something to fix the problem, rather than mindlesly slaying vamps for eternity. I honestly think that would be much more fun, while maintaining the challenge we all want. I hope you understand what we're trying to get across. I can tell you have a different perspective when it comes to this sort of thing, which is fine, but some people are drawn out of the experience when they have to reload over over, find npcs missing days after they were killed on the other side of town without them knowing, etc. It just makes the whole experience feel artificial and pulls them out of the experience.

Right Here!

Fabulous idea

The feature seems pretty well executed to me, you are just going to have to outsmart it.

I seem to recall a thread around here somewhere complaining about why our action seem to have no effect on the Skyrim world. Well every time there is even a minor effect, it seems to me there are a lot of complaints about it.