I am trying to study vampires I am looking for their weaknesses and their benefits/advantages. I am studying vampires so I can kill them strategically. I am especially looking for players that are very experienced vampires (highest power of vampire) to give some of their buffs/traits.

Not much to study. They are weak to sunlight (which you won't really get to use to your advantage, vampires won't follow you out to exterior), fire spells, and all spells that work on the undead should work too (such as turn undead, although I haven't tried personally). Dawnguard also has specialized spells and weapons that are more powerful against vampires, although if you're willing to use higher tier weapons they'll be much more effective with fire enchantment on. Silver weapons may be available much earlier (although iirc only Silver Hands "drop" them) and is among the strongest weapons when used against all of the undead, vampires included, AND you can add fire enchantment for some extra vampire melting awesomesauce (fiery soul trap on top is especially sixy). Dawnbreaker will trigger it's effect on vampires as well.

Poisons, as with all the undead, is completely useless.

The work of the turn-undead-spells can be confirmed by me.

Of course, turn-lesser-undead do only work on the death-dogs and 'simple' vampires. For the master-vampires, that attack towns, you wold need somewhat stronger.

In addition of everything from Chaka ZG:

The greatest strength of the vampires is their drain-health-spell. You can block it with a ward-spell. Also, you may want to shock- and drain-magica-spells and -enchantments to take their magica, until they can't use the spell any more.

With the stagger-effect of the crossbow and/or the perk, you can just kill them before they are near enough to you for an attack...

If you want to play a vampire: There is the Nightblade-class. That is a hybrid from a knife-assassin and an illusionist. The enemy vampires don't use that skills, but you as a vampire would have a bonus for sneaking and illusion-spells (you are harder to detect, and the illusion-spells are working on higher-level-opponents). That makes the Nightblade pretty easy

To add even more to Wolfsmaul, for the ultimate vampire slayer you could stick fire or fiery soul trap + shock damage (or chaos if you're up for a bit of a gamble) on mentioned silver sword/crossbow for massive damage + magicka degeneration, or magicka drain if you need defense and magicka to sustain the ward.


Additionally, from my experience, aside from drain the use cold spells the most, so some cold resistance and stamina regen on armor could help.

IIRC health drain is a pure magic spell, and thus it can be resisted by magic resistance. So having max(80% iirc) magic resistance when fighting Vamps is a good thing to protect yourself too.