Did you complete the MQ in Dawnguard right away?

I thought the vampire attacks only began at lv 10 and up. Very surprised to see 1 master vampire and 2 slaves attacking the gates of Whiterun while I was just level 8. A chance Irileth was there and with Amren and one guard they defeated them . Of course I helped too but I had to be very careful with my blows. Maybe the quest begins only at level 10 but the vampires attack anyway? I know we can make the quest at level 1 but not without godlike knowledge .

I heard level 7+ the attacks begin.

I believe you are guaranteed an attack at level 10 if you enter a city. This is to set you up for a visit by the Dawnguard recruiter Durak who begins his little spiel by mentioning the growing vampire menace. Doesn't always happen, but I believe it is supposed to work like that.

Hell I lost belathor as soon as I entered Whiterun didn`t realize until about 10hrs later and that was very annoying had to get married and make alot of trips to Riverwood to sell alot of my loot.

Level 8 and level 10 guaranteed when entering a city/settlement. Though you won't get the guard rumor or Durak coming to look for you until level 10.

Alot of those random attacks can be avoided
how by avoiding they are triggered in the first place avoid fasttraveling directly to the town , usually there is a point near the town you can fast travel to

Vampire attacks in towns ditto , plus that event is also triggered each time you enter the town or leave any building in that town
Quuicksave each time before you leave that building
If they do spawn they not really that hard to kill and if they do kill important npcs reload your quicksave , most likey they don't even spawn after that

another option is to avoid towns all together , but now that is really problematic for some of you i think

The skyrim devs got a lot of things right having NPCs slowly but surely killed off so that towns become empty is not one of them.

So if you start a new game with Dawnguard installed and you don't play the DLC towns and cities will eventually be wiped out?

Unless you take precautions that you really shouldnt have to take you will lose a lot of NPCs. They dont get replaced by new ones so some places become ghost towns.

Yep. The attacks on settlements don't seem to occur as frequently as they do while the DG main quest is active, but they still occur with regularity. I'm 120 hours into my current game in which I've elected to ignore the Dawnguard questline. I still get the occasional city attacks. It's part of Skyrim life now with the DLC installed, so yes, I take precautions. If I enter a city/town at night, I'll often do a thorough patrol of the area.

Yeah, and it's funny that Bullet Magneato mentioned Belethor, 'cuz he got killed immediately for me, too - I forgot about the whole DLC but it hadn't forgotten about me. As I mentioned in a previous post, its why I don't activate the DLC until I'm ready for it. I think it should have been designed that the attacks don't start until you start the DLC's MQ - at least you'd have a modicum of control. It just gets too chaotic too fast, and every time you wanna travel you have to be braced for the time change and then run around your destination town to make sure you didn't miss a spawn/attack and lose NPCs.
The attacks are exciting (just like the dragons) but it can also be very disruptive to certain styles of play.

This. It's fine for my current character, because she doesn't fast travel and has a routine - get to town before the shops close to sell off stuff, then hit the hay. She gets up and gets going again in the wee hours, and fortunately, most of the townsfolk are indoors at that hour. If she's still out traveling when night falls, she has to find a place to sleep for the night. I'm using a mod requiring food and sleep. BUT I'm also using a timescale mod to make it more realistic, and which also avoids the "Whiterun in sight at 5 pm, arrive at midnight" problem.

But my previous character just about went nuts dealing with the vamp attacks. I got in the habit of fast traveling to the stables when possible, and once outside of Riften the battle involved three vamps, two thralls, two death hounds, three Khajit caravaneers, a courier, three guards, the two stable employees, three hired thugs, Serana and a dragon. I added a Dremora Lord to the mix. It was chaos.

When it was over, another three guards wandered up (presumably from the watchtowers) to stare at the dead dragon. Where were you five minutes ago???

(edited for spelling)

How do you turn off the DLC on console.

Uninstall it, then go to the marketplace and download it again.

i havent played skyrim since dawnguard released on the 360 because of the vampire attacks. i would assume that they would have fixed those in a patch or something, well i guess im never putting skyrim in my xbox again. thanks bethesda i will be enjoying borderlands 2 for the next year or so.

But it's not a bug, so there was nothing to fix.

Thanks!

it doesnt need to be a bug for it to be broken

Meaning, they designed/intended for the game to be that way.
If I'm in the dark here, I apologize for any confusion, but I'm pretty sure the random vampire attacks in towns are supposed to happen with the DLC. Some might not like it or agree with it, but that's not the same as being "broken."

It's a feature, but its a feature that isn't working as intended because Bethesda forgot how terrible their AI is on NPC's and that every NPC in town would try to fist fight the Master Vampires as opposed to running away or cowering (like they should). If the NPC's would just run or cower and let the guards battle the intruders, all would be good. But bad NPC AI makes the feature broken.

I won't argue that it was an intentional feature, but it was a poorly-conceived intentional feature. As someone else pointed out (not sure if it was in this thread or not), the vampire attacks occur whether you wish to play out the DG campaign or not. The only way to stop them is to play out the campaign. But you're not always going to want to do that with each and every new game of Skyrim you begin.

Compare and contrast with the vanilla main quest. If I don't want dragon attacks, I can simply opt to avoid the main quest. No "Dragon Rising" = no dragons. I can't do that with the vampires. It's either play out the DG campaign, uninstall the DLC, or do neither and be saddled with random vampire attacks on towns. This was a terrible idea. There was no long-term thinking involved. No consideration given to the fact that players would eventually lose interest in Dawnguard and wouldn't necessarily want to play it out with each new character.

So despite this being a "feature", it's a feature that does need to be patched. One initial attack is fine as an inciting incident. But no more should occur until or unless the player makes the conscious choice to enter Dayspring Canyon and begin the campaign.

I dunno. I kinda felt like the devs liked the idea that NPCs could die - and not just generic guards - named NPCs. It's the same thing with the dragons. I believe that they're supposed to be that much of a threat.


See, but if they're NOT patching the NPCs AI with the dragons (it's been like over 9 months since the release), then why would they "patch" it now - they're had plenty of opportunities, including during the development of the DLC, to decide if they wanted to do something about it. Either they want it this way or it is unpatchable. So, the devs are just doing with the vampires what they did with the dragons. They had to have gotten feedback from gamers about the NPC AI regarding the dragon attacks, and not only did they not change it, they implemented the same AI with regard to the vampires. My explanation for this design is that if a vampire menace sought to blot out the sun, shouldn't a threat of that magnitude force a hero to respond immediately? Like, how do you call yourself a hero and yet ignore these attacks? I think the devs intended for the hero to have to address it, on the game's terms, not the gamer's. This is all speculation on my part of course.

I can uncheck the DLC from the files that load at the beginning of the game (on PC), thus forestalling the onset of the vampire attacks. Is this not an option for console gamers?

That's not the point. The point is they die stupidly. No one should be charging a Master Vampire with their bare fist, especially when there are guards all around that can take them out. It's just dumb. I'm all for NPC's dying, but it is a very bad game feature that they die so STUPIDLY. That's the point. With the correct NPC AI this wouldn't be a problem at all, including the idiots in town that try to fist fight dragons.

Well if you do not want NPC's charging Master Vampires with their bare fists (most actually do already have weapons) do something about it! Either give them a decent weapon to use, kill the Master Vampire quicker, do something to slow the action down, or do something to make one of them run. It is not like they did not give you a lot of options to try out, there are not doubt a lot more than those few.