I may just make this myself, but I thought someone else might like to take a shot at it, as I am busy with another large-scale project.

Basically, Vampire Lords are WAAAAY OP. This isn't my opinion, this is fact. I feel like once you have every perk in the tree, they should be as powerful as they are in the first place. The perks are just icing on top of an insurmountably large cake.

Ideas:
Instead of the drain health spell being a hand grenade of ultimate destruction/keeping me alive, make it an aimed concentration spell like every other vampire uses. One perk tree could be exclusively to make this more powerful, with the final perk in the tree being that it reverts to the vanilla Hnad-Grenade mode (that makes it require absolutely no player skill whatsoever to use, but hey, you've invested perks so here you go Dragonborn).

Make sunlight drain health, not stamina. Frankly, vampires don't get a wee-bit tired when they enter the sun. They burst into freaking flames and die horribly. You could make one perk with five ranks of 20% sunlight damage reduction, such that if this really annoys the player they can do something about it if they are willing to spend the points.

Make the raise dead spell have differing levels. It's a bit OP that you can just resurrect everything you kill at its full power, especially when killing them is just one Hand-Grenade of life drain away. Maybe at first you just get little ghostly versions of them with a SetLevel(GetLevel()/2), and as you put perk into a tree branch the setLevel divider goes down by .5 until it hits 1, and then by .25 each rank after that. (Making it such that at 1 rank they are at 75% power rather than 50, and at a full four ranks they are at double their initial power.)
You could even have a setAlpha() function that changes its magnitude according to your perk rank such that they are "more ghostly" at rank 0, a little less at rank 1, fully opaque at ranks 2, give them a cool FXShader at rank 3, and give them an even cooler shader at rank 4.
I just found that this spell was either OP as heck if I used it on a strong enemy, and way underpowered on weak enemies. Doing a fractional GetLevel() script would make it more in tune with the vampires level, rather than the enemies. Feel free to do it however you want.

Nerf the UnarmedDamage that the Vampire Lord automatically starts with, and make a tree branch that makes it progressively more powerful. It should scale with playerlevel no matter what, but maybe should scale very little with level to begin with, and scale very highly with level with the appropriate perks.


Of course, if you make this mod, do what you will to balance things. Just please, someone, make Vampire Lords less OP. I wanted to have fun with Dawnguard, and while doing the non-Vampire questline was fun, becoming a Vampire Lord made everything in the game feel trivial. Even Ancient Dragons on Master difficulty were just...easy.

Stating "this isn't my opinion this is fact" is a little eyebrow-raising, and I don't even believe opinions exist at all.

You have described the situation, and I trust that it's an accurate description. But you've failed to define the term "way OP," so I'm forced to judge with what I believe to be the most common usage.

With said usage in hand, I can now say that you have failed to show any reason why vampire lords should not be as powerful as they are, which I think is a necessary thing to demonstrate to verify your assertion.

Your post would require much less rigorous scrutiny had you simply said "I do not like how powerful vampire lords are, could someone nerf them?"

I was speaking in hyperbole.

Anyhow, the reason they are pretty overpowered is that as soon as you become on you have one spell that kills anything in a few hits, costs relativeley little, and heals you simultaneously. You also gain a hugely powerful unarmed damage attack, and the ability to raise undead soldiers, again for practically no cost. Its a bit much.

I'm not mad, I'm autistic.

And yes, I get that vampire lords are powerful, but why shouldn't they be? They seem very reasonably-powered for what they are.

This is a problem encountered in many media. For example, Dragon Age's blood mage specialization. Blood mages are supposed to be immensely powerful, able to dominate people with a thought and destroy whole towns. But, they have to be balanced against the rogue's "bard" specialization.

If you make an option realistically powerful, people complain that it's too powerful to be fun (they actually complain "OP" but they, like you, are often misusing the term). If you make the option balanced, people complain that it's basically Cutscene Power to the Max.

Bethesda didn't really have to balance Vampire Lord AGAINST anything else, so they went for "realistically powerful." Lo and behold, someone complains.

Protip: if you don't want unimaginable power, don't inherit the blood of Molag Bal.

You're using the term realism to describe vampires.

Anyhow, my beef isn't that they are lore-breakingly powerful, my beef is that they are GAME-breakingly powerful. Ultimately, this is just a game, and should be made to be fun. Vampire lords are not fun to play.

A lot of people think they are.

I think the best solution is simply not to play one, or if you can't help yourself, a mod that removes the option.

A mod that nerfs vampire lords to meet your standards wouldn't make sense within the context of the game world.

"More powerful than I would like" =/= "over-powered"

Look, I'm not looking for an argument here. I want to play that quest line, and I even like the direction Beth went in with their powers...mostly. I just want to play it such that there is a clear progression, rather than something that makes every fight in the game trivial.
Seriously, I don't see how something that makes literally every encounter on Master difficulty completely trivial the moment you get it isn't overpowered.
You're basically saying that a request for a mod is illegitimate because it might step on Oh-So-Precious lore. Considering there is no lore indicating that Vampire Lords have to be unstoppable death machines the moment they take the blood, it really doesn't damage the game world in any meaningful way. Also, even if it did totally violate lore, what of it? If it makes the game more fun for some, isn't that the entire purpose of a mod? Not every mod needs be totally lore friendly.

Basically what I'm saying is, if you don't like the idea, don't make the request. But don't come into a request just to yammer about how such a mod would be lore-breaking and anyway the OP is using casual gaming terminology in a way that doesn't jibe with your understanding of it.

P.S Bethesda did have something to balance vampire lords against.

The rest of the game.

You could tweak the spell in the CK in 1/16th the time it took to write this post

Its supposed to be over powered but I agree with you, it is a little game breaking at times by removing all challenge. It seems kind of random though. It wipes out some enemies in one shot, while others it barely puts a dent in their health. To me the other health drains are worthless. A good fireball is a much better use of magic. It's more about staying alive by killing the enemies than slowly draining them and getting minute amounts of health. Then again I don't invest much into light armor so my characters can't tank well.

I don't think claw attacks are very overpowered. Werewolf claw attacks seem to do way more damage and send enemies flying back a long ways. You can't heal yourself doing melee either, unless you score a finishing move but with Serana spamming ice spikes at your enemies she gets the kills more than I do.

All that said I am making a total vampire overhaul Unholy Darkness, but it won't be done this year so if your in a hurry for this someone else will have to make it.

What I would do to it is make it a 5 tier perk spell and cut it down to about 30% for the beginning spell so it isn't utterly useless then have it get better with each perk investment, and remove any scaling to it, if there is. 3 hits should kill a lower level stormcloak guy or something I would say. Maybe reduce the radius a bit.

Personally vampire grip is much more overpowered though. Pull someone and chuck them bomb them with life drain while they are down. But they kind of balanced it with its heavy magicka use. Perhaps that is all that is really needed with the life drain bomb, just make it cost more so you can't spam it so much? There are a million ways to try and balance it.

Yeah, as I said, however someone wants to balance them its up to them. I just had a few ideas.
But I do think they need balancing.

Then don't say

Problem is, they didn't balance that either

Everyone has different gameplay tastes. While you worry about nerfing VLs, I'm pondering which of VL's powers would port nicely to regular Vamp form...

They may be strong but they're ugly.