Seriously. It is marring the shit out of my enjoyment of the game. Whatever other quests I might have been playing at, it is now all about finding the fucking cure for vampirism. People are afraid of me. I have to spend time finding victims to feed on. This is bullshit.
I’m not very high level (level 10 Nightblade), so my lockpicking sucks. I bought 30 picks from Shady Sam and broke all of them without getting the fucking soul stones from the University. Sam doesn’t have any more, the prick. No picks to get the stones, no picks to open chests. Gah!
There may yet be hope. Reading on some game discussion boards had me believing you had to steal the stones from the guilds to have the requisite number. Last night some searching on an Oblivion wiki indicates that there are three stones to be had in 3 dungeons where they will become available in rooms that appear only after this quest is triggered (even if you already explored those dungeons). Nothing in-game gives any hint that this is the case, of course. So, with the ones I bought, I should have enough to move on to the next series of frustrating fetch quests for the cure.
Honest, this whole quest/subplot idea is almost enough to make me say “screw it!” and quit playing. Whoever thought it was a good addition to the game needs kicked in the nuts til his ears bleed.
I agree that vampirism is poorly handled by the original game - which is why there have been any number of mods of it, the main feature of which is usually that people aren’t so afraid of you until you look majorly fucked up from lack of blood. And with them, the cure becomes a distant concern because, let’s face it, being a vampire is rather cool 
But even without mods, it’s pretty easy to not get vampirism in the first place - IIRC, you only become one three or four days after getting bit, before that you merely have to cast or drink a potion of Cure Disease (which you should carry in any case, if only to remove the stat decreases from rabid dogs and the like) and you’re good. So if you have an earlier save, that’s an option.
Other than that, well, I guess you can enjoy the small comfort of knowing that, AFAIR, once you get the cure, you can’t ever catch the disease again…
I am playing on XBox 360, so mods aren’t an option.
I don’t find it all that cool either. The little boost in strength is okay, and the Hunter’s Eyes (or whatever it is called) spell is genuinely nifty. Largely it is a pain in my ass. The vampiric abilities that have surfaced so far don’t fit in with my style of play.
As far as not getting it in the first place, I’m still pretty new to the game and don’t have a vast knowledge of all the little fuck-you’s the designers may have buried in the play. When I got infected, I used a cure disease potion. It doesn’t seem to have worked. Or maybe I got infected a second time. Who knows? I just think that making it such a complex undertaking to get the cure was bullshit.
For whatever reason, that’s always been a staple feature of Elder Scrolls games–lycanthropy and vampirism are major life-changing experiences and getting rid of them once you have 'em is a huge pain the ass.
There is an awesome daedric quest that you can do that gives you a drumroll UNBREAKABLE LOCKPICK. It is the bestest quest ever. I don’t remember which one but I’m sure if you google it you’ll find it. It saved my bacon so many times.
Also I think the beginnings of vampirism don’t get cured by the cure disease potion; you have to go to a temple. But yes, it’s not like other diseases.
I’m pretty sure it can. The problem is if you’re fighting vampires chances are you’ll contract it again seconds after curing it. All their melee attacks have a chance of causing it.
I actually like the way it works in Oblivion. It’s really negative unless your character can exploit it well. Which is good. The only problem I have with it is that there’s no way to know if you have a disease outside of going to the magic menu and looking at the active effects panel. And even then it might not be all that clear what you have or how to cure it since it lists the effects of a debuff/buff and you have to hover over the debuff to see what causes it rather than the other way around, like most games do, and which is far more intuitive. But more to the point it should have had an icon showing you are diseased in the main HUD. All it has is the little “You have contracted [disease]” pop up that you can easily miss. Especially if other things are popping up there at the same time. Which is likely since you contract most, if not all, diseases in battle.
The Skeleton Key. Obtained from doing Nocturnal’s quest. It’s really such an easy quest for such a powerful item too.
Vampirism is fun in the beginning. My character was never very strong but once she became a vampire she was flinging wolves across caves and all sorts of awesome stuff. I also decided she would only snack on quality blood so I had her feed exclusively on dukes and countesses and other upper class folk. Her sneaking was fairly high but it was still tense slipping into castle bedrooms and such.
Then I realized my character was getting uglier and couldn’t go out in daytime too often, which pissed the hell out of me considering how much time I spent on the character customization page. So I breezed through the quest then went on a vampire-killing rampage of epic proportions. I found every vampire cave I could get to and massacred everyone inside. How dare those bloodsuckers mar her beautiful face! Ah, good times.
Which is a long-winded way of me saying that I thought this was a pretty fun quest. Afterwards I killed the old witch so no one else could get the cure. You know, just to be a dick.
Oh, and a pretty awesome item reward is Umbra’s Sword, I forget which Daedric quest it’s for, it should be on UESP linked to above. You can pretty much forget about any other sword because I think this one has the highest damage. Umbra is hard as hell to kill but fortunately for me she got stuck behind some rubble so I emptied like 200 arrows into her and looted her body of everything.
QUOTE=Zoinks;12342137]Oh, and a pretty awesome item reward is Umbra’s Sword, I forget which Daedric quest it’s for, it should be on UESP linked to above. You can pretty much forget about any other sword because I think this one has the highest damage. Umbra is hard as hell to kill but fortunately for me she got stuck behind some rubble so I emptied like 200 arrows into her and looted her body of everything.
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Umbra isn’t a reward from any quest, and you can go get it any time if you can handle the fight. However, it is involved in a certain quest for Clavicus Vile, and you should get the Unofficial Oblivion Patch to fix the miserable bugs behind Bethsoft’s poor scripting.
It is not the best sword in the game in terms of damage, but it is very close and can be used even in the endgame. In terms of enchants, though, it’s not that useful. On the other hand, it has the advantage of being able to recharge its own magic. That’s not very useful unless you already have other items which need recharging so it’s of mediocre utility for anyone except a spell-slinging warrior type.
Cured! Going to those three dungeons to get the blasted soul thingies speeded things up immensely over trying to steal the fornicating things. I also lucked out that I found some of the necessary herbs in the dungeons themselves and was able to simply purchase almost all the rest of what was needed. I did have to journey to the city of Skinflute (or whatever the hell it is) to steal one clove of garlic.
The big, bad ancient vampire (sadly, not named Kain) whose ashes were a necessary ingredient was a disappointing taffy-ass in battle. A taste of the Blackwater Blade and he went down like Tom Cruise in a bath house. The vampire knight and other mooks in the same dungeon were tougher.
Now, at last, I can get on with the quests I had originally planned on completing.
I do have one lingering question, though. Why do the Argonian females, a reptilian race, have tits?
Umbra isn’t a reward from any quest, and you can go get it any time if you can handle the fight. However, it is involved in a certain quest for Clavicus Vile, and you should get the Unofficial Oblivion Patch to fix the miserable bugs behind Bethsoft’s poor scripting.
It is not the best sword in the game in terms of damage, but it is very close and can be used even in the endgame. In terms of enchants, though, it’s not that useful. On the other hand, it has the advantage of being able to recharge its own magic. That’s not very useful unless you already have other items which need recharging so it’s of mediocre utility for anyone except a spell-slinging warrior type.
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Indeed. I was a spell-slinging archer/backstabber type, so Umbra was absolutely golden. My endgame bow was so terrible, I could only fire it four or five times before it was out of charges. Umbra delivered the telling blow most of the time.
… THey’ve gone back and forth on whether they have boobies (also, what their legs look like) . However, I think they do give live birth, and there’s no real reason a fantasy lizard can’t nurse their young, so…
Ever play Morrowind? (or Daggerfall, or Arena, but I didn’t spend much time as a vampire in the former and never played the latter, so I don’t know. Werewolf+Hircine’s ring was great though)
As a vampire every human would refuse to talk to you and call the guards on you. Mage’s Guild members were one of the few exceptions. Not talking to people means you couldn’t talk to transportation people, which means you couldn’t fast travel at all. Imagine walking everywhere. No horses, no fast travel at the click of a button. An item called the “Boots of Blinding Speed” helped, if you knew how to use them.
And this was on all the time. Feeding on people didn’t alleviate the problem.
Why do Warcraft Tauren have tits instead of udders? Seriously though, they’re not necessarily reptiles just because they’re scaly. Maybe they’re descended from TES version of pelycosaurs.
Nah. The scales are only part of it. Look at their teeth and eyes. They’re definitely supposed to be lizard people. The females of the other races, even the Orcs, are reasonably hot. The snake-head and scales are just too offputting for me to wonder what the Aragonian females would look like if XBox had the nude patch.
In an unrelated matter, does the order in which one does quests have a great effect on the game? On my way to Crowhaven, where I planned to complete the Gray Prince quest, I offered my services to a town under siege and also got tasked by a goddess(?) to wipe out a nest of necromancers. If I go ahead and complete the Gray Prince quest will it shizz up the other two?
Doesn’t matter a bit, you can do the sidequests whenever you want.
Most quests don’t affect each other, unless you kill a quest giver or something. In your example, you can’t complete the Gray Prince quest if you already completed the arena. As long as you don’t run around like a psychopath, it’s hard to break quests. Sometimes people can unfortunately get killed by the environment though. The orc who helps you get the Skingrad house is particularly susceptible.
FTR: The Dark Brotherhood series of quests rilly rawk, Alas, I’ve actually come to like my dark brethren and it seems that I’m required to eliminate them. I’m actually tempted to just not complete the quest. Pretty much everybody else in the game has been a douchebag and had to be “convinced” to like me and talk to me. The Brotherhood, except for that tiger guy, has been friendly, accepting, and helpful right from the start.
Talk to the “tiger guy” now before you do the deed, if you need more guilt on your hands. By the way, many of the spells and such he sells are semi-unique, so get them while you can.
Well, I did them in. Didn’t mind doing the tiger fellow because he’d been such an asshole to me up to that point. I also had a change of heart about the orc and killed him with no personal drama. In a random conversation with him, he’d proudly told me about killing a 5 year old girl at her birthday party, so I actually felt pretty good about zorching him. I did kind of regret eliminating the rest of them, including the pet rat and the animated skeleton Barney.
I intensely dislike Lechance, or whatever the hell his name is that ordered this “purification.” His attitude towards me is irritating. Will I have the opportunity down the line to stick a knife in him without locking myself out of quests?
There’s nothing to indicate that the writers had any particular family member in mind as the supposed traitor, but IMO it was probably the orc.