The Werewolf post.

There are a few things I wanted to talk about. How ho-hum Shadowfen was, the writing quality improving again in Eastmarch, despite how boring and one dimensional Nords are, and how I don't think an editor even glanced at the Rift. (Voice acting doesn't match text, missing words, breadcrumbs for quests I've already completed, never actually informing people the deed is done before a ghost sends me elsewhere in the same quest line. I could go on, and eventually will... likely)

Ok, a while ago I teased with this picture...

Combined with that and how I don't black out my text box and the amount for chatter from a guild called "Creatures of the Night", also combined with previous posts detailing my goal of being a werewolf, one could probably guess what I was up too.

Well SURPRISE!

It's exactly what you guessed! Creatures of the Night is a guild about providing Werewolf and Vampire bites to those who want them. There's a weird thing going on right now in the game, it stands out to a point where even IGN had an article about it. The "Underworld Economy".

Many people out there want to be one of these things, the NPCs that can turn you are super rare. As you can turn another player into one of these once a week, players have begun selling their weekly bites for upwards of 40,000 gold. These same players also camp the spawn points of werewolves and vampires to keep their prices up.

Not Creatures of the Night, weekly bites are raffled off when available and I happened to win one of these raffles. I have in turn, raffled off my bites thus far.

However, I have since stopped being a werewolf. No longer a Creature of the Night, I have since also left said guild, but recommend them to anyone who aspires to be either wolf or vamp.

Dropping werewolf was not a choice made lightly. I had worked towards it, pre-built my stats for it, leveled the skill line to the max of 10 and tried for days to find a way to use it effectively.

As of right now, it is my current opinion, that there is no use or point to the werewolf form beyond RP, novelty, and cool factor.

First is the cost of the ultimate ability, it starts at 1000 but degrades to 900 as you level it. This takes 15-20minutes to build up. As a dungeon is roughly 20minutes on a clean run, you can think of it as a 'once per storyline' or 'once per dungeon' ability. Must be a good one eh?

Not quite. Even with a focus on Stamina, which is what werewolf damage scales off of, I didn't actually deal any increased damage. To which I have to think of the effect of those who didn't focus on stamina as much as I did.The abilities given are a leap and an area of effect fear. The leap has a minimum range and deals less damage then my normal assassin Telestrike. The AoE fear has a slugish 1 second cast time that requires you stop attacking for it to register, lagging it longer as you mash the button after letting go of the mouse. I can get the same fear from the shadow line of my Nightblade abilities. Only it's instant. And it can be morphed to lower the enemy's attack power...

The trade off for these things that I could have anyway? 50% more poison damage taken at all times. Losing the ability to interrupt and dodge. Additional weakness to players who invested into the fighter's guild skills. Oh! I also lose all other abilities for the duration of the transformation.

Ah yes, the transformation. All that stuff I gained (but not really), available once every 20minutes or so, lasts about.... 30 seconds. Now to be fair, I can extend that by devouring corpses and a morphed version of the leap. The 3-4 second devour animation grants a few extra seconds. The description says it can be used on 'humanoids' but I need to get a Zenimax to English dictionary. 'Humanoid' does not include goblins but includes wolves, spiders and bats in their context.

I will bring up that devour is currently bugged. It provides the extra time at the beginning of the animation as opposed to the end, can be interrupted still providing the time, and, having not finished the animation, allows the devouring of the same corpse again.  While this can provide infinite transformation time, it does not weigh in my decision to drop the form as it is a bug that will surely be fixed. Or perhaps helps illustrate my decision as even with this bug, I dropped the form.

It feels like I don't actually gain anything. From groups of minions to bosses, it's easier to just use my class abilities, to which I can guess it would be even easier if I had an ultimate other then werewolf and didn't have a weakness to poison. For these reasons, I gave it up.

Perhaps later they will fix it, I did not repec my skill points so it's still fully leveled up if I ever regain the infection. I did however respec my attributes to be more Magika focused and now use mostly Nightblade class abilities. The transition period of leveling the skills was hard, but overall things have gotten easier then my stamina weapon build.

I have no current plans to become a Vampire, but I may give it a try later. Until then, I'm alright not being supernatural.

-McJigg