Thanks for the weekly report as usual MKRU. Can't wait to see what everyone comes up with, those first entries look cool.
Regarding your shoulder tendon pain, tried a shoulder pad? If you've seen a physician for it you've probably already had the recommendation depending on the damaged area (especially if the tendon is trapped due to excessive tendon fatigue).
Great game in almost every aspect except levelling. Amount of save-scumming necessary to get enough vampire dust is just ridiculous and without save-scumming I am always underlevelled because of very weird random.
Also, vampire route is kinda disappointing to be honest. Pretty much everything what happened on the hunter route before switching to vampire route loses its importance and it is like completely separated story.
I've had the opposite experience with leveling here. Collecting those parts was fun especially once
Faahlda becomes one with you.
Enemies respawn if I recall correctly, so except for unique battles and unique items, you shouldn't have to savescum (unique items by design should also be 100% drops). RNG-based stuff is always annoying (ah, the memories of 1 in 4096 drops that felt like a goddamn rigged gacha) but the leveling system in CV is pretty unique. Maybe additional lootable vampire parts would help but following MKRU's guide, I've never had any issue here and I can assure you my luck is so terrible I could fail hundreds of hits at capped THAC0 (or get hit by crits all the time with capped AC). 25% chance items literally wouldn't drop in 20+ fights (not that unlikely but still frustrating) and that did include leveling items.
MKRU also made sure to pretty much add Faahlda in every critical spot so you'll almost always have a way to reach her to talk to her without going all the way back to Noctorna HQ.
Do make sure you collect, use and hoard every single laurel you can, and also get and reinforce the best gear you can for the situation. Not just the optimal gear, elemental affiliation and status resistance is important too.
For Vampire route, I believe MKRU has plans to make it carry over, but I'm not sure about those exploration-type players who keep Dorian for later in a save then completely forget about him (not exactly sure where I caused a sequence skip to happen, but when I came back after freeing all false memories, he was already dead, so I had to revive him and kill him again, it was either that or exploit the Tragic Bride memory glitch, and I wanted to make sure I hadn't forgotten anything else in there - I tend to break a lot of things by testing everything).
For a no male interaction allowed route or if you want to become a vampire after freeing all false memories
plus one then you'll have to exploit the glitch once. If you're shameless or really love the tragic bride (I did have a soft spot for her, she does have a moving storyline) then you can just "talk" to her freed soul twelve times or more (this assumes you did her contract) then step on the middle pedestal.
Technically and if I'm not misremembering, you're supposed to become a vampire if you surrender or lose to Dorian in chapter 3 (and at this point Mila is "reborn" as a newborn vampire). I actually don't remember how I got past him without fighting him, he was already dead when I got back, but since I never killed him, I ended up missing a false memory.
The short version would be that you'll want to play them as separate stories either way. Play it the same way you'd play classics. Multiple sets of saves.
