Seriously, I've watched Wyll annihilate a bunch of goblins with "Arms of Hadar" when defending Aradin and co. I was aghast, that looked so...wrong to me ðŸ˜
Yes! I so agree.
Astarion: It actually kind of makes sense to me you don't recognize him as a vampire spawn right away even if you had some familiarity with the creatures. The tadpole changes all the rules for Vampirism. Kind of hard to accuse a dude of being a vampire when you first meet him under a very bright sun.
Fair point! That might be enough to buy him the benefit of the doubt.
So you're actually buying into how the tadpole conveniently explains everything that would be challenging about vampires because of game mechanics? That's precisely what makes the writing feel weak to me. They cherry picked the vampire traits that caused probelms and explained them with a really weak plot device "because tadpole". Daylight, entering houses, crossing water.. not a problem.
Actually, I think the implausibility of that pales in comparison to the tadpole saving us from the fall from the nautiloid. It doesn’t make a lot of sense to me that it would protect us from that and not from dying in myriad other ways. (Unless we were actually caught in some area safety effect of the nautiloid and it wasn’t the tadpole at all!)
Seriously though, I think it makes narrative as well as gameplay sense for Astarion to get some additional benefits from the tadpole, as it gives him reasons to want to keep and use it that no one else would have. But while I’m okay with the sunlight and entering houses, I do hope Larian will (re)introduce at least some of the features that could make an undead character different and interesting, such as damage from crossing water and most ordinary healing not working. I can see why they avoided this in EA as it is fiddly for a new player to manage and there’s already a limited pool of companions without the option to hire mercenaries, but fingers crossed the approach to vampire spawn powers/vulnerabilities will be more nuanced in the full game.
