Vampyr Tips

We got Vampyr for free from the Epic Games Store, which gives away one or two games free each week. Here are our observations and tips, playing on Normal difficulty.

If you are considering whether to pick up this title, check out our review of Vampyr where we scored it +6/-4.

• Chapter 1 / Early Game
• Weapons
• Skills
• How to Cheese
• New Dialog at the Hospital
• Serious Bug
• Minor Issues
• Chapter 2
• Chapter 3
• Chapter 4
• Chapter 5
• Chapter 6
• Chapter 7 (Epilogue)

BEWARE OF SPOILERS in this document!

Chapter 1

You have to sleep once near the start of the game in order to get your first skills: Autophagy and one combat skill. This puts you at level 3.

• Even at this newborn level, you can explore Pembroke Hospital, the Docks, and Whitechapel; and in doing so, cure and finish Investigations for a lot of  citizens. This is because combat is very interesting in Vampyr as your level does not matter so much as your skill at reading the enemy's moves.
• Of course, as enemies get harder, what passes for "skill" starts to look like cheese moves simply because you can't afford to take many hits.
• The main benefit of levelling up is taking less damage. You may not look like you are gaining a lot of health, but when the level difference is smaller or you over-level your opponent, you take less damage from their attacks.

Weapons

• Primary Weapon: Scythe
• You can obtain this shortly before the fight with William Bishop.
• You cannot get materials to upgrade it past Level 2 in this early stage of the game. You will likely be initially short of Common Handle Parts but just keep farming Priwens until you get enough.
• The Scythe lets you Parry, and sometimes when the enemy uses a big-Stamina move and you Parry it, they are immediately knocked down and you can Bite or hit them some more.
• Even if they are not Stunned, you can typically keep up a Parry indefinitely -- by the time the enemy has recovered from stagger and is ready to attack again, your Stamina is typically refreshed enough to Parry.
• Be careful about relying too much on Parry as we did not find it entirely reliable. Sometimes it is better to just backstep Dodge from a melee attack, and when their animation carries them forward into range, counterattack.
• There are four attacks in the Scythe chain, but since it costs 30 per attack, in the early game you are unlikely to get that many swings in. Or if you do, you are dangerously too low on Stamina to Parry or Dodge afterward.
• The first two attacks are normal. The third is a zero-Stamina Parry (?), and the fourth is a wide swing that presumably is meant to hit multiple close targets.
• Although it is a slower weapon, the overall Stamina consumption is better than one-handed weapons. Later, when we have more Stamina, we can switch to the faster one handed weapons and try to stagger-lock enemies until they go down.
• Secondary Weapon: None.
• We did not need one and actually found swapping back and forth to be clumsy. In general we tried to control the fight with Coagulation and Blood Barrier, and keep the pressure up with Stuns or thwart their attacks with Parries.
• If you do want a secondary weapon set we recommend the Hacksaw for the Blood Drain; and a gun because it requires no Stamina to fire and it has range.
• Bite: Do this often. Other than restoring Blood and a bit of health shortly after the bite attack, it has the important characteristic of Invulnerability.
• When you start a Bite, the action around you stops. By the time the Bite attack is over, your Stamina will have fully recovered.
• Bite will cancel other actions such as the swing of your weapon.
• You are invulnerable when you are Biting. Enemies may attack you or you may be in an area of effect, but none of it will do any damage.
• Enemies are staggered right after a Bite so you can hit them again. This is sometimes risky as some enemies recover very quickly and if you attack them, they could attack right back faster than you can Parry or move away.
• If enemies are close by and you sneak up on them, your Stun move can knock down more than one and typically you have enough time to Bite two enemies one right after another.

Skills

• For skills you have limited choices for your first sleep/evolution. You have to take Autophagy and you have only enough for one attack skill. For reasons we explain in detail later, we recommend Shadowmist.
• Before you commit to sleeping to finish "Take me to a hospital", we recommend you have at least around 7,000 XP to evolve the following Coagulation 1, Blood Barrier 2, Physical Prowess (Stamina) 3, Abyss 1.
• This will put you at around level 11 to 12, which will still be low against many enemies but you can certainly defeat some of the really serious story bosses, Fergus Bansha and Mary, and using no Serums.
• Abyss
• At level 1 still does respectable damage against most enemies, even in Chapter 4 when they are around level 29 in the West End and we stayed at level 12 as long as we could without evolving/sleeping.
• Note that while things run in slow motion during the cast, you are not immune to damage, unlike a Bite.
• Don't count on it to actually interrupt anything. Nothing is interrupted until it lifts the target, and then certain boss moves cannot be interrupted and will end up negating Abyss.
• After Abyss, you are unlocked from animation and you can usually get in a few swings -- so you need Stamina (Physical Prowess) to get those free hits and not be drained of Stamina when the enemy finally recovers.
• Also invest in Hard Biting if you are going for Stuns and Bites with the Barbed Cudgel, but later reassign points to increase your Physical Prowess for more Stamina.
• After the basics outlined above we recommend:
• Physical Prowess (Stamina) because it helps you keep up the pressure with your attacks or Dodge out of trouble.
• Once you have lots of Stamina, bursting with one handed weapons becomes much more viable and combat easier than having to deal with enemies attacking you in between your own attacks. You can try stagger-locking them with speed 10-15 weapons and stunning them with the Truncheon or Charlotte's Stake.
• If you want to try stagger-locking enemies, an interesting early-game weapon is the Hacksaw at speed 15. Only the machete is of equal speed but that weapon cannot be upgraded.
• Some Blood Barrier to let you do counterattacks while your Blood Barrier block their attacks. Take the zero-cost version because you don't want to be both pressed for defense and Blood.
• And Coagulation to hold the boss while you deal with other situations such as dangerous area of effects or needing time to heal or wait for your Blood Barrier to be ready again.

How to Cheese

You can do a lot of running in circles and dodging, learning the enemy patterns and waiting for an opening to strike. In some closed areas where you can't cheese the enemy, you will in fact have to do this. Otherwise you can save time trying over and over and just use some cheesy moves. There is also a ridiculous amount of materials for healing Serums (slide 3) so if you have trouble in a close fight, don't be afraid to use it like water.

Cheese 1: Escaping Combat

Enemies will only chase you so far. Then they will turn around and start walking back to their initial area and resume their scripted routines. This provides many opportunities:

• You can effectively isolate enemies and fight them one at a time. Run in, strike one enemy, then flee. Repeat this attrition until the enemies are cleared.
• You can sneak up on enemies as they are walking back.
• Note that if you run too close, they will often detect you and turn around to fight. So when you get closer, switch to walking.
• Sometimes they will stop and turn around, but do nothing and just resume walking back, and therefore easy to attack without retaliation.
• Sometimes they do not react to ranged attacks and continue to walk.
• If they do react, just turn around and start running away until they give up pursuit again.
• Some walk slowly enough that you can catch up at your walking speed and hit them from behind to Stun.
• If the enemy faces away from you in their regular routine, you can repeatedly sneak up, Stun, and Bite them to recover your Blood.

Cheese 2: Shadowmist / Attack from safe spots

Without a target, Shadowmist will be dropped at your location at the time of casting.

• So if enemies are chasing you, hopefully they will run right into range of the explosion.
• Or you can cast Blood Barrier to survive a hit or two and immediately drop Shadowmist to bomb all the enemies that have closed on your location. The explosion will knock them down and you can dodge out.

It breaks blocks.

• Often enemies drop into a block stance for a while and you can't melee them without staggering yourself (and doing very little to them). The Shadowmist explosion ignores this and knocks them down.

It knocks down targets.

• This can give you a second or two of respite if you need it, especially if you are surrounded.
• Note that targets that are knocked down are not the same as being in a Stunned state, even though both appear knocked down. Knocked down targets can be targeted by take no damage. For example if you cast Abyss while they are knocked down, even if the Abyss fires after they get up, they take no damage and you have wasted your Ultimate.

It does not require unobstructed line of sight because it originates at the target.

• In general, if you can have a target lock in normal vision (not Vampire vision), you can bomb them with Shadowmist even if you cannot actually see the target because it has walked behind a barrier.

Of course Shadowmist requires Blood and you might be low before an encounter. Just backtrack and look for Rats to Bite to top up your Blood. Or sneak up to someone, Bite then, and run away; repeat until your Blood is topped up to start attrition bombing with Shadowmist. If they are not dead from Shadowmist, run away until the enemy gives up the chase then bomb them as they walk back.

Cheese 3: Dying

Dying is actually a good thing in Vampyr because when you are revived, most encounters are also restocked. In general, only special quest encounters and named enemies do not respawn.

To balance out this infinite source of loot and XP, enemies generally give you only 5 XP per kill, no matter what level they are. So if you are trying to farm XP, you can farm the earlier areas between Pembroke Hospital and the Docks, where enemies are lower-level.

Embracing Citizens

There is one scripted event where you are given the option to Embrace Clay Cox, as an introduction to the mechanic. However it does not tell you that you will lose the possibility of an achievement, nor that it affects the health of a district despite every remaining citizen being healthy (slide 4).

If a Pillar of the community dies, it also sounds serious but the district can still have a good health status (slide 4).

As you go through the game you will have a choice whether to let a District Pillar Citizen live or die. There is always a "Charm" choice which lets District Pillar Citizens die if you can find the Hint for it, so Embrace can always be avoided and still see them dead.

Losing Hints

Although the one-time dialog choices (dialog wheels with the red "Y") often seem to have no real consequence, some can actually lose you Hints permanently if you choose the "wrong" one. If you are concerned by this, before making any choices, do a search on the character online, such as at the Vampyr Wiki.

If you do make a choice that loses a Hint, and want to undo it, immediate tab out to another application or use your Windows key to call up the taskbar and thereby put the Vampyr application in the background. This will cause the menu to appear, which you normally cannot call up while in dialog. From the menu, choose Return to Main Menu, and reload your save game.

New Dialog at the Hospital

In between main story quest steps, open your Map and look at Pembroke Hospital for "!" marks, indicating new dialog available with Doctor Swansea and/or Lady Ashbury. It's not mandatory to talk to them but you can miss Hints if you do not.

Serious Bug - "A Cherished Souvenir"

You can explore Whitechapel but be aware there is a serious bug in the quest A Cherished Souvenir. Once you spy on Clayton Darby and Cristina Popa, you can unlock this Investigation by speaking with Clayton Darby. But as soon as you unlock it, if you return to the main menu for any reason, the quest is bugged and the option to complete the quest with Clayton Darby disappears.

There are two solutions.

• Get Ready
• Before unlocking the quest, you can clear a path to the quest item (Wool Scarf), and NOT pick it up from the corpse on the ground.
• Unlock the Investigation with Clayton.
• Go pick up the quest item and turn in the quest right away if you want to give it to Clayton Darby.
• Backup your Savegame folder before unlocking the Investigation
• Find your Savegame folder. It should be in ..\AppData\Local\AVGame\Saved\SaveGames
• Make a copy of it, and if anything goes wrong, restore from your backup.
• The game does make backup saves, but does so every two minutes, which is not enough of a rollback window given the nature of this bug.

Other Issues

• Chapter 2 starts after you sleep to finish "Take me to a hospital". If you happen to have a Treatment for Fatigue in your inventory, the sequence will be off. The quest tells you to answer the door but no one will be there and you need to go downstairs to talk to Nurse Crane to advance the quest. Furthermore, the boss "John Doe" will also not be in the Morgue.
• You can find the formula for the Treatment for Migraine in the Graveyard (slides 1 and 2). Otherwise you will have to wait until the main story quest "Night Shift" and get "An Enigmatic Formula" from the quest-locked Morgue.

Chapter 2

• Chapter 2 starts after you finish "Take me to a hospital" by sleeping. Following the main quest will take you into Poplar Sewers. The first time you exit Poplar Sewers, the world is altered: The shortcut to your office in Pembroke Hospital is open, and many containers in and around the Hospital are restocked and can be looted again.
• The Barbed Cudgel can be found in Poplar Sewers, and it is a good weapon to switch to as you generally Stun many enemies after one or two swings, allowing you to immediately Bite and stagger them from that Bite. However in Chapter 4, enemies become harder to Stun even if you focus on Stun upgrades, and you might end up killing them first so you can consider keeping the Scythe on damage.
• A Mace is available much later during the main quest, but it does not have a Parry ability. Instead it has a slow attack animation that is probably supposed to do even more Stun than a regular attack. We found the slow speed to be too much of a liability as frequently enemies could just move to one side or attack you first and cancel your attack. However if you are better at combat than we are, and can manage your Dodges and distance, it might be able to get you even more Stuns.
• Depending on your Stamina and Stamina management, you could start switching to a one handed weapon with Blood Drain. The idea here is to keep up the pressure and stagger-lock enemies with fast attacks so they cannot counter attack in between your strikes the same way they sometimes can if you are using a Speed 5 weapon. The Blood Drain keeps your Blood up for healing so you don't have to rely on Stuns and Bites.
• We were still low-level so we didn't have really enough Stamina to do this, so we stayed with the Barbed Cudgel. The periodic Stuns we could get with strikes or parries let us Bite to recover Blood as well as Stamina during the Bite invulnerability animation.
• Even with a fast weapon, not all enemies can be stagger locked and some will still be able to attack you in between your own attacks, presumably with an attack that is classed as fast or faster than your own. In such cases, a Parry weapon using a strike-parry-strike combo seems to work well.
• We eventually did get maximum possible Stamina and switch to a one-handed weapon in Chapter 4, but not until the very end of the game when we were able to get True Dragonbane.

Chapter 3

• Although Edwina Cox will sell a blue Trigger component for ranged weapon upgrade, she is basically the only one. Blue upgrade materials appear at the vendors properly in Chapter 4.
• During Burying the Past, it is apparently possible for Emelyne Reid to die. To get this outcome you will need to have Embraced enough Citizens prior to meeting her.
• We wanted to fight Mary at a low level so we did not Evolve after the mandatory sleep to complete "Take me to a hospital", and stayed at level 12. We were unable to save Vicar Larrabee but it is apparently possible.
• After Mary you get a cutscene, and you may find the cinematic "frozen" with you holding Mary in your arms. There isn't a prompt to do anything, but what you can do is hold down whatever key you use to move forward. This will advance the action until the script takes over when you are standing at her grave and looking up at the sky.

Chapter 4

• We were still level 12 at the start of Chapter 4 and enemies start to get really tricky at over level 20 basically everywhere, even in previous quest locations such as Poplar Sewers.
• When your level is low, you take more damage from the same enemies than when your level is higher.
• Presumably you are expected to be around level 20 when you face Mary. Nevertheless we were able to progress through the game until the boss Doris Fletcher. We defeated her at level 26 and did not sleep/evolve again.
• Blue upgrade materials start to appear, but initially are extremely scarce. When you first start Chapter 4, you can probably only upgrade one weapon of each type to maximum level and most of your initial materials will be from merchants instead of trying to get drops from containers or enemies.
• Having an upgraded weapon to do solid damage, controlling the fight with Coagulation and Blood Barrier, and strategically retreating against multiple foes will help you much more than simply levelling up.
• Occult Oculus can finally be completed as you can access the final page and also have enough Mesmerize to speak with Mason Swanborough. However if you have all four pages in inventory, the quest is bugged: It will give three pages but remove all four. Go back to Highmore Clothing and pick up the fourth page again.
• To reach Louise Teasdale for the Investigation "Like father like daughter", you need to do the "puzzle" involving the water wheels and unlock the doors in that room, then lower the water to reveal a passage you can now reach.
• You can spy on Carol and Carolyn Price to acquire a Hint. However, if you pay Usher Talltree to read his cards, he will say something cryptic that gives you that Hint. This disables the spy action and you will not be able to witness it.
• You can get the Investigation "Pandora's Box" from Usher Talltree, but the area in the Theatre is quest locked until Chapter 5, "Science without conscience".
• This quest determines whether you can obtain one of the Collectibles, and therefore also whether you can get True Dragonbane, although theoretically you can just step on the pressure plates near Usher in the correct sequence.

Chapter 5

• If Dr. Edgar Swansea survives this chapter, there will be a Hint marker ("!") at Pembroke Hospital, but he will not actually be relocated there until you sleep.

Chapter 6

• If Dr. Edgar Swansea survives this chapter, there will be a Hint marker ("!") at Pembroke Hospital, but he will not actually be relocated there until you sleep.
• The final boss fight is actually easy and straightforward except you cannot Bite in phase 2 to recover Blood.

Chapter 7 (Epilogue)

Some events and the state of the various Districts when you come to this chapter will affect some lines of conversation here. If you don't want to play through the game multiple times looking for them, here is a good video with the various combinations. The "ending" you get seems primarily based on how many Citizens you Embraced.