What is a Sampire?

A sampire is a character that uses (at least) Weapon Skill, Necromancy, and Bushido.  The main objective is to get into Vampiric Embrace form and deal lots of damage to the enemy.  While in Vampiric Embrace you perform 20% life drain whenever you strike an enemy (20% of the damage that you deal will be returned you in hit points).  Example, if you deal 100 points of damage while in Vampiric Embrace you will be healed 20 points of damage.  

The ‘Samurai’ comes in with Bushido.  Certain parts of the bushido skill gives you large advantages in terms of offense and defense (which we’ll cover shortly).

What can I kill with a Sampire?

The short answer, anything.  I personally have killed everything from paragon succubi, to Dreadhorn and Irk, Miasma, ranging to Baracoon and paragon Balrons.  

How does a Sampire work?

A Sampire deals as much damage as possible, while taking as little damage as possible.  The more damage you deal the more you are healed, the less damage you take the less you have to heal.  

What skills does a Sampire have and why?

There are two different schools of thought on this after the publish that was an attempt to nerf sampires.  I call them the ‘Connor’ and ‘Lynk’ schools of thought.  First we will cover what the templates have in common and then we’ll discuss where they are different.

Weapon Skill (macing, fencing, or swordsmanship) –  This needs to be 120.  You can get away with 115 but any peerless boss or doom boss will be extremely difficult.  A weapon skill defines your chance to hit as well as to be hit.  As mentioned earlier, the whole idea behind a sampire is to deal lots of damage while taking as little as possible.  It needs to be one of the three skills listed because of the next required skill….

Parry – Parry should be 120, but you can get away with 115.  With 115 parry you have a 32% chance to parry, with 120 you have a 35% chance.  Is the 3% chance worth it?  In my opinion yes.  If you can’t afford it go with 115 and when you can afford it go to 120.  You will be effective with 115.  In fact, 115 only has a 1% chance increase to 110.  Anyone can afford a 110 parry.

Bushido – Bushido is an integral part to this template.  Bushido allows you to honor your foe, lightning strike, and parry with out a shield with no penalty.  

You can honor your enemy as long as it is at full life.  Make sure you ALWAYS honor your enemy before hitting it.  When you honor your opponent, you begin to achieve ‘perfection’.  Perfection is an ability that gives a damage bonus based on the amount of consecutive hits you deal to your target. In order to use it you must have at least 50 bushido and then honor your target creature.   After that, every successful hit will increase your perfection while a miss will lower it. As your level increases each hit will gain a 10% damage increase bonus (to a maximum of a 100% bonus at the highest level).  This does not stack on top of the 300% damage increase cap.
At the death of your opponent, you also gain back some health, stamina, and mana based on the final level of Perfection you have achieved.

Lightning strike will grant you a 50% hit chance bonus when attacking your target.  This bonus does not exceed the hard 45% item increase cap.  Lightning strike also gives you a chance to perform a ‘critical hit’ on your opponent.  When you perform a critical hit you hit your opponent for roughly 200% more damage than you normally would (this stacks on top of the damage increase cap of 300%).  This is key to a sampire, because for 1 v 1 PvM it allows you to exclude hit chance from your suit and focus on other mods that might be beneficial.  With that being said, if you can afford it it’s wise to include hit chance for the times you get mana drained and/or you need to use a special move like whirlwind or momentum strike.  Hit chance is still extremely valuable.

Bushido allows you to parry without the use of a shield.  In fact, using a shield with Bushido actually hurts your chance to parry.  This grants you the ability to use a 2 handed weapon which hits harder, or use a one handed weapon and drink heal/agility/strength/refresh potions.

Necromancy – Necromancy is used for Vampiric Embrace which was covered earlier.  You need a minimum of 99 necromancy (after items) to sustain vampiric embrace form.  Some templates (which will be covered later) also use it for curse weapon.

Chivalry – Chivalry is essential.  There are several spells use with Chivalry that make it invaluable to a successfull sampire.  The first of which is Enemy of One.  This spell grants a damage increase of 50% (while you receive a 100% dmg increase from other monsters than your target).  Consecrate Weapon is also regularly used which makes all damage you deal allocated to the lowest resist of your target.

These are the required skills, the remaining skill points are what cause 70% of the sampire debates between the most knowledgable and regular Stratics contributors.  

The Lynk Method (supported by NickyDishes) –   This method inovlves using skill increase items to fit in Tactics (damage), Anatomy (damage and healing bonus), and Healing.  The benefit to this build is the obvious healing.  On top of the constant life leech, you also get 60 point bandaid heals every four seconds.  In order to use this template you need to fit in a lot of skill increase between armor and jewelry.  The cons to this suit is it is very hard to change equipment when you find a better piece.  This template is left more to those that have aquired an arsenal of oddball jewelry and armor.  Not recommended for the casual player.

The Connor Graham Method – Connor’s method is a little more diverse.  He sets up his template to use Tactics, but his last skill (that isn’t mentioned above) ranges between Anatomy, Resist, or Spirit Speak depending on what he fights.  It’s a great style and requires the use of soul stones but it really does make a difference.  

Anatomy is the best all-around skill, since it will increase your damage output, and thus enable you to leech more life back.

Resisting spells is good for long fights with necromancy-casting opponents. Specifically this is a good skill for use in Doom, where the bosses frequently cast blood oath. A well timed blood oath will kill a no-resist sampire every time.

Spirit speak gives your other necromancy spells a little bit of added oomph, enabling you to wither through low end spawns, use wraith form instead of vamp form for leeching mana or using curse weapon for emergency life leeches.

What stats should I use?

100 strength (minimum)
10 int (30 mana with elf)
As much dex as you can get away with up to 125

Items:
The sampire depends on the right items to get away with this template, which can be very pricey or very cheap.
The bare minimum you’ll need for a sampire is:
Armor:

45% DCI (70 if you depend on divine fury)
All 70’s resists

Weapon:
A weapon that swings at the highest possible speed (1.25 seconds)
High mana leech
High stamina leech

Combined armor, talisman and weapon
100% damage increase

You can get all of that for a relatively small amount of gold with a little bit of creativity, then build up over time to get the higher end items.

For example, a new sampire could use an aegis of grace, fey leggings (elf version) and a ring or bracelet with 10% DCI to cover the DCI requirements while adding 20% damage increase to a ring and bracelet as well as wearing the gauntlets of nobility or stormgrip (both are less than 500k gold at the time of this guide) and a 40% damage increase weapon with mana and stamina increase in order to start out.

Through Miasma or Thrasher hunting, you can earn a lot of gold and earn minor artifacts which you can sell until you can afford better weapons and armor.

When you feel comfortable with that, you can learn to key the Dread Horn, which is the easiest peerless monster to kill with this template. After a while, you’ll earn high end artifacts (the Crimson Cincture specifically, but ML ingredients and dread horn manes sell well too) which you can sell or trade for the highest end armor (mace and shield glasses, jackal’s collar, ring of the vile, conjurer’s trinket, etc)

Tactics advice:
-Honor everything, even mongbats.

-Use bushido’s confidence, heal potions, refresh potions liberally. Use chivalry to cure only when you’re done fighting (you auto-cure low level poisons in vampire form, and leech more damage than you take from any high level poisons)
-If you aren’t lightning striking, then you’re doing it wrong.
-If you don’t have the mana to lightning strike constantly, then you need more mana leech
-You can get away with no stamina leech on your weapon only if you have more than 70% DCI and can cast frequent divine furies as well as using refresh potions.
-Honor everything (it bears repeating) Without honor, it’s harder to hit that 300% damage increase cap, and makes things a lot harder for you.

A special thanks goes out to Farsight for his help and input.  Items/Stats/Tactics was taken from an article he wrote.  His article can be found here

Supplemental Information
By aarons6
there are two different ways to attain stats – the armor way or the EP way.

One way uses armor to get hp/int and stam up. What your looking for is 130 hp, 50 mana and 180 stam, those are pretty much a min for sampires.

The EP way uses 50 EP to max out stam and hp with pots.

the EP way gives more room for higher mana, but requires you to carry pots around everywhere, and those seem to be the first thing monsters loot when you die.

Weapon choice is also very important, many times I have had bosses i couldn’t kill until I got the weapons just right. Sometimes it helps to have AI, sometimes it helps to have mortals, sometimes feint works best. This is where things get expensive.