Vampire lord or Werewolf? legendary difficulty.

[Zachshock]

Which one would be a good choice for a melee character on legendary difficulty?

[Ihateeverybody]

to be honest.....Neither. You are less powerful as either. Your armor goes away as do your weapons. What they are replaced with is Gimmicks, Just like the Dragonborn (the character, not the DLC) mechanics.

Edit: It is the equivilant of Fallout 4's power armor. Nothing to write home about for a seasoned player. It looks cool for the simpe minded (Surface over substance). Practicality be damned, it looks pretty.

Edit2: But to answer your actual Question, Werewolf is more appropriate for a melee based character (not that it needs to be a melee centric character as again........your regular combat perks don't apply (don't recall if your magic perks do (mage armor, magic resist in the alteration line, atronarch, etc.)

[ColorsFade]

If you're talking about *playing* as a Vampire or Werewolf, then neither. Your dual-enchanted melee weapon(s) at higher level are going to be far more powerful than any of the vampire or werewolf skills.

Now, if you're talking about secondary effects... vampire.

This depends, of course, to some degree, on mods you may be using. For example: I play with what I like to call a "hardcore survival experience" - which, in addition to Legendary difficulty level, makes the game harder. This means Campfire, Frostfall, iNeed, more dangerous dragons, and darker nights and dungeons.

The overall effect of this combination of mods is that the game is significantly harder, just from a survival aspect.

Playing as a vampire - without using Vampire form - eases the burden. One of the neat things about RPG's is the progression of power; you learn knew skills, abilities, and those skills and abilities get more powerful, and you can do things easier than you could at lower levels.

Being a Vampire is much the same way.

Cold, rain, and snow - the elements - are something to manage as a mortal with Campfire/Frostfall/iNeed installed. But once you become a vampire, you have a lore-friendly way to mitigate these burdens.

Likewise, darker nights and dungeons create a burden on the character to carry a torch, use Magelight and Candlelight frequently, or use a mod like Wearable Lanterns (which I highly recommend; again lore-friendly). But here again, become in a Vampire mitigates these hardships. A vampire's night vision (or Predator Vision if you're using Gopher's mod, which I highly recommend) makes darker dungeons much easier to deal with.

Becoming a Vampire in such a configuration - with all the survival aspects and harder mods - feels rewarding. It feels like unlocking a powerful ability through normal RPG play. It's just one more part of the "progression" of playing an RPG and it feels really neat.

Werewolves get almost none of this (except a bit more resilience to the cold).

Personally, I play as a Vampire in every play. I primarily play a Battlemage, and I use a 2HS a LOT in my plays. When I finally get far enough into the story to become a Vampire, it always feels very rewarding, because of the way I've setup my "hardcore" style of survival game. And it's always a lot of fun after that.

Caveat: I also play with Better Vampires, and sunlight is set to kill. I don't like to go easy on any aspect of the game :)

Anyway, that's my 2 cents.

[ᴛᴀʟᴜ 🐦]

Both are really weak at high level play and annoying to use since you can't loot items, check your map or go trough tight dungeons and doors since they are so tall. The transformations suck too, takes like 5 - 10 seconds to transform back when you can use that time to just run trough things normally. The forms are mostly strong at low levels, but once you reach lvl 30 and above you start to find problems. The only thing i liked from vampire lord was the telekinesis spell, funny to throw animals and people around, deals massive fall damage too if you can throw them off a cliff or something. Theres mods that improve on the forms, but havn't used them.

[Jerubius]

Both make you immune to diseases, which is a helpful perk for a melee character. Vampires can be abused with the necromage perk to increase the effect of buffs on yourself, and come with helpful frost resistance built in. They also have a variety of perks relevant to stealth or illusion magic, but you won't really care about those for the most part. Also neither can get the well rested perk from beds, but vampires can still get it from coffins. Vampires however also come with a fire vulnerability, which can make getting close to dragons a bit of a pain. WIth Hircine's ring, the werewolf form can be very effective for quickly getting around if you don't like fast traveling everywhere. The werewolf form can also wreck any single target that can be ragdolled. I think the lunge attack ragdolls enemies, and so you can just stunlock single targets to death with it. Damage falls off pretty hard and you don't have reliable healing access.

Werewolf is my pick for most fun to play, but as for most useful, definitely vampire lord, as neither transformation is terribly useful, but vampire provides a fair amount of useful buffs without transforming.