ESO Werewolf vs Vampire
This section of my ESO Complete Beginner Guide is an in depth comparison between werewolves and vampires in the elder scrolls online, and it will help you decide which (if either) is the right choice for you!
If you want to read what passive and active abilities you get from being a vampire or a werewolf, you can find the vampire skills here and the werewolf ones here.
Keep in mind being a vampire or a werewolf leaves you open to some fighter’s guild abilities, mainly Dawnbreaker which will hit you hard in a PvP environment.
To actually become a vampire or a werewolf, you need to contract vampirism or lycanthropy respectively. To do this, you have a couple options:
- Contract it from a player
- This is the one I recommend the most. You can have a guild-mate give you vampirism or lycanthropy by going to either a vampire or werewolf shrine with that player in your party and having them bite you. You will contract the disease and the quest to get the skill line should appear within the shrine area.
- Don’t pay someone to bite you. There are plenty of people who will do it for free.
- Purchase it off of the crown store.
- Be bitten by NPCs in specific locations. The vampire and werewolf NPCs that can give you the disease spawn at specific locations, you can’t just be bitten by any ol’ vampire or werewolf. Players do like to grief these spots too… but, if you still want to do it this way, here are the spawn locations of the vampires and the werewolves.
Should you become a werewolf or a vampire?
Ultimately, it is up to you. It isn’t mandatory, but these are some conditions when you should consider it.
- Werewolf
- If you’re a stamina DPS player; magicka cant make any use from werewolf.
- You want to use werewolf form and focus your setup around it.
- You want to slot the ultimate for extra stamina recovery.
- Vampirism
- Vampirism has gone through many changes in the game’s lifetime. Back when it was overhauled in Greymoor, the primary reason to be a vampire was because you want to use the vampire skills and focus your build around being a vampire, due to the fact that the drawbacks to vampirism weremuch steeper than they used to be. However, nowadays, they’ve lowered some of the heavy penalties, so you can now better utilize Vampirism for a passive (such as undeath for tankiess in PvP) or one skill that you want to use (such as mist form for PvP). Outside of the PvP uses however, the vampire line only becomes a good grab if you specifically want to use some of the active skills and play a specifically vampire focused build.
If you are a vampire or a werewolf and you want to cure it, you need to go to the mage’s guild in one of the following cities:
- Bangkorai
- Riften
- Rawl’kha
Best Ways to Level Up Your Vampire/Werewolf Skill Lines
Vampire and werewolf are actually incredibly easy to level up to 10. These are the following ways I recommend leveling up the skill lines:
- Vampire: Simply grind experience like you would anything else. Vampire doesnt have any special conditions or requirements for its leveling process, you simply just need to gain experience. To see the best ways to grind up XP, check out this guide.
- Werewolf: Werewolf used to be much more challenging to level up, but now you can level it up from 1 to 10 in about 30 minutes! Werewolf levels up by getting kills, and feeding on corpses allows you to extend your werewolf duration. So simply find any delve/public dungeon with a good circular loop and just run around and slaughter everything. Make sure you feed after you kill packs of mobs to keep the werewolf timer going, and just run around in that delve/dungeon until your werewolf line is level 10!
