you are right, in vanilla its not worth it yet, but instead of spending 32 points on physical attributes you still could have auspex 4 for 25 points and in meleefight just use bloodbuff anyway.
Bloodbuff is only +2 and is a pain to use every time you want to feed or do melee combat.
additional 24 points in research would give you free dodge/firearms 5 plus level in persuasion and intimidation
You get another final free point in Scholarship after the Giovanni mansion. 10 research isn't worth it since it only gives you firearms (firearms is best maxed by buying the 1st, 3rd and 4th point, free point from book and romero, total cost only 18 xp).
max skillcheck is 7 for intimidation(upd: nope, its 8. 7/7 is better then), if you don't use persuasion above 8, then 6-7 is enough(7 only for Chinese killers and to persuade Ricky at Johnny's club, with persuasion 6 you still can get in to basement of Giovanny mansion).
Kind of irrelevant if the skill checks aren't good for intimidate. For Persusion most points come from scholarship which needs to be raised anyway, early on it needed a point of charismato hit some skill checks.
plus, add points you spend on thaumaturgy and dominate, and you could easily had 11 or even 12 lvl of ranged weapons by this time. seduction 4 is useless, you can fuck Jeanette w/o seduction skill, and feed on the street or just buy whores and save another 10 points.
and w/o disciplines like celerity, potence, fortitude or presence its not worth to invest a lot in melee(but yes, its almost free in this case)
Melee is perfectly acceptable with just Blood Shield (and still quite adequate when not). Chang brothers in particular were completely destroyed by the katana while ranged weapons were pretty meh. No need maxing out to 13 ranged when melee is still better. FWIW I had 12 ranged by the Giovanni.
In any case I don't really see what the discussion is about now. My point was that Bloodlines gave you enough free skill points and XP to do pretty much everything if you built wisely. I think that's been proven. Before you were telling me that haggle is so good, now you have shifted 180 and are criticizing my build for not having maxed several combat stats with a third of the game's XP still unearned.
Now in vanilla where AFAIK you don't have the long cool down and can spam the blood spells, yeah you can take anything down in seconds if you have the blood (like Harm in Arcanum).
you can switch between spells while cooldown
You can't cast new spells though, unless there's some exploit I'm missing.
Yeah TBH the mechanics aren't really interesting enough to warrant this type of discussion.
I only brought up my problem with Vick and the ninja Malk because IMO it illustrates a problem with the game -- it encourages you to make different builds and usually gives you many different ways to approach situations, but in some cases hits you with fairly massive difficulty spikes if you haven't built for straight-up toe-to-toe combat one way or another.
I know this is a bit of a contentious issue here -- "no bad builds" and all that -- but I feel pretty strongly that character-building systems should strive for differentiation rather than simply "better" or "worse" characters (which are going to be a side effect no matter what you do).
I.e.: if your character-building system uses a single resource pool and gives you choices to distribute them between, say, talking, sneaking, lockpicking/hacking, brawling, and shooting, then your game should support each of these styles as well. Bloodlines gives the impression that it wants to -- most quests have multiple ways to approach them and talky skills plus lockpicking and hacking feel really rewarding -- but then it hits you with boss fights that can only be approached by straight-up combat, some of which are on the crit path and unskippable (Blood Guardian, the Tzimisce, Bach, Ming Xiao, the Sheriff etc.). This is a fairly significant flaw, and one that would not have been all that hard to address. This is IMO more of a design flaw than just lack of polish; there are so many instances that it can't be just happenstance.
Problem with Bloodlines is that it so so combat-less in other parts of the game that the difficulty spikes come completely out of nowhere from left field. If Bloodlines was an actual combat game the player would be able to rate their character abilities vs. a difficulty curve and adjust accordingly, in Bloodlines you only momentarily make contact with the difficulty curve once every few hours and need to just guess where it is in the meantime and hope it doesn't spike to your disadvantage.
Overall the game is begging for a much more openworld style of gameplay. As it is its like... Fallout 2 if you were able to non-combat every thing to the Den, but to actually leave the Den you had to take down Metzger's gang. Just wouldn't work for most builds.
I certainly wouldn't call these changes a case of implementing "no bad builds". Bloodlines is different that it actively deceives you into thinking that it isn't a combat heavy game. A talker in Bloodlines isn't like rolling an 18 strength 3 int wizard, which should be obviously stupid, because the talker actually works for most of the game and at most the game strongly hints that the player should also be able to sneak and get some minor combat skills to beat a few mooks.
