There are many different types of vampire in the World of Darkness, and all of the best abilities in Vampire: The Masquerade Bloodlines 2 draw from their unique skillsets, strengths, and weaknesses.
Bloodlines 2 gives you the opportunity not only to choose from six of the clans from the setting, but to eventually reshuffle your ability tree to take advantage of powers from all six of those clans – at a price, of course.
This means that once you hit a certain point in the story, your ability tree goes from extremely linear to presenting you with almost too many choices.
To help you decide how you want to build your version of the playable Nomad, on this page we’ve put together an explainer of how the expanded ability tree works, as well as giving our recommendations for the best abilities in Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2.
VTMB2’s Ability Tree explained
Bloodlines 2’s skill tree has six levels for each clan:
- Passive: This is the ability you unlock immediately upon choosing your clan.
- Strike: A basic offensive power.
- Relocate: A positioning power.
- Affect: A crowd control power.
- Mastery: A signature power tied to the clan’s specialisation.
- Perk: The final power you can unlock after completing your clan’s skill tree.
Your available Passive and Perk abilities are determined entirely by your choice of clan, and can’t be swapped out, learned or acquired by members of another clan.
However, the other four abilities – Strike, Relocate, Affect, and Mastery – can be learned by a vampire of any clan once you reach Quest 6 (“Keep the Peace”). You just need to have reached the equivalent level in your own clan’s skill tree; convince a member of the clan in question to teach you; and be able to pay for the privilege.
VTMB2 Best Abilities
Abilities from your own clan’s skill tree only require skill points to unlock, meaning that you’ll likely race through to completion quite quickly. But learning a skill from another clan additionally requires blood resonance points; you can collect these by feeding on humans who display Sanguine (pink), Melancholic (purple), or Choleric (red) auras, at a rate of approximately 100 points per successful feeding. You do get a discount, however, when learning another clan’s ability if you share an affinity type with said clan.
Note: The Nomad can’t collect blood points from humans displaying Phlegmatic (blue) auras, but conversely Fabien can only usefully feed from them during the sections of the game where you play as him.
Once you’ve stocked up on both XP and blood points, you can head to one of the following locations to chat up the relevant clan contact and have them teach you their powers:
- Fletcher (Ventrue) is at the piano in the Makom Bar; you’ll actually encounter him here as part of the story before you’re even able to learn new abilities.
- Onda (Lasombra) can be found near the penthouse elevator in the lobby of the Glacier Hotel.
- Mrs Thorn (Tremere) is behind the counter of the Wake The Dead Café.
- Niko (Banu Haqim) and Patience (Toreador) are both at the Aurora Pawn Shop: Niko is behind the counter, and Patience can be found in her studio in the back room.
- Silky (Brujah) is sitting at a table on the second floor of The Dutchman Bar.
These locations will all be marked on your map as soon as you gain the ability to learn skills from other clans. Speaking to your own clan contact will cause them to comment that they have nothing useful they can teach to an elder of their own bloodline, but you can still undertake their loyalty quests and/or choose to romance them.
You can only equip one ability from each category at any given time, so you will have to sacrifice your innate clan abilities if you want to mix-and-match with another clan’s powers. However, it’s well worth experimenting with which combinations best suit your playstyle, and since Bloodlines 2 isn’t really an RPG in the sense that there’s no character sheet to work your way through, this is about as close as you get to customising your build.
Best Strike Abilities in VTMB2
Strike abilities tend to focus on the immediate damage the Nomad can deal to the enemies surrounding them. Depending on whether you prefer to brawl head-on or control the action from a safe distance, there are a couple of strong abilities we recommend.
Players who prefer the tanky approach will probably benefit most from the Brujah ability Lightning Strike. This is, essentially, an unblockable combo hit that doesn’t require you to pull off any fancy button mashing, since your character will take care of raining down a hail of blows on any and all nearby enemies once the ability is triggered. The final hit deals increased damage, too, so overall this is perhaps the strongest early-game ability when it comes to dealing with crowds of opponents.
Players more comfortable with the game’s controls and positioning might consider the Banu Haqim’s Bladed Hand as a more demanding but also very satisfying alternative to Lightning Strike. Provided you can comfortably confront enemies face-to-face and avoid them suddenly juking around behind you, Bladed Hand can be deployed to behead many weaker enemies in a single blow, and will naturally cause a lot of damage even to stronger foes.
On the opposite end of the Strike spectrum we have the Toreador’s Entrancing Kiss ability. All you need to do is get in close enough to one enemy to plant a smooch on them, and for a period of time they’ll turn on their own crew to fight on your side, defending you from any other attackers in a crowd. The Nomad’s position as a sole combatant in a sea of opponents can be quite lonely in the early game, so creating your own temporary allies is a powerful solution for those who prefer a more defensive combat style. “Weaker-willed” targets (like, say, humans as opposed to other vampires) will stay entranced for longer.
Best Relocate Abilities in VTMB2
Positioning is a key skill during combat in VTMB2, with Relocation abilities typically focused on helping the Nomad move either quickly or quietly.
If it’s “quickly” you’re after, the Brujah’s Charge ability is pretty unbeatable, allowing the Nomad to put on their best berserker impression as they batter forward at a near-untouchable speed. The best part, though, is that they’ll pick up the first opponent they collide with and use them as both a shield and a melee weapon for the remainder of their charge, knocking down anyone else who gets in their way.
For the “quiet” approach, the Lasombra’s Shadow Step is the most scarily effective option. The signature of Clan Lasombra is their mastery of shadows, so what better way to sneak up on an enemy than by melting into your own shadow and reforming out of theirs, putting you in the perfect position to deliver a quick stealth kill? Nothing, is what – and also, this might actually be the most frightening thing a vampire does in this whole game.
Some of the clans take a more specialised approach to relocating, which is why we’re also going to shout out the Ventrue’s Possession power, which interprets relocation rather loosely as “temporarily hijacking the mind and body of an enemy”. Doing more or less what is says on the tin, Possession allows you to continue to fight as normal, except that for a limited time it’s someone else’s precious body you’re putting on the line.
Best Affect Abilities in VTMB2
Most combat encounters in VTMB2 see the Nomad facing off against a group of enemies who will probably start quite widely scattered, allowing for some stealth moves to thin out the herd before dealing with the final stragglers as a by-now-rather-angry crowd. Affect abilities offer a wide range of solutions for managing this scenario.
To focus on picking off as many stragglers as you can before triggering a proper fight, the Banu Haqim’s Mute ability is the best in the game. An enemy afflicted with Mute can’t make any sound – running, screaming, or even firing a weapon, it all happens in complete silence, leaving their allies none-the-wiser as long as they’re away from line-of-sight. This is chilling stuff, obviously, but it also means that accidentally breaking stealth in front of a single target won’t automatically bring the whole crowd down on you at once.
For the exact opposite effect, the Tremere’s Cauldron of Blood causes a marked enemy to scream out their agonised last while their blood literally boils inside their veins. I’ll be honest that this was one of my favourite abilities from the first game, so it’s very gratifying to see it return here with an added twist: other nearby enemies will (understandably) be distracted by the noise and the horror, grouping themselves together in a way which presents you with the opportunity to unleash some deadly attacks into the tightly-packed crowd.
Because we like a left-field third option, you might also consider equipping the Ventrue’s Cloud Memory ability to your Affect slot. The great “Ctrl+Z” of vampiric abilities, Cloud Memory essentially resets an aggroed enemy, causing them to forget you were ever there in the first place and returning them to their idling pre-alerted state. This is one of the small number of abilities in the game which can be used outside of combat, too, so it can be useful for smoothing over any minor Masquerade breaches while you’re out and about in Seattle.
Best Mastery Abilities in VTMB2
Mastery is the hardest category to pick a “best” option from, because unlike the previous three, there isn’t an overall thematic similarity in what each ability is trying to achieve. Mastery focuses on each clan’s signature skillset to deliver a unique high-level power, and as such, your favourite option will likely be highly personal.
That being said, we can of course make a few recommendations just to give you some ideas. The Brujah’s Earthshock, for example, asks “what if a vampire pulled off an iconic superhero landing?”, unleashing a shockwave that knocks everyone in range off their feet and causes a great deal of damage to those in closest proximity.
The Tremere’s Blood Salvo, meanwhile, makes up for the clan’s lack of brawling power in the early game by equipping them with daggers made of blood that can be thrown out in several directions at once using telekinesis. Maybe I’m slightly biased because this was my other favourite ability from the original game, but it really is satisfying to finally see blood sorcery pay off in one of the best offensive powers further up the tree.
For a less flashy but undeniably extremely powerful alternative, the Ventrue’s Mass Manipulation not only freezes all visible enemies in place – which is already very useful – but it also applies any other active Ventrue and/or Affect abilities to all affected opponents for its duration. Combine that into something like a mass-application of Cauldron of Blood, and you can begin to see that its potential is much grander than it might at first appear.
If you’ve just fired up Bloodlines 2 for the first time, you might also appreciate our guide to the best dialogue choices to make when meeting Lou Graham in the second quest.