so i have been giving it some more thought and perhaps the best best is to roll vampira again as the life spec dagger, but i am not sure about what to do with ratspike. my goal here is two daggers with lockpick, one that can do double duty as an archer, and one that can act as a mage. getting rat to 3school status was a big undertaking, so i am reluctant to change that. all he really needs is the 6 skill credits to train xbow. now 6 credits is a huge number of levels (like 30). perhaps i need to kill aun railrea and take that credit from him, that will knock 5 levels off the total, but it's still a lot. i don't want to dump healing or manaC, and lockpick is sort of the reason for his existence. one possible option is to unspec meleeD, but i *really* don't want to do that.
so i guess the dagger tank with Xbow is a pretty long term project.
i have tried twice with vampira, both templates were the "quad spec" toon of yore, with 100's for coord, quick, and focus, and spec'd dagger, life, meleeD, and lore. the second was also a quad, but with 75's for pretty much everything. the first iteration was a good tank but a lousy life mage, and the second just wasn't that good at anything. what i want is a more versatile version of moy, having lockpick and being a little stronger at life magic, at the expense of having dagger instead of sword, and being better defensively thanks to a higher meleeD. moy is an axer now, but that will change in two more credits when i go back to sword (which is how he started :-) )
somewhere in this mix, i want to finish kablammus as well. i want to get him the creds he needs to spec creature magic, and then get him some rending wands. once he has that, my hope is that he will be able to just blast things without vulns, and only yield stuff that resists him. i figure he will become a faster killing version of naihanchi at that point. nai seems to be on his way being a war magic version of janus. i am thinking of dumping healing on him to spec creature, at which point he will be spec'd creature, life and manaC. with a critical strike wand he would be dangerous in his own right.
i still need to finish my work with katusa before i start in on vampira. mostly it's gettng him out the newbie uniform (explorer gear) and into the low level gear (olthoi armor, unimbued simulacra gear, and some level 4 jewelry). from there he should be taking on his own persona with his gear and his armor. there's still quite a bit of work to go, but i am always eager to get started with a new project :-)