Hunter rework/balancing ideas

Skills

• Crucifixes should when held disable nearby (or at least in front) vampire abilities (some exceptions would be damage limiter), with the atheism accessories blocking this effect based on the tier of crucifix. This would put emphasis on hunters teaming up, with one hunter staying back with a crucifix and another actually attacking and defending the one holding said crucifix. This would also make the crucifix actually viable in a pvp scenario while also not making it broken.
• Greater blessings should be replaced by just blessing and should allow a hunter to "bless" weapons and items, this would affect the item with "holiness", which would upon hitting a vampire/vampire player with a weapon that is marked as holy would, for one second each, blind them, disable abilities( all abilities stop working for a second, but bat mode has a cooldown of around 10 seconds to really help hunters with vampires who just run), and deal some small extra damage. This would make the holy tree of the hunter skill tree (crucifixes, blessings, garlic, etc) more unique and provide a more counter vampire style of play, It would also encourage teaming up against vampire players, additionally remove vampire awareness and replace it with "Greater blessings", which would simply be a stronger version. Blessings could be done by right clicking an altar of cleansing with an item with a crucifix, greater blessings with the golden version.
• Change cross bows to go from basic to semi-automatic to fully automatic, however lower the damage drastically and remove all the different types of bolts however allow for the blessing of bolts or the crossbow itself. This would encourage team-based play due to the crossbows being in a different skill tree as well as encouraging the use of a crossbow to apply pressure to a vampire player while also being used to keep them from escaping (blessed disabling bat mode, teleport, etc)
• Remove the hunter axe increased damage to vampires (slightly increase base damage) as the holy effect, smite, etc would do better, additionally make the ultimate variant of both hunter axes, heartstriker, and heartseeker rarer. As they're both meant to be ultimate versions they should be harder to find than just looking in a mineshaft and finding several. Additionally up the durability or let it have mending.
• Enhanced armor should lessen the effects of vampire abilities but not remove them entirely, things like making freeze shorter, dark blood do less damage, etc. This would give more incentive for hunter players to actually wear the armor instead of just plain netherite.
• Remove most self buff potions and replace them with splash potions that contain multiple harmful effects to vampires while some good for hunters, this would be making potions that would have the effect of instant health 2 and holy water. This would put emphasis on it being strictly a hunter item without it being incredibly overpowered like it is now, especially due to the holy element being added with this suggestion, strength 3, regen 3, etc would break the game and be unneeded.
• Remove most of the oils due to the fact that they really have little to no purpose. With the exception of instant health, smelting, and evasion. Holy water should also double as an oil as an alternative way to get the holy element on a weapon; this should possibly be a weaker version as to not make people with the bless skill entirely useless, possibly wearing off faster. Instant health oils can be used against vampires to deal extra damage and to heal your fellow hunters in battle ( possibly make it so a weapon with instant health can't damage hunters so it can be actually used to heal)
• Add another type of hunter armor that looks like the black priest-like hunter npcs armor, this would increase the range of crucifixes when held and increase how long/how many hits blessings would last, possibly also increasing the damage of holy water. This would allow some players to play as more of a support class and allow for some more customizability.

Small balancing/rework ideas

• Vampires should heal from instant damage and take damage from instant health, this would make them follow more of the whole undead rules as well as giving hunters & vampires a unique way to heal and damage each other. Maybe they should also be immune to poison, since all other undead entities are immune to poison. It wouldn't change much anyway considering vampires naturally heal faster than any poison can damage them though. (This should all be configurable to be shut off due to the fact that other mods might rely on harming/poison/instant health effects and may be affected by this change.
• Vampire slayer does less damage than sharpness and is thus useless and confusing, it should be removed with the smite enchantment simply doing more damage to vampires, this would make it so if hunters want to deal extra damage to vampires they have to sacrifice a bit of extra damage to everything else, which is the same as smite, and bane of arthropods in normal minecraft
• All holy based damage to vampires (smite, holy water, blessed items) should deal a small amount of extra damage, disable vampire abilities for a second (turns batmode off, can't freeze, etc during said second), and blind for a second. This would make hunters more focused on countering vampire abilities and make it so hunters have direct counters to certain abilities (damage limiter may have to be an exception due to the nature of the ability)
• Remove all special tipped arrows that are added with the vampirism potions. They provide an unfair imbalance in pvp since all factions can use them regardless of the fact that they are hunter weapons.
• Pitchforks should be normally craftable and not be a hunter item, it's just a pitchfork, villagers use them. It doesn't really make sense that only hunters can craft them. The crafting recipe could be two sticks, then 2 iron one in each top corner.
• Have hunter axes and all the other tools that do this have the proper properties of said tool, that is to say, a hunter axe is registered as a sword when it's an axe. This means it sweeps.
• Vampire capes should move like a cape, like they used to. They look incredibly awkward to wear.
• The Holy element finishes vampires.
• Vampires take continual damage from holding anything blessed.
• Remove toxicant and just have the player take damage, it doesn't really make sense to wear a kind of armor and suddenly get poisoned.
• Hitting a vampire with a garlic injection should use up said injection but apply the garlic effect for a time, while this idea does seem comical it would actually have a decent use for effecting vampires before actually going into combat while also doing something that kind of just makes sense.
• Remove hunters and vampire npcs having resistance, it doesn't really make sense and is ultimately just annoying when you have to hit them twice as much
• Unsure if it's entirely possible but vampires should have some kind of dust/smoke particle when they die, maybe having the downed body crumble into dust.
• Update the hunter npcs to be holding the actual new models as well as make them move accordingly (some hunters will hold a stake and a crossbow, and when charging said crossbow will just leave the stake to awkwardly hover in the air.
• Possibly make it so smite and blessings can't be on the same weapon, with smite dealing less damage to vampires than blessings with the trade-off of it being permanent due to it being an enchantment
• Still debating this, but maybe hunters and vampires shouldn't be able to use turtle master? Possibly just having them get a weaker version like with fire resistance, the thing really isn't balanced in vanilla and this mod certainly doesn't help its inherent balancing. It's gotten to the point where people will just spam turtle master and take no damage resulting in incredibly long fights that force one person to leave or just not fight until the person runs out of potions (see the fight between me and bitul).
• Hunter armor, specifically the normal variant, should have armor toughness, as due to it not having said toughness it's worse than netherite and not used at all.
• Remove the knockback from hunter axes and increase the ultimate variants base damage slightly, the knockback should be removed because it is by all means a HARD nerf to the item, and always gets removed by the grindstone anyway making it basically not exist anyway.
• Some way to bless items mid-fight, Random suggested a prayer book, holding in off hand and possibly shift right-clicking for possibly a weaker version on-the-go
• Fix the blood system, it heals based on the amount of blood gained and not the fact that you have full blood, this means that eating a heart with one lost blood drop gives less healing than eating a heart with more lost blood drops. To put it simply, healing should be based on just being full and not the total amount of blood gained.
• Garlic diffusers tend to get glitched where the garlic effect just stays in the chunk, where even removing the diffuser won't remove the effect. This is kinda just a bug fix.
• Hissing should do something, I genuinely don't know what it does, can't find anyone that knows what it does. Possibly such a loud sound that it blinds and or causes nausea

Werewolf addon ideas:

• Werewolves and vampires should take continual damage for holding silver items/wearing silver armor.

Important note:

Holy items shouldn't deal a LOT of damage, the effects they give should only last a second. They should exist to give hunters an edge in combat, not an overwhelming chance. The blindness and other effects are simulating a burning effect from being touched by a holy object.

This whole suggestion is based on two concepts. Vampire hunters are just that, VAMPIRE hunters, this suggestion would make them actual vampire hunters and not just an all around monster hunter, and it emphasizes teamwork, which is a strong theme with the hunters themselves (spawning in groups at tents, being basically human, etc).

Additionally this would mesh really well with aging and final lord levels, with really high aged vampires being taken out by large groups of hunters using blessings.

Reviews

Tabby_ (Hunter player on the server)

"Ooo yea I can definitely understand the hunter axes and such, everything seems pretty balanced out I like it :D"

Tomas_valle (never gave feedback)

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InfernoWarrior (Hunter player on the server)

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Zin (never gave feedback)

TransNoel (hunter player on the server)

"i really like all the ideas though

really good :D

The vampire slayer quarrels only effect vampire npcs so it wouldnt bother normal players it would just act like a normal quarrel"

Kranzy (never gave feedback)

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Grid(Hunter player on the server)

"I think I can agree with everything. I am not sure about the turtle master potions; yes, people use them too much, but I am not sure whether it is okay to block their use entirely, maybe just adding some debuffs to it"

Random

"I agree with most of this as it suggests reasonable changes, kind of sub-class and makes the middle skill tree more able to compete with the blood potions skill tree. Besides that, it makes vampires follow Minecraft's undead creatures rules which makes more sense and allows to remove vampire slayer enchantment which is unnecessary at this moment."

Credits:

Special krab and Supermike

I also want to suggest that if hunter axe will be registered as axe then it should waste 1 durability point instead of 2 when you use it for fight. And there may be smoke particles and/or searing sound to indicate if player/mob is affected by the holy element.

Does it waste 2 durability points per swing? I don’t player hunter normally but I’ve never notice that.

Also, I like the idea with the holy element

I meant if hunter axe will be registered as the actual axe because if I remember correctly, axes in vanilla spend 2 durability points per swing. Hunter axe doesn't waste 2 durability points per hit now

Regarding the werewolf addon ideas I do not really understand why merely holding anything silver related would result in damage? Just feels like an unnecessary faction restriction that would result in making killing other werewolves including entities take longer if you are one.

I hadn't really considered the werewolf v. werewolf point, I was mostly thinking about from a lore perspective silver should burn werewolves & vampires for touching it. Maybe the silver oil wouldn't cause damage since you're holding the handle, and since its oil its only going to be on the blade part. Or maybe it should just be scrapped as an idea.

Like Lusifer said, lore wise it makes sense. Silver it self rdoesn’t do much damage against werewolf npcs and is slightly better against werewolf players, so there’s no lose in time trying to kill an npc and wouldn’t really make a difference in pvp or pve scenario.

After a while I came up with another idea: make it so hunter weapons hold more holy charge than all other weapons. Also there can be this feature: the higher tier of hunter axe/crossbow the more strikes it can do before blessing will run out. This will make tiers more different from each other and will give more value to the ultimate hunter axe