Dracula-verse Strategy Guide

 

How to be OP in the Dracula (novel)-verse.

For the purposes of this I will be including the unpublished prologue and section to the ending as these seem to things Bram Stoker wanted to include but was told not too by the editor, if you choose not to include them it dramatically changes the novel's scaling.

Wall Tier:

Dracula takes place in a world where vampires prey off humans. This tier includes all the human protagonists as they seek to ally themselves in the defense against a powerful Vampire Count, Dracula as well as the count's minions. This tier gets up to wall level as Dracula's minions includes wolves whose bite force can reach this as well as weaker vampires than the count. Vampires in this verse are stated to be 20 times the strength of humans, which depending whether you think it means average men or peak men would be either superhuman level or low end wall level. Vampires are also stated to be unkillable by man-made weapons, though the degree this means their durability in contrast to their regen is debatable.

In terms of speed, Harker, a normal human was able to escape from Dracula's territory despite being pursued by his wolves, wolves being able to run from 13-16.5 meters per second, compared to the top speed reached by Usain Bolt being 12.42 meters per second. Similarly the heroes are able to fight at similar speeds to Dracula during the daytime, when his powers are diminished. Even during the day, Dracula is described as moving like a panther. Panther speed varies based on species but speeds of 13-18 meters per second are not uncommon putting this tier at superhuman in speed.

This tier primarily has three threats. The first of them are the weaker vampires in the novel including the three "Weird Sisters" often called by the fandom the "Brides of Dracula" as well as Lucy in her vampire state. These vampires are obviously weaker than the count but should still have the abilities Van Helsing gives as the general properties of vampires.

As Vampires they are dead, kept animated by the consumption of blood from others. They can convert others into vampires by forcing others to ingest their blood in a ritual. They have command over the creatures of the night, can transform, and control elements especially fog and lightning. They have necromancy which allows for the raising of the dead and divination through it (asking spirits questions.) They have size manipulation strong enough to slip through the cracks of a coffin, as well as levitation. Finally their most potent abilities, they have limited teleportation, invisibility, and a fear aura so strong that the Weird Sisters presence were able to make horses die of fright.

Vampires also have a regenerative property, it being stated the only way to permanently kill one would require the head to be cut off and then a stake to be put through the heart. However I am not super this is super relevant in a vs context as this regeneration seems to be very slow. Harker causes a slight wound to Dracula while he's sleeping near the start of the novel and he still has the injury near the very end.

The second threat of this tier are the aforementioned creatures of the night. This includes swarms of rats, owls, bats, moths, foxes, wolves and the criminally insane. However this control is limited as animals will still flee in fear even when commanded to fight, and the insane Renfield tried to kill Dracula in gratitude to Mina for showing him love. The animals can be a major threat in large numbers, especially wolves who have the attack potency to hurt wall level entities, and all of them providing anti-stealth being essentially thousands of scouting eyes with enhanced senses of scent, hearing, and echolocation to bat. 

The final threat of this tier are the humans. While for the most part they have no abilities and are just more fighters, they are through the instruction of the Vampire Hunter Van Helsing all knowledgeable about vampire weaknesses and armed to take advantage of such. 

So how to counter this tier? Well vampires in Dracula have a LOT of weaknesses. Running water stops them, a wild rose placed on their coffin keeps them from rising. They require blood to maintain their youth and strength and also go into a feral rage at the sight of it. The biggest weaknesses are that their powers become massively diminished in sunlight, and holy objects are immense anathema to them, completely stopping them cold. 

That doesn't just mean that any holy character can do it. Obviously there's still swarms of animals and some pretty strong people around, however that brings up another big weakness of the tier which is that the characters are all on the very low end of their stats. The speed here is low-end superhuman and the strength/durability is low-end wall level for the strongest characters on this tier. There's also no real offensive haxes on this tier to speak of. A character who is very solidly wall level+ would be an absolute tank that even the strongest attacks on this tier could barely scratch and have an in-built defense against being swarmed. This would still leave the vampire women's stronger haxes to deal with, but in general a combination of holy power and a higher end wall level character I think would be a real trouble for this tier to deal with.

That brings me to my first counter

Arthur, King of the Britons, from Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

King Arthur and his noble knights withstood a cow being launched on them from a castle calced at 163 kilojoules making him potentially around an order of magnitude stronger than even the strongest characters on this tier, the difference between a normal human and the strongest humans in the world. King Arthur was also able to block strikes from the Killer Rabbit of Caerbannog and escape from it, the Killer Rabbit able to blitz normal knights putting his speed at very high for the tier.

Arthur is a Knight on a holy mission from God. He's a skilled swordsman who could one-shot anyone in the tier moving much faster then them. He learned the technique "Ni" in which he say the word "Ni" which causes dreadful pain in whoever hears it, which is a perfect anti-swarm tactic if the vampires tried to command wolves to attack him as any in range would hear the Ni and their will broken. He was also armed with the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch, a holy hand grenade which would likely be able to one-shot the Vampire women.

While Arthur would beat anyone in the tier with no knowledge, it's not impossible for them to counter if they have divined knowledge of him. In particular the Vampires could try to deceive him given his naivety or to use their seduction skills. I don't think the fear aura would work as Arthur demonstrates considerable bravery, but the seduction skills are unclear. God did give the holy mission to Arthur suggesting he was the most noble of the Knights which would scale him above Sir Lancelot who resisted the seductions of the women of Castle Anthrax and Sir Galahad who briefly resisted it as well. That said I'm not sure on that point, plus they might be able to trick him in some other way. While I don't think this is super likely given he can tank almost anything they could conceivably do, for a safer counter you could use

Zero Kiryu from Vampire Knight.

Zero is a vampire hunter who is himself a vampire changed from the blood of a pureblood vampire, making him the strongest of all the vampire hunters. Zero is strong enough to fodderize most vampires, who can do things like easily break through walls and blitz normal humans from close range, putting him as notably above the tier in terms of stats.

Zero has enhanced sensing of a vampire, primarily the ability to sense other vampires which would allow him to negate the vampires invisibility. From there he would very easily be able to kill them before they could do anything using Bloody Rose, his gun which is made specifically to kill vampires, enchanted with the blood of a pureblood.

Zero can create a powerful wolf, or other constructs made of vines though it requires a lot of his blood to do so. That which would normally be a weakness however would actually be a massive strong as the sight of his blood would naturally sense the Weird Sisters into their normal feral rage which would make it easy for him to shoot them.

Zero has most of the same vampire abilities as the tier but much stronger. He can turn animals into his familiars giving him direct control of them and has a special affinity for dogs meaning that attacking with wolves would be massively counterproductive. He has a healing factor faster than the novel's vampires, as well as the same level of immortality. He has telekinesis which he can use to stop any of the humans who try to attack him with any kind of a vampire weapon. Basically Zero is a Dracula-verse vampire, but with power creep and who is also a vampire hunter.

Not even the mental abilities of the Weird Sisters would work. Seduction definitely wouldn't as Zero is known for his unfailing loyalty and devotion to Yuki, and is a threat to pureblood vampires with outright mind control.

The only way that the tier might be able to kill Zero is basically exactly what the humans did to kill Dracula, find his sleeping abodes during the day and destroy them. But not only would Zero not give Mina his blood (given his loyalty to Yuki) and thus they would have no ability to track him, but Zero even has some resistance to sunlight (in Vampire Knight sunlight pains Vampires but doesn't fully remove his powers, similar to how Dracula maintained a level of physical threat even in daytime), and Zero is able to wield anti-vampire weapons even after being turned suggesting normal anti-vampire weapons the humans would use like the Cross or Wafers, Zero could resist. Still it might be a threat if the vampires allied with the humans and used swarms of animals to attack Zero's during daytime.

Still I have a counter I think would be even better, that being

Rapunzel from Tangled

Rapunzel was able to withstand without injury a long fall down a canyon that took several seconds in the Tangled cartoon, a feat that would put her at least several times stronger than the tier, if not much more. She was also able to outrun wolves which is pretty pertinent for this tier.

Rapunzel's hair is enchanted because it contains the Sundrop, the light of the Sun. This likely means that literally being around Rapunzel would nullify the powers of the vampires. And that's just her hair's power source. In terms of other abilities, her hair passively heals and can shield her which given her natural durability would make it nigh impossible for anyone in the tier to ever do any lasting damage to Rapunzel. She can use her hair to grapple, bind, and move acrobatically which can allow to her to grab one of the vampires who are levitating. Moreover the hair's magic undoes mental effects like the vampire's fear aura or control of the animals, and even if they still have powers would completely nullify both attempts to attack Rapunzel's mind and break any of their animal minions out of the vampires' control. She also has an affinity for animals and easily tamed a wolf in literally a few seconds meaning she could likely turn them to her side the same way Mina did to Renfield.

Rapunzel also learned the ability to control blackrocks from the Moonstone. These are considered completely indestructible in-universe, outside of other blackrocks, and can tank even lava. This especially combined with her enhanced fighting skill enough to fight trained swordsmen would allow her to pretty easily control the area against swarms of animals or against the humans of the tier just by creating a rock surge in that direction.

Even assuming the vampires could control lightning to strike her, Rapunzel's hair has protected her from explosions of vastly greater power than a lightning bolt. Overall Rapunzel is the best counter for the tier.

City Tier:

This tier contains including two named vampires; the Count himself, Dracula, and another powerful vampire Countess Dolingen from the untitled prologue. Dracula was able to create the strongest storm on record, was potentially maintaining a hill a castle stood upon, and hit Countess Dolingen with numerous lightning bolts that shook the expanse of heaven. Notably it took numerous strikes from Dracula to kill Dolingen, a weaker vampire then him, so their durability should scale.

In terms of speed, there really isn't any big speed feats in the novel. Dracula at one point seems to blitz the Weird Sisters, taking Harker from them before they can drink his blood which would likely be subsonic speed. In the same section Dracula is stated to move like lightning, however this is the only statement of the sort, it's a common phrase, and it's also not consistent with anything else so it's most likely hyperbole.

This causes a little bit of a problem, as the speed is very low for the power tier.

In terms of abilities, Dracula is the main antagonist of the novel. He was a successful military leader who studied black magic at Scholomance. In addition to the abilities stated of all vampires, Dracula demonstrates a degree of mind control, enough to paralyze people and control those whose blood he's drinking, the ability to scale surfaces like a lizard, creating and maintaining the largest storm on record for several days, some type of vision that weakens his opponents physically, more versatile transformation being able to change into creatures of the night, elemental dust, or turn intangible entirely, and telekinesis strong enough to move a ship into a harbor in a massive storm. He's also superhumanly intelligent, for he has "the cunning of the ages."

This really changes the strategy for the tier because now there is actually defensive hax, intangibility, as well as offensive hax (paralysis-inducing hypnosis) and any counter has to account for that somehow.

However the tier also has some other characters. The Devil does not appear in Dracula but is stated to be the one who taught him magic at Scholomance, along with several other vampires. The Devil would naturally scale to Dracula in terms of dark magic he can hypothetically use but without the usual vampire weaknesses. This also suggests that there are several more vampires of Dracula's rough power level as Dracula was one of several vampires to gain black magic by the Devil.

So how to counter the tier? Well the biggest problem is the relatively low speed for power. Ignoring that this verse is more dangerous overall due to having a defensive hax that requires special tactics to get around, at the very least having access to a holy weapon to nullify the black magic, as well as an offensive hax. A lot of the same vampire weaknesses apply to most of the characters here, but most of them would not work on the Devil, though these wouldn't work on the Devil except MAYBE holy items. 

Another weakness for this tier specifically is that the characters shown are all emotional, dramatic, and over-confident. Vampires are prone to bouts of passion symbolic of the blood they seek. Dracula was also clearly over-confident facing humans on the grounds that they aren't a threat, so characters that don't seem like threats might be a good pick. This brings me to my first counter

Minoru Kamiya, alias "Doctor."

Doctor is classified as an upper D Class physically, putting him in the same class as Genbu and Saint Beasts arc Kurama who could move faster than the eye could track, putting him at similar speeds to the verse. While physically he's far weaker, his Psychic Scapel technique allows him to cut enemies up to A class who can destroy entire countries, meaning he would be able to easily slice through anyone in the verse he came across.

Doctor is a keen psychological manipulator with the psychic power to control body chemistry. He primarily used this to create a spirit energy-draining disease. I'm not sure if this would work on the vampires, as they are dead and Dracula is explicitly immune to disease but this is one that can drain spirit energy itself. However he doesn't really need it.

Kamiya pretended to be a weak and lowly human doctor, something which would absolutely work on the vampires in this tier, especially as with one slice he can completely bisect them including their hearts and brains. Regeneration should be possible from that but not in any reasonable time frame. He can also adjust his body to not feel pain and to repair itself from injuries to the point that even an upper B Class Yusuke who was on the level of Toguro and could create city level attacks couldn't easily put him down. And it's not like the psychic powers are likely to work on him, as psychics like Kamiya have a level of resistance to other psychic powers. If Dracula were to telekinetically hold Doctor down, it would be fairly easy to beat him, but without prior knowledge there's no way he's open with that.

Doctor also has one more tactic which would be especially helpful against vampires. Vampires including Dracula are sent into a feral frenzy at the sight of blood and Doctor could easily use his bodily manipulation to send spurts of blood around causing the Vampires to completely lose concentration and tactical thinking.

There's only really two clean counters this tier has for him. One is if Doctor runs across the Devil, though presumably with such little information about the Devil Doctor could use a similar tactic. The other one is if Dracula simply swarmed Kamiya with hoards of animals to overclock his stamina and concentration and tear his physically weak body apart. This would work but it's probably not really in-character against a single random human. For an even stronger counter however you could use

Durkon Thundershield from Order of the Stick.

The Order of the Stick have an early feat where they survived a mushroom cloud explosion, and Durkon should be comparable to his teammate Elan who can easily dodge arrows and moves fast enough to create numerous afterimages which would put Durkon at this tier's physical capabilities.

Durkon is a Dwarven Cleric. Given his short stature and unassuming appearence it's likely the tier would pay him no mind. However as a cleric Durkon has a set of holy spells that are specifically designed to fight the undead and devils.

Like all good Clerics, Durkon can simply force the undead away with turn undead and can give himself spell resistance. He also has resurrection to turn the vampires into physically vastly weaker humans by literally resurrecting them, True Seeing to see them when invisible, wind walk to hit them when they're levitating or just blasting them with Thor's lightning, can counter paralysis and telekinesis with "Remove Paralysis" and turn it back on them with "Hold Person", can create a shield to block attacks with (Shield of Faith.) His spell list is basically a perfect list of things to counter the tier. They can't even really hide from him with darkness or fog as Dwarves have natural darkvision and he has an amulet of natural armor as well as natural Dwarven constitution to make himself extra impossible for them to damage.

The only way anyone in the tier could really stop him is if they somehow took advantage of his phobia of trees or managed to bite and turn him, both of which are unlikely to say the least. However some think the mushroom cloud feat for Order of the Stick is an outlier.

For the best counter I would suggest

Markal from Heroes of Might and Magic

Markal as a powerful necromancer is on the same tier as Wizard Heroes who can move and levitate entire cities with their magic. Heroes are also depicted as similarly powerful to a Tier 7 creature like a Storm Titan who can create a storm encompassing a battlefield. He also likely scales speedwise, at least in reactions to Wind Elementals who are stated explicitly to move at the speed of the wind which generally reaches subsonic speeds.

Markal is a powerful Necromancer, giving him specialties in dark and summoning magic. In terms of dark magic Markal has basically most of the magical abilities of the verse but way stronger, including numerous ways of weakening enemies or controlling them including his own unique ability to manipulate all undead psychologically which would be especially potent on the dramatic arrogant vampires of the Dracula novel. Or he could just control them with spells like Confusion, Frenzy, and Puppet Master, or could induce blindness. While vampires can hypothetically get around blindness by turning into bats or wolves, they are left physically vulnerable in that state.

Markal is also a master of summoning magic which would allow him to summon literal armies of undead monsters, including Tier 7 Skeleton and Ghost Dragons as strong as Dracula. These armies are way more numerous and dangerous then Dracula's army, and furthermore would make it impossible to tell where the threat is as Markal can just disappear inside his massive undead army. Markal can also create a phantom duplicate of himself or arcane armor for himself with summoning magic making it even more difficult for Dracula to find and harm him.

While Dracula has some control of the undead, it would definitely not beat Markal's who can control entire armies of neutral undead at will. That's not even getting into the other things Markal could hypothetically summon including dozens of elementals, a phoenix, and worst of all bees. 

And plus Markal has intimate knowledge of vampires from his own army and would easily be be able to permanently kill the Dracula-verse vampires or bind their dark souls to his cause should need be.

However what if Markal runs across the Devil himself? Well Markal happened to run across an item called the Heart of the Griffin, an item designed with the purpose of banishing the Demon Sovereign to Sheogh, an interdimensional prison for vampires that even the dimension traveling demons can't escape from. Given his ability to protect from dark magic, Markal should be able to pretty easily seal away the Devil after using his dark magic and knowledge of vampirism to defeat his vampire students.

And that's how to be OP in the Dracula-verse.