There are three kinds of powers.

• Abilities which you can use all the time with cooldowns, one ability gives you blood
  
• Skills/Spells which use blood
  
• passive abilities which are active all the time

The most important thing is: experience/XP
Whenever you get a certain amount of XP you get a skill point.
With skill points you can buy/upgrade the three above mentioned types of powers.


Kill: 20 XP
Unaware: +60 XP or Alerted: +20 XP
So: Unaware is like killing 4 guys at once! These are Perks you can get or not get!

PDA: 200 XP, 200! 10 enemies! Look for them!

As you see above, just killing someone gives 20 XP, but killing an unaware person gives 20+60=80XP.

So, if you want to have a lot of cool powers, redo the levels until you kill most people unaware and try to find all the PDAs. 200 XP for ONE PDA.

One thing to keep in mind IF you are crazy and good enough to do it:
If you or a corpse are seen, not really sure about the conditions, then more guards are called.
More guards means more XP. So... why not being seen while sucking the blood of one guy to be able to get more walking XP? I never did it because I am not good enough to clean the levels with normal difficulty without problems but I wanted to mention it. :-)

Btw, I still do not know if it is better (better like: "MORE XP") to kill nobdy or kill as many as possible. Because of this I try to kill as many as possible and my skills are for killing, not for moving towards my target. Which might be wrong.

In my not so humble opinion you should put your first skill points into:

1. Instant Kill -1-> Quiet Kill -1-> Silent Kill
   
2. Shadow Leap -1-> Increased Range -1-> Reduced Cooldown -2-> Perfect Shadow Leap
   
3. -1-> Shadow Grip -2-> Silent Grip -3-> Destroy Corpse
   
4. Feed -2-> Sanguinarian -2-> Sanguinarian II -3-> Sanguinarian III

The reason for the above:

If you can kill without sound, you can even follow a two person patrol and kill the person who is one step behind the other. Without "Silent Kill" your life will be very hard.

With Perfect Shadow Leap you don't make a lot of noise and can just jump two steps behind someone who walks towards your cover. Perfect for moving father away and perfect for killing from behind. Do not jump directly behind them, they will still hear that. Not sure about external noise in that context. What happens if you jump during a thunder?

"Shadow Grip" with "Destroy Corpse" will make many situations easily solvable.

"Feed" to maximum is a must, because otherwise you will always struggle to use powers which need blood. To max it after "Shadow Grip" is because you can use "Shadow Grip" without it, but you have no use for "Feed" without a power which uses blood. And you really don't want to have to use blood for healing. It would mean you were detected AND shot at AND hit. How embarrassing!

Anything after the above mentioned ... I really don't know.
I was going with Vampire Vision and it is VERY useful if you have to move through a forest with a lot of thicket where ghouls are bad to see without an upgraded vision. So, yes, it IS good.

But: I think the way to play the game really successfully could be the correct use of these skills which play with the minds of the victim.
Instead of jumping like a clown.. why not do something to the mind of the prey and just walk by it?

If someone is able to use the mind powers successfully, please comment in a meaningful way so I know how to try them too.

I think "Awakened Instincts" is a very good power, but it is expensive.
If you KNEW you could just suck that guy's blood instead of having to silently kill him, that would be nice. If you can know that a patrolling guy is seen by another patrol at a point where you were sure you could kill him, you can play like a pro instead of like a save scummer.



Look at this to know that distance is important, not just line of sight:




Bushes are able to be used as cover, right click them like you do with walls to get perfect cover.


In the beginning you have no use for "Shadow Leap" to a wall, I want you to remember about it because later you can just ignore some traps while "jumping" from one high above ground walkway to another one.