Casting animate skeleton as a vampire should give blood.

[mibe420]

Casting animate skeleton on a corpse gives you chunks of flesh, instead of bottles of blood. So you have to choose which corpse to turn into food and which to turn into an ally. This isn't inherently bad on its own, but once you think about how annoying it can be to keep track of which corpses came from which monsters, I think the annoyance far outweighs any interesting decision.

For example, you kill 2 merfolk impalers on the same tile. One had a trident and one had a demon trident of electrocution. Obviously you want to animate the second one but you have to remember in which order you killed them to animate the correct corpse.

Or after a fight with an ogre pack you should bottle the ogres with giant clubs but animate the skeleton of the ones with giant spiked clubs.

And after a big fight leaving multiple corpses upon multiple tiles you should find the biggest/weakest corpse, while remembering which ones had which weapons before deciding which ones to bottle and which ones to animate.

The simplest solution I can think of is just letting a vampire who cast animate skeletons receive bottles of blood instead of chunks.

[Rast]

FR: skeletons and zombies don't pick their weapons back up.

[ion_frigate]

Even that doesn't solve the problem, because for some reason, Crawl's UI only has "merfolk corpses" and "orc corpses," even though the corpses actually do retain their original identities so far as HD is concerned. So if you killed an orc warlord and a vanilla orc on the same tile, you've got the exact same situation: one corpse that will revive as a massive HP tank, and another that will be a flimsy piece of popcorn better used for blood.

[WingedEspeon]

Other classes don't have to make the choice between food and skeletons, why should Vp?

[VeryAngryFelid]

Just remove animate skeleton already. Animate dead does not have this problem and is not as OP.

[Siegurt]

Or animate skeleton could just not produce chunks, it'd solve the problem the OP has without being weird. (And would function as a super trivial nerf to animate skeleton)

[Gigaslurp]

Remove blood system altogether IMO, pretty much the only meaningful differentiations between it and traditional food are either obnoxious without adding meaningful depth (stuff like this) or lead to degenerate gameplay (leaving popcorn alive as blood pinatas for endgame).

Vp as a whole honestly needs some serious work, the race is in a really messy place where it's degenerately strong but such a pain in the ass to play that noone even cares. But that may be getting a bit too off topic here.

[RBrandon]

IMO a lot of the changes to Vp have been steps in the right direction to making them not awful to play. This change would be another one.