I'm almost finished with VtM:R and didn't have much trouble to get through from Prague to Giovanni's Warehouse, except for that one Vozhd encounter. Now the opponents seem to get a bit tougher though and I realize my characters are still missing important Disciplines like Prison of Ice, Theft of Vitae etc.

I've still got quite a few xp points to spend (about 50-60k), so that's not necessarily a problem, but how would I learn certain Disciple groups that my characters don't know yet? For example the Blood Magic or the Blood Ritual group required for the disciplines mentioned above. None of my PCs has them yet. I once found a tome of Blood Rituals and gave it to Serena, so she could fight the Vohzd but since she was removed from the party shortly after, that was a waste.

Can I buy such tomes somewhere in New York? I don't think I saw them in the shops. Or is there another way to gain access to new Discipline groups?

Thanks for your help!

This won't be much help; I'm going on a long ago memory. I don't recall many tomes being sold - most are found here and there. However, at this point, I don't remember where. I'm guessing the blood magic tombs were a medieval find at the chantry but I could be wrong. Hope someone else answers this.

Yeah, I feared so, but at that time I had no other choice, since I badly needed someone to cast Prison of Ice and Serena was the only one with enough xp left to learn it. Otherwise the game would have ended for me with the Vozhd encounter.

If the tomes are the only way to learn Discipline groups and you only get one Blood Ritual tome in the whole game (in the MIddle Ages, on top of it), that sucks. I will admit that I didn't put that much thought in my characters' stats and diciplines but even so it seems the game is balanced very badly. Most encounters were pretty easy even with a messed up party and then at one or two points in the game the difficulty all of a sudden goes up by 200% and in order to move on you absolutely need some specific disciplines that are easy to miss for a clueless player?

Add to that that xp and money are strictly limited with no option to gather some more before continueing, if your PCs are lacking in some regards, and that you can't return to all stages of the game if you miss something ...

At least Christof can still learn Lure of Flame disciplines and become a master at Fire Storm, let's hope that will allow me to finish the game without having to resort to cheats. :(

i completely agree that the game is very unbalanced. especially the first vozhd and the nosferatu boss at the tunnels in prague. when dealing with that nosferatu boss at the first time, i almost scremed in rage since he usually one or two hits party members and also uses the discipline drawing out the beast which causes near instant frenzy. and he is not alone, hanging out with couple of other nosferatus and ghoul rats. but after finding that blood stealing sword, the game becomes relatively easier.

if it is your first playthrough it can be horribly hard and i strongly advise reading the manual which explains the attributes(what is str, int are used for etc.), disciplines and such -these info are lacking in the game.

but there are couple of tips: use all discipline tomes you find on christof, when distributing experience for attributes go for str, con, dex and int for christof(str, con and dex are for combat obviously and int for disciplines). for disciplines, max out blood healing, theft of vitae, prison of ice, call lightning and feed. the others are not that great(feed is expensive but can be devastating. by luck i defeated that nosferatu boss i mentioned earlier by it)

In the end I managed to finish the game despite all. Actually the last dungeon crawls were a cakewalk again, once I resorted to using Cloak The Gathering, Feed and Fire Storm. Even the Vozhd weren't that hard to defeat now, with the help of modern weapons. Difficulty in the two boss fights went up by 400% though. Luckily Plan B worked out for me, without much use of DIsciplines: Equip the party with rocket launchers, buy tons of rockets and blast the bosses from a difference, constantly running away from them (splitting up the party was helpful with this tactic, too). I'm glad I still had enough money for that.

Anyway, thanks for your help, lordhoff & Corax! :)