Speaking of lycans. There was an interesting post earlier about Lycans being underpowered in the game. In some ways I have to agree, although they are a potent, in some ways they seem to not be a real threat to many NPCs. Any opinion on that? I luv mine, but want to try the vamp side for comparison purposes. I'll admit that the Lyc has significant advantages against vamps (in that they cannot get the disease at all and have a much higher HP value than the average person and recovery methods bar none.
The vanilla version is underpowered because healing is limited to feeding off of humanoid corpses and there's zero damage resistance. With nerfed healing rate that makes the Beast form extremely vulnerable in fights against non-humanoid characters.
I still liked using it in encounters with the Silver Hand and other humanoid groups because the speed in Beast form is extreme and no humanoid enemy can defend against the running power attack which ragdoll stuns them. It works well because you move so fast that they can't even hit you most of the time and you basically just stun all of them and then flurry attack them one by one until they're all dead.
Before it was patched you could ragdoll Mammoths which was kind of funny. You can still ragdoll Giants though.
The Dawnguard version addresses all the shortcomings IMO. You get physical damage resistance and, fully perked, you can feed off of most corpses and regain a lot more health (and your damage is doubled per attack).