struggle to understand why taking composure 3 and firearms 3 would ruin any character concept, even if you want to be terrible at all other forms of combat. Vampire can be a violent game, and most vampires logically want to be able to defend themselves.
I like to play new, weak characters with very human sized dice pools. Usually with the indulgence of an ST, I can skirt around a lot of violence and just hide or social my way out of it. You're right, at even 5 years in, after seeing what's what, then you would definitely pick up a way to fight. I just tend to be more on the existential horror side of things is all.
But it really doesn't play like that. I've taken 0 compulsions as a PC in half a dozen sessions, because I don't try to do things I'm bad at. I've never frenzied, and with 8 dice in a predator pool, hunger is not a problem: it's just a limiter on discipline use that I can redline if things ever get really, really dicey. Compulsions can happen a lot if you try to do a lot of stuff, especially if you have low willpower, but they're not very burdensome
So definitely don't be a jack of all trades and things will be fine? That seems fair. It seems like having a high dice pool and using it liberally is the secret to success here. You would think with all the elders taking off that it would be an anarchy power grab! I guess they took all our power with them!
If you think disciplines are weak, I can't help you.
Mostly looking at low points Presence and Celerity and thinking...but why? Dominate seems much more solid.
If you really want to have cool magic powers and avoid the hunger system, though, play a Caitiff (Ventrue sire) with Fort 3/Aus 1/Dom 0 (The old Venture antitribu spread). You can start with Resilience, Toughness, Valeran, and Sense Unseen, and basically be an unkillable Paladin who uses her first 6 XP to take Cloud Memory for a free redo button. Bad at brawl? Who cares, no one can damage you. There's even a Golcona loresheet that lets you lower hunger by 1/day, for free!
Genius. Caitiff really seem like the way to go. I was feeling that anyways. Thanks!