Does Astral Projection makes a vampire even more vulnerable or harder to kill?

Question

A vampire still have a soul (spirit) in 3.5 as far as I know so since Astral projection states:¸

If the cord is broken, you are killed, astrally and physically

Dying ''physically'' or having it's body destroyed only forces the vampire to go to mist form and go into it's resting place.

Being killed ''astrally'' just mean your new form ''died'' and you normally return to your physical body, if the silvery cord is severed then even your material body dies, but that does not affect the vampire. (I might be wrong here)

As far as I understand, it would be clever for a vampire to be even more careful and only go out in his astral form (wich is not exclusive to the Astral plane, even if you are transported there, you can come back with your astral form in the material plane if I remember correctly from a post I saw). His material body would be not too far from it's resting place, in an extremely secure area, so if it dies, it would just be in his coffin and regenerate. (a fortress with a lot of adamantium doors to break etc. before reaching one of it's many resting place in a demi-plane so good luck reaching it in 1 hour ;))

Answer 1

The vampire would take additional effort to kill, because you'd have to find its body.

Some comments:

• Vampires avoid dying by reverting to gaseous form if reduced to 0 or less HP, but by RAW, severing the silver cord outright kills the vampire and puts the vampire to "dead" status, meaning it can't benefit from non-magical healing (i.e. its own fast healing). Its soul leaves its body and the body will decay. This way of dying wouldn't be a death effect, and undead shouldn't be immune. However as mentioned, the silver cord is hard to sever.

• In core, projection can only be done from the Material Plane:

You project your astral self onto the Astral Plane, leaving your physical body behind on the Material Plane in a state of suspended animation. The spell projects an astral copy of you and all you wear or carry onto the Astral Plane.

But as Maxime commented, Manual of the Planes lets you use Astral Projection from other coterminous planes.

Either way, a vampire would at least have to be in a location where planar travel is possible. If a vampire is strong enough to cast Astral Projection, it'd probably be encountering some high level parties. The vampire's physical form would have to be enchanted with some pretty strong anti-scrying measures to avoid getting tracked down when the party sees the vampire disappear instead of going gaseous, assuming the party didn't already cast analyze dweomer or something.

However if the vampire instead decided to low-key hop around place to place and feed on low profile people, they could probably make a legend of themselves over a very long period of time before finally being hunted down (finding their coffin with Discern Location would probably be a starting point for such a hunt) -- interesting idea for an adventure!