Improving thief skills beyond 100
iAmGoatBoy
Member Posts: 72
Is there any point? Are there any locks that require more than 100 pick locks skill to open? And so on. It seems weird that the game would allow you to build thief skills indefinitely if it does nothing, but I've never failed to open a lock with 100 skill, so... what's the deal?
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So to me it looks like you want to get most of them to 100 and no more, but Move Silently and Hide in Shadows are worth taking above 100 if you just happen to have some spare points, though it's still not really necessary.
The only one I'm not entirely sure about is pick pockets. I simply don't know if you need more than 100. So far I've been able to pick pocket everything I wanted with less than 100, so I don't think so but I'm not sure.
For Pickpocket you generally want to dump your stats into this, because free stuff is awesome, It does a check, so say you want to pick pocket a store, the store's check value is 75, you need 75 to have a 50% chance to pickpocket, as you go higher, your chance increases (not to 100% as far as I can tell, but damn close).
Hide in shadows you want to get to 150, (IIRC), and Move Silently you want at atleast 125 (IIRC) these are also percent based on opponents.
Some NPCs such as epic level thieves require up to 240 pick pockets to steal from (I only ran into this in Watcher's Keep and the guy didn't have any loot worth stealing).
Some merchants who are thieves also require Pick Pockets in the 220-250 range.
The hardest merchant I've run into was Bernard who I failed regularly on with 240 skill even.
The hardest Pick Pocket I ran into was the rogues in the Deck of Many Things encounter who needed 240+ skill to even get a success.
There's no reason to set them that high though. No benefit from > 200 in each.
looks like Bernard has a stealing difficulty of 128. so if you guys were having trouble at 240 PP maybe you need to have double his difficulty in PP for a good chance.
which rogues are we talking about @kryptix, the tieflings or the assassins spawned on one of the draws or something else?
Elven Chain imposes a 5% find traps and open locks penalty, as well as more severe hide/pickpocket penalties. Given that I use the Aslyferund Chainmail for Jan throughout TOB it seems a good idea to get him to 105% find traps and open locks.
dont invest in pickpocket, Illusion Detection is 1000x better, perma true sight!
Of course you're lower on skill points but as it turns out you can survive not being able to deal with the less than a handful traps and locks or so in the whole game that you can't deal with otherwise. You've still got potions to buff you too if you really must.
A typical example of how much you're missing out on if you don't have super high open locks: There is a locked door requiring really high open locks skill in the prison of Saradush. But you easily walk around it. Silly
- pickpocket is useless : money is plentyful anyway and potions do the job nicely
- lockpick is also useless : just bash or use knock when bashing fails. Furthermore almost no good item is behind an unbashable lock.
- HIS/MS are ok but can be easily replaced with invisibility spells/potions/items
- detect illusion is very good. But true sight does the same (and often quicker)
- set snares is very good (even if HLA traps make it a obsolete)
- find trap is the only mandatory one. 100 is more than enough though.
Therefore a level 3 thief with 100 in find trap has all the really useful utility. The rest is purely optionnal.
That being said pure thieves do not necessarily suck : the swashbuckler scales nicely with experience (although a fighter/thief multi is 100x better). The assassin poison weapon is a VERY nice tool.
Roll a Sorcerer, skip the party, only pick up the 5 items that suit your class, skip all dialogues (they are useless
Anything else would be useless
Oddly I find the swashbuckler the weakest thief kit. (low attack rate, weak defense for a "fighter")
There are some nice opportunities for pick pocketing, ofc you can abuse this with stacking thieving potions.
Or lockpicking earns some nice EP, mages have better 2th grade magic to memorize.
Thieves are with mages the most versatile characters, I wouldnt miss one in every group.
Btw. you forget the rangers/clerics Find Traps spell, and a buffed mage can trigger it without harm.
So Find Traps obsolete?
I'm not a big fan of pure thieves because they get more skill points than you need anyway and lack other powers that multiclasses get, but I'd rather have a pure thief with me than settle for a dual such as Imoen or Nalia.
As @kaffekoppen says, thieves are very convenient. Unfortunately they are just as convenient as dual or multis which rather undermines non multi/dual thieves.
My point was not to say that thieves are useless, my point was that their thieving skills bring very little utility overall, especially because they can be easily boosted/duplicated.
- lockpick/HIS/MS/detect illusion are done very easily by a mage
- pickpocket would be fine (nobody else can do it) if it was not made of cheese : either you have to use 2-3 potions (which renders skill points useless) or you have to reload in case of failed attempt (very cheesy). Also, either you are willing to sell stolen goods to a fence (extremely cheesy once more) or the loot you can get from it is not that extraordinary
Disarm and set traps are interesting because they bring something that no other class in the game can do.
Don't get me wrong, i love thieves overall because they have a lot of interesting gameplay options (backstab, traps, poison weapon,...) but i find the thieving skills very lackluster and poorly implemented (pickpocket...) for the most part.
Just a note regarding swashbuckler. They are rather weak at low level.
But a level 40 swashbuckler has :
- 9 AC bonus -> they will reach better AC than any fighter.
- +8 to hit/damage. Even with WW penalty that's still +4/+4. Still better than a fighter for the same number of APR. With improved haste and 2 speed weapons they will reach 9 APR at +8/+8
Overall we could argue that, at high levels, they are almost better warriors than plain fighters.