What does move silently/hide in shadows really do?
Blinkk
Member Posts: 25
I've played baldurs gate for years and I've literally never used these two abilities any time I play the game. I don't really understand what they do. What's the point of hiding in shadows? I've never actually had to use it. I've tried backstabbing, but my thief always misses or it doesn't duplicate the damage (am I doing it wrong?), so I kind of gave up on that.
I'm starting a new game with a monk, and monks get these abilities. How do I use these abilities, especially in regards to monks?
I'm starting a new game with a monk, and monks get these abilities. How do I use these abilities, especially in regards to monks?
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Both HiS and MS do approximately the same thing, and no-one seems to have published a definitive answer about the difference (if any) between them. However, it's rumoured that the average of the two figures (i.e. (HiS + MS)/2) affects your chance of getting into Stealth successfully and that MS alone determines your chance (once per round) of remaining in Stealth for another round, so if that report is correct then MS is more important. On the other hand, others have reported that HiS and MS actually have exactly the same effect as one another, and I'm not sure which report is correct. The chance of getting into Stealth is also affected by the light level, which is why it usually fails if your Thief is standing in bright light. As a rough rule of thumb, Stealth doesn't work very often when HiS/MS are below about 50, but when the scores are above 50 then you stand a decent chance that Stealth will work. Both HiS and MS continue to improve up to a score of 255 - and at that sort of level you can usually enter Stealth even in bright sunlight.
Backstab will always fail if your Thief is visible. You have to make sure that your Thief is wielding a melee weapon (not his bow, for example), and then you put your Thief into Stealth (or use a potion or spell of invisibility), and then you have to get your Thief positioned approximately behind the target (by just walking up to the enemy whilst still invisible, then stepping behind him), and then (but not before then) you tell the Thief to attack the target. The Thief will immediately break invisibility and attack, and if the Thief's first strike is a hit, that's when you get the multiplied damage. If the enemy doesn't have a lot of HP, then a single backstab with multiplier will often drop the enemy on that first hit. After the first attack (whether it hits or misses), the Thief is visible and is in ordinary melee against the target (unless you killed the target with the backstab, of course), so you then might want to get him out of there quickly (or take a potion to go invisible again). Some enemies (especially in ToB) are immune to backstab, in which case you still get the chance for a hit but there'll be no damage multiplier.
http://forum.baldursgate.com/discussion/comment/500058/#Comment_500058
Just follow that discussion, he has managed to turn my view on this subject and @elminster agrees with him.
http://forum.baldursgate.com/discussion/comment/370098/#Comment_370098
This means, then, that Thief Stealth actually works identically to Ranger Stealth. There is actually only one skill which the game engine uses in calculating the success of a stealth attempt, which is the single figure called "Stealth" for a Ranger but is the average of the two figures called "Hide In Shadows" and "Move Silently" for a Thief. I already suspected that this was the case, from observing the effect on a Ranger's "Stealth" figure of equipping and unequipping various items which separately boost either "Hide In Shadows" or "Move Silently" - both increase a Ranger's Stealth figure by half of the item's bonus, regardless of whether the bonus is to HiS or to MS.
Incidentally, this also confirms that the late-SoA Boots of Elvenkind (+15% Stealth) are absolutely nothing but a slightly-inferior copy of the ordinary Boots of Stealth (+17.5% Stealth) which you've had ever since early BG1, so the Boots of Elvenkind are a totally pointless item.
Thus the only reason for the game to offer a Thief both "Hide in Shadows" and "Move Silently" as if they were separate skills (when really they're precisely the same skill) is that this makes Stealth "twice as expensive" as other Thief skills, i.e. you have to invest twice as many skill points in Stealth (by increasing both HiS and MS, or by increasing one of them twice as much) to get great Stealth, compared to other Thief skills where you have to invest skill points in only one figure. It's evidently intentional that Stealth is more expensive than other Thief skills, so fair enough.
As far as i know you must use one handed piercing or slashing weapon.
That is what "move silently" and "hide in shadows" do.
By the way, do fists count as backstab weapons?
There is also an AC glitch when importing from BG1 to BG2 which works to the character's benefit. For an imported monk BG2 treats the AC bonus from BG1 as a separate bonus while still lowering the monk's base AC in BG2. The effect is essentially a +5 bonus to AC if you imported an 8th or 9th level monk, a +4 bonus at 6th or 7th, etc. I have mixed emotions about it. On the one hand it compensates for the lack of any real wearable robes for a monk, the fact that bracers of defense do nothing in BG2 once your base AC is as low as or lower than the bracers, and the fact that they didn't put bonus to AC based on Wisdom similar to Dexterity which existed in the pen and paper version. The bonus makes the monk manageable and playable at early levels. On the other hand, however, the bonus combined wth an ever decreasing AC starts to give the monk some ridiculous AC as he goes along. Mine is turing into a real tank and is only level 13. He has an AC of -8 without even using the best AC improvements available to him (other fighters in my group have -8 or -9 since I've gone with the higher dex options of Mazzy, Jaheira, and Anomen with Dexterity gauntlets and tend to spread the wealth).
Just letting you know in case you want to take the time to go through BG1 for those differences and the feeling of taking him or her through all of the games, if you weren't already doing that of course.
Thanks for the heads up, either way.