Thief/mage
Cvijeta
Member Posts: 417
With party of Haer'Dalis, Aerie, Anomen, Mazzy and Keldorn
- Thief/mage39 votes
- Multiclass28.21%
- Dual - class56.41%
- Something else15.38%
0
Comments
If you want your character to do stealth and traps, too, you're going to need to make a multiclass M/T.
Sw10->M is a very viable character, although my personal preference is Sw12->M to get good pickpocketing skill as well. (Yes, I know you've got Haer'Dalis who can pick pockets, but his PP skill maxes out quite low, whereas a Sw12->M can do it much better and sooner.)
Over the course of your stealing spree you'll actually wind up swiping more than the 5 or 6 Potions of Master Thievery that were required to get everything rolling, so it's actually cheaper than free. So even someone like Nalia has all the pickpocketing points you'll ever need.
(Like I said, it feels kind of icky and investing hard points into Pickpocket is much more satisfying, so I'm not trying to dissuade anyone, I'm just providing information.)
Oh, and the Hide in Plain Sight makes wands more useful, since you don't get exposed during the casting time.
The toughest locks have a score of 100%, but when you're making an attempt, the game randomly adds 0-5 points to your score to see if you succeed. Since there's no penalty for failure, you can open every lock in the game with a 95% simply by trying over and over until you succeed.
Also, you can always rush to Chapter 3 and side with the Shadow Thieves. If you're using Potions of Master Thievery and abusing pickpocketing, you can get the necessary 15k gold (and hundreds of thousands more, while you're at it), as soon as you leave Chateau Irenicus.
In the cellar of the Shadow Thieves Guildhall is a thief you can talk to to get the Ring of Lock Picking, which gives you +25% to open locks. You can keep this in your inventory but not equipped for the rest of the game. Again, since there's no penalty for failure, you attempt to pick a lock with your base 70% lockpicking score. If you fail, put on the ring and try again. If you fail again, keep trying a few more times and it'll open.
That'll get you 15% more points to go around, allowing you to max out your Find Traps, (where there *is* a penalty for failure), and still keep your ~85% hide in shadows and move silently. Add on the Boots of Stealth and Mercykiller Ring, (both available in early Chapter 2), to get to 120% hide and 125% move silently. Add in the Cloak of Elvenkind, (end-game SoA) for 170% hide and 125% move silently. Further Dex Boosts can add even more. (There's also armor that boosts your stealth, but it disables spellcasting.)
Every level results in a +/- 10% delta in your HiS/MS scores, so dualing at level 10 instead of 11 puts you at 110% hide / 115% MS in Chapter 2. Dualing at level 12 puts you at 130% / 135%. Etc.
The other alternative is to bring along Yoshimo / Imoen / Jan / Nalia as your trap-and-lock-bot and dump all your points into Hide / Move Silently / Detect Illusion.
Not to mention Korgan has great dialog with Mazzy and even Aerie (if you can keep your CHA high enough to delay his attack on her, easy with the Ring of Human Influence).
Currently, I found out at hard way, you really have to use some exploit to start the game with level 10 character without playing BGEE. Then, starting your level 10, and dualing right away, it takes a lot of time to regain your thief abilities, I reach level 11 as mage duing ch2. Yikes. Now, I have my thieving skills back.
Depending how greedy you are it's possible to get to level 15 or 16 as a mage just on the scrolls available from the shops in Athkatla.
That was my go to thief in a number of my builds for a long while.
(Speaking of: Haer'Dalis and Aerie might also be problematic if OP is trying to romance Aerie.)
Typically, if you unlock your dual-class midway through Chapter 2, it's considered a short dual. Reaching level 11 as a Mage takes 375,000 XP, which is a not-insignificant chunk. But if you're being a relative completionist, you could get as much as 1.5m XP out of Chapter 2/3, so you're looking at only about a quarter of that time spent unlocking your dual-class, which isn't that much in the grand scheme of things.
As you get more experienced, you learn (a) which quests give good XP rewards for minimal effort, (do these during your downtime after dual-classing!), and (b) what other little tricks you can do to speed the process up. A common one, when dual-classing to mage or thief, is to take advantage of the fact that scribing scrolls, unlocking locks, and disarming traps provide not-insignificant XP totals.
If you scribe one copy of every spell of the first six levels, you get like a half-million XP out of it. If you kick all of your companions out of your party temporarily before doing that, all half-million of that XP goes to your main character, which is enough to get him to level 11 and unlock his dual-class immediately without any wait whatsoever.
If you want to get really cheesy, you can steal every single scroll in the city, scribe them all, then erase them from your spellbook and scribe them again, repeating as often as you have scrolls. With this method you can get millions of experience points in one fell swoop. But... it's insanely cheesy, and you'll ruin a large part of the challenge of the game for yourself. So I wouldn't recommend it.
It also turns out really well if you manage to delay the fight until after ToB, where Korgan's true motives are revealed.
He already has three arcane casters and two divine casters, I don't think Dispels/Remove Magic/True Sights/anti-magic spells are going to be an issue.
The way his party is currently set up, then assuming he uses Mazzy as an archer that leaves Anomen as the main tank (HD is a great temporary tank, but a bad full-time one). Personally I'm not overfond of using Anomen as a main tank, especially if he has to compete with Keldorn for the Gauntlets of Dexterity.
So it makes the most sense for Mazzy to be the main tank. Some people actually prefer her that way, and it works well but you must get her early. I suggested Korgan because he conveniently fixes all of that (among other things), but as OP pointed out Korgan does leave if you keep stacking reputation.
All in all, I'd simply suggest getting Mazzy ASAP or she'll sink her extra proficiency points into short swords and your PC/HD will be competing with her for those, a shame considering all the other weapon types you'll be missing.
with an 18 to 20 charisma and them put in these positions. It's potentially possible to go the entire game without the fight dialogue to come up. Or have it come up only once or twice if your the type to reset when they leave/kill each other. over these moments.
It's one of the undocumented uses for Charisma and Charisma is really only useful mostly in the hands of the main character because it's usually our first slot character.