rogues aren't good enough
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I dislike the thief class in baldurs gate because it's only real skill that is not expendable is pick pockets. Traps can be tanked, there are spells for invisibility and locks, and back stabs aren't the only way of doing lots of burst damage. You only need one mage with a few low level spells to do the majority of what the rogue does. As nice as it is to pick the occasion free action ring, or regeneration ring, its pretty far from making rogue the peer the warrior and magic classes who are basically the bread and butter of any successful group. With the way class balance stands right now I think I'd rather take a bard and download a wand of unlocking mod if I could find one.
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Traps are really useful and nobody traps as well as a thief.
I mean: really really easy. Specially when you get the HLA traps.
It was so easy that, as @Lord_Tansheron , will never do it again.
Or unless you're an assassin and backstabbing and poisoning folks like a boss..
or unless you're a bounty hunter and laying so many traps you barely even need to "fight", just watch the enemy kill themselves on pre-placed goodiebags.
Or unless you're a Fighter/Thief half-orc with ludicrous strength and constitution, wielding carsomyr, ring of gaxx, some dragon plate, helm of balduran, cloak of displacement, belt of inertial barrier, laying traps left right and center which instagibs bloody demogorgon.. and if it doesn't, you'll pop whirlwinds, thief evasion hla, fighter hardiness hla, and become next to bloody invincible while you slash the ever living crap out of anything and anyone with carsomyr..
... oh wait, I could go on like this for a while.. I guess thief is kinda OP.
Assassins can backstab brutally at high levels and their poison is fairly nasty, even for paladins. They can also trap. Bounty Hunters can unleash tremendous traps and backstab, Swashbucklers can out melee possibly and have nasty traps still, and vs *1* shadow dancer with good stealth the paladins could be backstabbed to death, also traps. I agree vanilla thieves are lackluster vs kitted, but they can still roast anything with traps and can do good backstab damage.
Thieves require you to play smart, but they can all solo the games. @Blackraven has some threads iirc about soloing with thieves that might be enlightening.
Ofcourse, compared to cookie-cutter builds, they are difficult, or lets say less-straight forward to play. A barbarian can just rage and equip the best weapon and go to town on enemies. A sorc can chain contingency wiltings to obliterate all. Thieves on the other hand, require tons of micro management, a through knowledge and experience with the game rules/engine, and skilled playing, but when they work, they work very well.
An experienced player (AlesiaBH) has no-reload soloed Ascension+scs all the way from bg1 to the end with a bounty hunter in old Bioware forums. In some fights the modded, scary enemies stood no chance at all, they were horribly outclassed by the bounty hunter's cunning and skills. It was a fun read. Those stories can still be accessed with BlackStrider's back-up forum site.
Mages would have slightly more of a chance than paladins in a battle with thieves, particularly if they all started invisible and they knew where the thieves were, but the reverse was not true. It's also true that mage spells are able to duplicate to some extent the effects of thief traps. However, it's still the case that mages are very easily killed by thief traps and a group of thieves that knew there were a group of mages in the area and were not restricted in their choice of equipment would have no trouble killing them.
And just in response to your original post:
- I agree absolutely that you don't need a thief to complete the game. Of course I also agree that you don't need any other particular class either.
- a mage can duplicate much of what a thief can do, but then that's only fair given that a thief can duplicate much of what a mage can do ...
BTW - I know that with traps and UAI thieves, well, *can* hack and slash pretty well, but I mean it from more typical team roleplaying point of view. I see no point in noting that thieves aren't as good warriors as warriors are.
https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/62202/the-lob-scs-solo-challenge-riding-the-no-reload-train
@Harpagornis also managed to get to the final battle with a Barbarian, but couldn't beat the final fight with it. I think it's fair to say that thieves are not underpowered...
I notice this is MUCH more risky in SoD. The stealin rules musta changed there.
It's a bloody nightmare.
And in Arniss Keep I had to go pick up Nalia because neither Edwin or myself could "see" the hidden door to where you make the flail. Stood there for ages, the conversation went like this,
"I'm sure there's a door here somewhere, it doesn't make sense following this corridor and ending up facing a brick wall"
"Why do you expect a building made by simians to make sense?"
"Because we were told by the aforementioned simians there was a room here with a secret weapon"
"They probably forgot where they put it being of such limited inteligence"
"Or maybe we need a thief?"
That's why I EEKeeper Half Orc Fighter/Assassin, or what I'm doing now a full BG1-2 run with a solo Elf Fighter/Mage/Assassin, which is crazy strong and definitely OP, but Fighter/Assassin to me actually feels like what base Assassin should be. Same with Fighter/Thief in general is way stronger than any base Thief to the point almost no one who knows better would ever use base Thief.
Thieves are harder to use effectively, but are very capable if you use them right. Think of thieves as spies and they seem less cheesey for trapping things.
Regarding backstabbing with a thief or assassin, bad rolls hurt fighters too, its just that for thieves they are gambling more on a specific roll. Invisibility is a big bonus actually to hit. To get better mileage, use items that grant invisibilty to help offset the bad roll issue, and for Assassins, consider using higher apr darts to improve your odds, though using Arrows of Detonation work well in BG1. BG2 is a bit harder to rely on just backstabs due to AC, but if you stick to a weapon with a high To Hit bonus it can help substantially, so Staff of Rhynn is a good Assassin weapon, or vanilla thief.
Swashies btw are decent at melee in SoA, and great in ToB, but do start a bit slow.
also, thieves will outfight any fighter by a large margin. especially later. this is especially true of harder fights where neither mages nor fighters can hit. my thief solos demigorgon and other dragons every playthrough in a full party because the other party members can't contribute much in the 1 round that spike traps take to kill a high level enemy.
But as said, then I started to play them more solo and realized they are very capable. I still think their THAC0 progression is ridiculously low and pathetic (except swashies ofc, though it takes a long time until that added THAC0 makes a decent difference and they don't have any BS) and assassins should get THAC0 boosts more than they have. I'd prefer the assassins to rather get like +8 to hit from stealth and stop at +5-6 multiplier instead of going to +7 multiplier and only get +1 THAC0 at creation. The ONLY way to get fairly decent hits in with a pure thief (in melee) is to get the +3 THAC0 from 19 STR (or higher) and use the staff of Rynn or similar high-enchanted weapon. An elf assassin using swords get +2 THAC0, so combined with STR THAC0 you get decent % to hit from stealth, but swords have on average slower speed which can be annoying sometimes when hitting from stealth. It's still too low THAC0 boost though IMHO and thus you often need to boost the thief with a high level STR potion before battle to consistently hit in melee.
So, IMHO the low THAC0 is the only real drawback of the single class thief. It can be circumvented through extensive use of buffs and items but I still think they are relatively too weak in melee to the other classes. The +4 from stealth is often not enough to make you hit consistently if you have a decent STR of say 18 and a weapon with like +2 or similar, not even with the fast level progression of the pure thief. That's why thieves are best played as dualclassed from fighters or as multiclassed IMHO. I'd much rather have two multiclassed thieves to cover all the skills needed (ie Charname F/T or Montarion and Tiax/Glint/Jan Jensen or similar setups) than one SC thief, at least if I start from BG1 and therefore have to level them up from scratch.
Bountyhunters are great though, but IMHO then you have to have a second thief anyways since it takes a fairly long time to get 90+ in locks, disarm traps and set traps, especially if you use Yoshimo and not have a charname. Combined with Nalia or a charname Yoshi can be a fun NPC (for some time, you know the deal).
I probably should read through before posting, but have a meeting now so have to post