Favorite Single Class Thief?

Chronicler

Balrog99

Even more trap cheese? Sign me up! ?

Tresset

Shadowdancer, to be sure. The stealth games they can play are just SO much fun for me!

Chronicler

I love the shadowdancer conceptually.

I like that it's like a full thief, but it just has a bit of magic trickery up its sleeve. As opposed to a thief/mage multiclass that has the full mage spellbook, can cast almost as well as any mage through large chunks of the campaign.

I like that they have the hide in plain shadows, so backstabbing doesn't rely on metagaming. You can just stealth when the battle starts, as opposed to using it as your opener, probably after save magic allows you to know about the battle before your character does.

I like that they give up the traps, since I don't tend to have a lot of fun with those. You just put them down before the battle starts and then they win for you. Probably, again, after you predict a battle your character has no way of knowing about ahead of time. The HLA's they get instead of the HLA traps look really fun.

Every time I try and play one though, I just have trouble with those early levels. No backstab, no traps. You're probably putting too many points in stealth to pick locks or disarm traps, but your stealth's not gonna be useful for a while now. Just plugging away at the enemy with my 1apr crossbow while my party members do all the cool stuff.

I bet if I stuck with one long enough I'd love it. One of these days.

Skitia

Swashbuckler is my favorite, especially in BG2, as I don't tend to use backstabbing, so its loss is irrelevant.
Shadowdancer would be the second favorite, then vanilla thief, then assassin, then bounty hunter.

sarevok57

i had ( or actually still do have it but abandoned it ) a halfling swashbuckler who is in ToB with -25 AC wearing full platemail hahaha, when you hit that AC even ToB enemies can start missing with 19s...

ThacoBell

Before I discovered the amazingness that was bards, Swashie's were my go to class for years. I seem to cycle to a new "favorite" class every 5 years or so. I've just about hit that point with bards. I wonder what my next class will end up being.

jmerry

Swashbuckler, by default. I've beaten the game with a halfling swashbuckler, and not done anything significant with any other kinds of single-class thieves.

Most of my thief protagonists have been fighter/thieves of some sort. And no, a fighter 13-assassin dual class doesn't count as an assassin for the purposes of this thread.

Pokota

The only thief kits I've played are Bounty Hunter (a Dwarf Bounty Hunter is a minor god of traps) and the Adventurer kit from... some modpack or other (I think from RR but I'm not sure, it's been years since I've played with kit mods). I'm not a stealth kind of person, so most of the perks of Shadowdancer don't appeal to me and subsequently the only Assassin perk I really benefit from is Poison Weapon (and a Blackguard runs that better thanks to better THAC0).

Skatan

I never play single class thieves, but if I would I would go vanilla. Even though all kits have their nice additions, each give up something. I just want it all; the skill points, the backstab and the traps. BH would be the only kit I would consider to play as a thief. I kinda like swashies, but if I'm gonna play a THAC0 poor class trying to emulate being a fighter, I would play Blade 10/10 times.

Chronicler

Wow, I remember back in the day all the old gamefaqs guides and threads would say that the swashbuckler was the worst one.

Really seems to have taken off in popularity since back in the day.

Flashburn

I always use thieves to eliminate key targets in one hit, so the Assassin is the obvious choice for me. The lack of skill points is unfortunate but they eventually accumulate enough to make themselves useful at utility.