What's a good level to dual thief to fighter?

AsaBM

Planning a future playthrough. What are the "essential" skills for a thief Charname to have at ~100? I'm thinking bounty hunter, specifically, because I like traps.

Blackraven

If you won't have any other Thieves in your party, I'd say having Find Traps and Open Locks at around 80 would be convenient. (Find Traps especially since traps are dangerous and only Thieves can disarm them.) Potions of perception will allow you to handle all the difficult locks and snares. If you want to be able to successfully set traps as well, you'll want Set Snares close to 100, so that you're unlikely to fail.

If you start with an 18 dexterity human Bounty Hunter your ability scores will be:

Open Locks: 25
Find Traps: 10
Pick Pockets: 25
Move Silently: 20
Hide in Shadows: 15
Detect Illusions: 0
Set Snares: 20

You'll gain 5 points in every category except Detect Illusions with a manual of quickness of action later in the game. If you focused on the skills I mentioned above, you'd need about 50 points for Open Locks, 65 for Find Traps, and about 70 for Set Snares, for a total of 185. At character creation you get to distribute 40 points, and at subsequent level-ups 20, so you'd want to reach at least level 8, for 180 skill points. Level 7 might also work, especially if you take into account the Draw Upon Holy Might innate Bhaal ability that you can get to increase your dexterity.

Note that neither level 7 nor level 8 will allow you to get your Thief levels back in BG1. If that is important to you, you'd have to dual at level 6 at the latest. In that case, I'd take a minimalistic approach: +30 in Open Locks, +55 in Find Traps, and +55 in Set Traps. The nice thing about level 6 is that you get your second regular snare and your second special snare on that level.

Level 9 has the advantage of getting the quadruple backstab multiplier, quite a nice opener for a warrior to have. You'd end BG1 as a level 6 Fighter and Siege of Dragonspear as a level 9 Fighter before you can complete your dualling process in BG2.

In the past the game dualling out of Bounty Hunter meant that the game would upgrade your snares in accordance with your levels in your active class. So at Fighter level 21, you'd get Maze Traps, which is a a very powerful tool to have. I;m not sure if Beamdog have changed this.

sarevok57

for me, i always dual my thieves at level 11, just because then you can lay down 3 traps per day ( although if i do dual a thief its always a swashbuckler )

and as for traps with dual classes, the game takes the average level of the 2 classes to determine what your traps do

for open locks and disarm traps in bg1;

if you have 90 in open locks, you can open ANY lock that is not magically locked, although the level 2 knock spell can do this as well

with 95 in disarm traps you will be able to disarm any trap in bg1 except for these two;

the trap that has the wisdom tome in durlags tower is impossible to disarm regardless of score

and the trap that has the level 2 wardstone down in the lower basement i believe requires a 97, but by that time you should have kiel's buckler, so if you only have 95 in find traps, just equip the buckler for 100% for that one trap and you should be good to go

in SoA, i beileve there are 2 traps that require 100 ( a trap or 2 in prebek's house, and the one chest in basement of d'arnise hold ) and i believe 95 open locks can open any lock in SoA

in ToB i believe 95 in open locks/find traps is enough for any trap/lock ( except for the trap that goes to sendai's enclave, i believe its either 110 or 120 )

but the thing to note is that in SoA there are 2 rings of thievery, one gives you a +25 on open locks ( which can be found in the basement of the thieves guild ) and the ring that gives +25 to find traps can be found in the planar sphere

also, there is a pair of mits in the copper cohornot in the upstairs area that gives you a +20 to pick pockets and dierde or whatever her name is in the adventurer's mart sells a mercy killer ring that gives +20 to stealth and +20 to trap setting

jsaving

If your purpose is to have a fighter with some bounty-hunter flavor attached, then I think level 9 is a nice level to reach. You're adequately stocked by that point with traps/locks, trap-setting, and an adequate backstab multiplier. Agree with @sarevok57 that 11th level is better for the extra trap and you could even consider 13th level for the highest backstab multiplier, if you have the patience to endure that amount of downtime.

However, if your main motivation for a thief/fighter hybrid is to play a trap-using melee character, you might be better off with a half-orc fighter/thief multi. That way you'd begin life with 19 strength and would eventually be able to use the game's super-strong trap HLAs, which you wouldn't be allowed to access if you dual away from thief. Good luck!

AsaBM

Thanks, all. I'm now thinking probably level 9.

@jsaving Part of this is a character concept, so for RP reasons I will not be playing a half-orc. However, I have heard you can mod out the racial restrictions on dual/multi classing, so I might try that.