Yhorian and Daurwyn have it summed up. But if you don't get the blackjack skill, or to a lesser extent ko poison, you're in for a rough time trying to take advantage of most of it.

Death Strike and Strike on the abandoned are meh skills. There's not a whole lot of ways to exploit these that you'll otherwise not end up lagged or outdamaged to death without going into cabal raids, and in the situations where these will become critical your opponents will have damage redux anyway.

Earclap is awesome. Even for it's short duration, most mages (if you're not stupid enough to attack a shielded voker alone or jack a prepped muter before he starts reprepping) cannot escape your grasp if you start with this, and combined with grapple you can even remove a muter's staff before it becomes a threat. I killed one of Jhyrb's muters this way on accident, at the time I only wanted to steal his barrier rods but he had an out of range bard around and wanted a fight. Sometimes it's hard to keep slippery people around for you to two round them or otherwise unload inhuman amounts of damage, parting block and occasionally earclap help you to do this.

That being said, there's lots of classes/combinations thug thief is terrible against, most notably those that binder thief can probably kill more efficiently (but less often).

Separate, like pull or drive, does not help against conjurer servitors or nightwalkers.