And really, your choices for thief builds boil down to a primary or hybrid pick of: Binder, Thug and Pickpocket. The magic path is an all-utility path, and poisoner/trapper are underpowered. If grenade didn't miss so often and poisoners could chuck them left and right and the grenades always hit groups/did invoker or bard-level damage they wouldn't be so bad off with such a square-peg-round-hole fix but that's not the case.

Not only do you have to make trade-offs but there are some skills that are worthless to certain builds. Most binders don't give a shit about grease weapon or grapple. They also aren't going to be in situations where isolate or separate are of any use, as soon as a large scale battle breaks out binders become circlestab and cheap shot whores. And some binders that can rank quick enough to truss don't care about cheap shot either.

Many many many thieves can get buy without touching the magic path at all, even without scrolls though just having scrolls alone is nice if only because of the detect invis/align scrolls you can get in udgaard. Stone skin, silver malison and triple chain lightning are other common or semi-common abilities you'll have access to by just having that 4 point skill + hero level alone. Add in gentlewalk and deft touch and that list includes haste, shield, aura and a few other nifty things.

There are also plenty of thieves that don't care about killing people at all. These thieves can just take knife and ignore everything else and still be somewhat dangerous in combat against wounded folks. Of course if a thief doesn't care about killing people that means he's going to be some combination of poisoner, pickpocket and some magic path generally.

Mainly the skills I listed were things you can view in the context of thug or binder. Not every thief wants or needs double back, I certainly don't, but I can see how that skill becomes excellent when you come up against Marcus in the wilderness for example.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 10/09/2009 07:13AM by Scrimbul.