Learning to PK with a thief means you can more easily pick your fights as other classes despite having less information to do it with.
That being said, binders will completely disable your foe but only as long as the ropes remain. You're screwed if they come off too early in the fight, binders are useless against communers without certain high level scrolls (co word), and you have no control over what order the bindings come off. When they work though... well, it's generally agreed a skilled binder could have killed Cabdru outright solo but none existed during his entire life at hero.
Thugs are very good at being direct more than other classes at the cost of being unable to negate other classes preparation, especially since your entire predication to be able to control the majority of the fight will be "How much damage and lag can I do before they put up flight?". Earthbind scrolls that are high level are rare, tucked away in explore areas and tend to be paired with other damage spells on top of them. I've seen one playing CF and there are maybe only two or three different kinds of earthbind in the game so your attack is going to be predicated on "Do I have parting block/can I deal enough damage fast enough using backstab to make the 2-6 extra rounds I'll buy with it work? Will my opponent word?" Thugs have a bunch of odd abilities for group fighting that they don't tank well enough to use but you must practice to get to earclap, which is hella handy to kill mages that otherwise would tear you a structurally superfluous new behind or escape, such as muters/invokers. If I were you I'd ignore death strike/strike of the abandoned because they're just bonuses that it's near impossible to make proper use of without preps. Hell those abilities would be more useful for an invoker than a pure thug thief.
Poisoners look capable of some pretty nasty shit but the fact is suggest has lag and most, if not all, the tricks Tremblay and Yanacek used have been changed or removed. Suggest cannot force people to use the quaff command, and potions cannot be poisoned (though I think something was changed very recently to allow this). A pure posioner is not reccommended, the grenade ability is interesting given you can put ANY poison in there (emetic poison grenades during cabal raids anyone?) but you have little in the way of direct combat so you're worse off than even a binder against a partially incapacitated opponent. Backstab, knife, plant and possibly discerning gaze will be your bread and butter as a poisoner because frankly you're not doing anything else at hero with those extra thief points. Each poison has a different use but people have a chance to fight through fear poison since it's not entirely clear what fear poison stops (i've been bashed by a fear poisoned warrior before) and neurological poison takes time after it's applied to afflict all it's various effects. Mind Control poison can be applied for one round lag without KOing the target or starting combat, but that doesn't mean they won't just walk off.
Obviously your strength as a thief is selecting a main path, and then mixing and matching the entry level abilities from other paths rather than going half/half and thinking you're clever only to be screwed out of enough thief points to accomplish it till hero and sometimes not even then. Your choice of cabal, if any, is going to affect your fight strategy moreso than it does other classes even, so your best bet is to master flee/knife, figure it why it does and doesn't work, and then build from there, even going pure thug or binder to start if you must.
A few things in closing:
Cheap shot was toned down massively since the thief revamp came in. It's still good, but it's a fair bit less likely to permalag than it was so ending your fights quickly is more essential for a thug or any thief with cheap shot, than a warrior. Obviously a part- binder thief can change this in some situations but binder thieves who stray too far from binder lose their extra blackjack timer.
Trappers best use are cabal raids and that's pretty much it. Anything beyond that isn't worth it, as Maethron can tell you he had to rely so much on his tribunal abilities to get anything done it was utterly painful because of the unreliability of the traps and the inability to take full advantage of the maladictions they gave, I fought him with two characters can can attest to this almost as confidently as he can. Furthermore, a thug path thief (aside from bards, ragers, rager bards and nodisarm weaponry) is the hard counter to tribunal due to separate/parting block, and it's especially painful for a thief that doesn't have third attack to come up with another thief who has it in his head to kill you.
If you don't plan on heroing a thief, taking cheap shot and then seeing what other nifty abilities you can get is a perfectly viable lowbie PK killer, but if you go as far as parting block you essentially better be ready to commit yourself to thug the rest of the way, cheap shot is already hard on thief points as it is.
Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 12/09/2007 01:57PM by Scrimbul.
