I don't actually mean give them the spell persay.

But I would like to see them get a skill that aids in the location of rare items. For one thing, for the cost of gold, they should be able to get around the nolocate flag on limited items.

For another this functionality should ONLY work on limited items.

Finally, I would like to see thieves involved in helping mages find their sleeks somehow, primarily by an ability similar to the detect skills that will let them get an echo whenever they look at an object or person such as:

'When you look at this person/place you see the outline of a rare artifact of some kind.'

This will help in exploration to figure out that a person should be checking this particular spot later on. This echo will appear whenever ANYTHING is missing from a given mob/place, up to and including sleek locations, but only once (so you don't get to figure out how many items are missing).

It would also be an excellent tool for rager thieves to have to locate magical items to trash, because they might be able to sense the presence of limited items that are their level that are in an area (and if those items are not there than this sensing skill does not go off). Obviously at level 51 they will be able to detect items of up to level 100.

I don't want these skills to end up in the pickpocketing path. At least one of the skills needs to be a general skill that gives an incentive for thieves to take the pickpocket skills and gentlewalk. The other 3 ish skills I'm talking about here probably need to thematically end up in the Arkham skill path, and only be revealed to caballed thieves.

It might also be interesting for thieves who are in the same cabal as mages to be able to attune themselves to their cabalmates' strands of ether. This way, caballed thieves become essential *and* better help for mages than other mages in terms of finding their sleeks. In short thieves would get detect artifact on entering an area that has their groupmates' sleeks in it (or possibly other items that are class_only for a given cabalmate) and can see the location of limited items, but the mage in question requires detect artifact themselves to see the specific location and notice the wand.

I feel that thieves should get skills to streamline exploration for other people as well as themselves because they are only a half decent explore class right now even with gentlewalk. With the above changes, their fragility in exploration is justified provided they want to spend the thief points. They become ingrained in the fabric of their mage cabalmates' lives and to see if defiance is in upon entering an area, hell items, and various other objects without pushing to check the mob in question in the room unless multiple class_only items exist in an area.

This would also be an excellent tradeoff for making the A/B/S system easier, because if you run out of mages to ask and are getting frustrated, as a last resort you can tote a cabalmate thief around. Uncaballed mages are intentionally screwed out of this aspect, except perhaps if they are Herald or Scion.

More often than not, thieves who use these new skills are going to earn enough edge points to take Devious Versatility once or twice, so it's entirely possible for them to get some combat options on top of these skills. I would say these skills need to cost 30-40 cumulatively to have all of them. This makes a thief think seriously about how much they want to explore. The skills aren't intended to make exploring more fun for explorer players but to allow the class to streamline exploration as a whole for the people who are sick of it or not interested.