So you need to do the following to get to truss unless I'm mistaken:

1. Land a blackjack
2. Bind legs
3. Bind hands
4. Tie
5. Truss

Now each of these seem to have about a 2/3s chance of landing, even at 100%. So you have 2/3 x 2/3 x 2/3 x 2/3 x 2/3 chance of landing a truss. And if you fail any of the bindings, you can't attempt to rebind. This seems a bit off to me, as no other class has that little chance of getting to its 'good' skill. Can a player either fill me in if I'm missing something or an imm take a look at this? Maybe allowing thieves to rebind if they miss a binding would solve the problem, or at least make them unbind the 'broken bindings in the way' and then try again.

What you're maybe not considering is that if you get most people trussed and you don't mishandle the situation, they're probably dead.

Generally speaking, given a decent thief a trussed up character is much more screwed and much more likely to die than a character slept by a necromancer or A-P.

Now, this is after playing Calheil and Valryn, both of which seemed decently respected. I will admit though, I recall something about less attackers causing bindings to fall off less, and I don't know that I got much experience after that.

Mostly, the problem I ran into is that if you do get someone fully trussed, their whole goal is immediately to run away. Hence, you're now reliant on backstab, dual wield, second attack, and kick to inflict enough damage to kill them before truss falls off. With mages, this was generally pretty simple so long as their protections had worn off.

Communers were entirely pointless for me to try and kill, as binders are absolutely ineffective against them.

Melee classes generally just had too many hp for me to seal the deal before they ran away. Or in the case of assassins and h2h warriors, they'd just slaughter me still. Now, admittedly, I had a few tricks I could use to counteract these, but they made me begin to feel *MUCH* more of a one-trick pony. Also, teaming up with almost any sort of damage-dealers was just deadly for people, but solo I didn't feel I was exceptionally deadly against even trussed people.

Let's say you get them fully trussed and manage to gag them before they call in the gangsquad or have OOC buddies (very unlikely these days). Let's also assume they aren't seen my anyone else (lowbie unbinders) and they don't abuse the bug to come out of hiding from shadowdrag. Let's also assume they didn't have any ways out you can't deal with (worn containers, strange black opal, etc) and that you did this all tactically near some place good (Mausoleum, water, locked room, etc). Let's *also* assume that it's not a melee class with no-remove weapons. And let's also assume you prepped out to high heaven getting everything necessary to land a kill (multiple scrolls because of failure for deafen, energy drain, earthbind, crimson scourge, shield/aura for yourself against villagers, haste/slow, etc). All while you're keeping track of how long you have before you need to blackjack and rebind which none of them can fail, assuming they all worked the first time.

You know what they say about assume right? :)

Even just landing sleep with an AP in a tactical area (locked room) can mean the exact same death chance if not better - they have deafen, nasty wake-up damage, blind/curse, full A/B/S, summon. Oh and they're not horrible if sleep/blackjack fails.

Sorry Daevryn, don't agree.

> Let's also assume they aren't seen my
>anyone else (lowbie unbinders) and they don't abuse the bug to
>come out of hiding from shadowdrag.

To the best of my knowledge, it works that way intentionally.

I didn't say it was a great skill.

Then what's the point of it at all if they can come out of hiding immediately? I thought the whole idea was to drag someone into shadows so others couldn't find them....seems pretty pointless if they can just spam "vis" or whatever.

>Mostly, the problem I ran into is that if you do get someone
>fully trussed, their whole goal is immediately to run away.

The question there is, why can they? There are an awful lot of great places to drag someone.

You have to land blackjack, bind legs and bind hands. Tie and truss can both be repeated until they work but you have a very slim time to get both done before the blackjack wears off...not including gag if you want to stop them from calling in buddies.

But to address the major issue, yes binding thieves have problems right now - not to mention a bunch of bugs that make it impossible to kill any competent player. No other class in the game gets one chance to land a skill this dependent for the entire path (imagine a necro with one chance to land any spell).

Never really get an Immortal response though - thieves are generally bad in the whole "fun versus reality" argument especially at hero.

Glad I'm not crazy thinking that.

A binder-thug duergar.

Maybe try that? Seemed like the closest arrangement to an old-style thief I could create.