For some years, ever since the general thief skill pool came in I feel like the points cost of most paths is extremely prohibitive. I'd like to see more interesting lowbie thief path builds that become solidly competitive between 25-30 range and are only multiplied in efficiency from there on out.

I'll be using the term 'gish' from Dungeons of Dredmor which terms someone who splashes in multiple disciplines for utility rather than focusing on a single set of skills for raw power.

For the sake of this discussion I want to assume guild mastering and Devious Versatility are right out, so 100 points at 42 should be the de-facto standard and not this vague assumption of 'Well, I want cheap shot in my build but I can pay for a huge chunk of it with my role XP and about fifty hours of staring at the seaport or abusing gentlewalk to get free XP in dangerous explore areas'.

There are certain otherwise integral skills that leave thief builds very limited not to have. I want to ask some questions behind the rationale of price and level reqs.

With that in mind, here are my actual questions:

*** GENERAL THIEF SKILLS

Knife is 8 points. It was removed from the thief paths some years ago. It is also integral to allow solo ranking at some levels and not getting stuck tanking combat rounds with a small HP pool. Why was this removed from the base skill set of the class and what would have to be re-tooled to put it back in for all thieves?

Cheap Shot is 14 points. Is there a reason it's 14 and not, say, 10? It's a very stiff investment for a skill that without which thieves are not particularly very threatening before 42, particularly against pretty much anyone that isn't an arial or Outlander. I don't see the price on this changing but it would be interesting to see what kinds of options open up at a 10 or 12 price point.

Weapontrip has an edge for removing movement, it's also negated by bash protection for no particular reason. Would it be reasonable to bump this up to 8 and fold the movement loss edge into the skill?

Shield Block is 10 points. Chances are if you're needing this skill as a thief, you don't intend to kill anyone. What happens if this goes to 6? It's still a stiff investment of points with a questionable return for someone who should otherwise be dual wielding a dagger in the offhand. The only reason you really would take this skill is to tank people with axes or whips and stuff to let your gang take them out, or to tank while ranking because of a crappy PK range.

Separate is 6 and paired with grapple at 2. What happens if Separate goes to 4 to encourage people pairing them together again? Using these two skills at their full potential is rather costly as-is unless you have 25 dex.

Now for the path questions.

MAGIC PATH:

Nearly all of the magic path is utility, with hypnotize's risk-reward ratio being way off. Any chance of dropping hypnotize entirely or dropping it to the early teens, making Lore of the Ages the capstone skill (it's the de-facto best skill in the tree with actual martial applications, the others are all exploring or utility skills as they should be) bumping arcane vision lower and/or folding a large chunk of this path into the general thief path? The thief guild in Arkham's revamp still makes no sense as a magic-focused guild relative to something closer to the planar sanctum or mage constorium like Udgaard (Udgaard actually is better suited to this given the variety of magic shops with actually useful items in them located there)

Additionally, Veil of Souls is not particularly useful unless it gets a toggleable -1 duration like inherents and allows you to group with goods while in effect, or do something like get inducted into a cabal with the wrong alignment until if and when the imms decide to boot you out. (Evil Nexan, neutral/evil Fortie) It should, if possible with an edge, also change your alignment for the purposes of certain aggro mobs and such. If it were changed in these ways it would be the capstone skill and Lore of the Ages would be the second most expensive skill in the tree. As it is now, it has a mediocre use, generally your actions or rumors/log board other people make about you are going to neutralize any RP advantage this skill would have given even the most clever player.

POISON PATH:

Poisoners require an assload of niche' area exploration and/or the ability to gather large amounts of gold to the point that they are like gathering two sets of preps for every one bag of return/teleport/flight/enlarge/prot vs. align/stone skin you buy. Poisoners never really come into their own without at minimum fear poison, and weapon nick seems like a dumb skill categorically when it should just be a passive buff to the check on poisoning people in melee or using backstab/knife. Dropping that inane two round lag time to guarantee a poison application would go a long way toward making gish paths with poisoner more viable, as would dropping the level requirement for weapon nick to match neurological poison. So my questions are threefold:

Neurological poison's most beneficial effects only ever come into play during extended fights where your opponent is out of money. Can we drop the duration of this poison and apply some or all of these effects instantly or within 1 tick like dirt kick? Even if the point cost on this skill goes up as a result, it should be an interesting alternative or benefit for thugs and binders based on the quality of the ingredient, not a speed bump and default weapon application for self-defense. If this particular poison were more immediately noticeable and easier to apply in combat, allies would actually wait for you to spend the time and money to apply this to their weaponry.

Envenom is a great skill. It's also an example of a skill that should really have a higher level requirement than knock out poison (which should be 16 not 19) solely because it can change the damage type on an otherwise already very powerful physical weapon. Can we bump this skill up in level requirement (18, 19, 23, or 25ish) and allow cleanpoison to check and remove it? It really is a small balance inconsistency in a world where push isn't useful without knife and nimble fingers has zero immediate benefit for 8 or 9 levels (unless nimble fingers had a benefit wherein it also adds 1-2 dex points to dex checks on various offensive dexy skills, such as weapon poison application) but plant and bag of tricks are exactly where they need to be in terms of level requirements.

Can we increase the chance grenade has to apply poison? Can we boost the damage grenade offers when shrapnel from trap ingredients is involved but lower it for poisons? It's two round lag time on an already fragile class and the potential to poison yourself are both already extreme disadvantages for a skill that should be useful during cabal raids on inners and chucking shrapnel filled grenades at frequently resist_physical hero level ranking mobs.

Finally, poison path has a metric assload of inter-dependent skills costing 4 points that would open up one or two more options for full poisoners if they cost 2. In this list are drink poison*, knock out poison**,Neurological/Fear poison (needs weapon poison) Contact poison***, weapon nick (can stay at 4 but vitally needs to be a passive bonus to melee to make poisoners a more aggressive option) and Mind Control Poison (inhaled). Grenade would also benefit from a higher base poison application rate, a clarification in the helpfile whether the save against poison application is related to ingredient quality and vial level, and all of the previous skill price reductions to allow a couple more thug/pickpocket skills or gentlewalk to be squeezed in more naturally.

PICKPOCKET:

Cutpurse is the ONLY hard counter in the game to people with large sacks of gold spamming on healers mid-PK to outflank a thief's tiny HP pool in the lower levels. It's also a skill that is well known to be pretty passe' among medieval teenage pickpockets. Shouldn't this be dropped to 15 or 17ish to work with eye of avarice? It would be nice if it were also only one round of lag given the nature and use of the skill but the former would jazz things up for thieves if it were as accessible as plant to gish thieves. It would also be even more interesting at 14 so that a thug might pick it up in addition to or in lieu of knife, or a poisoner may want to combo it with fear poison in order to remove an opponent from a cabal raid. If the opponent has at least 20k in gold they are going to be back solo raiding the cabal as soon as the poison wears off. It would be nice to drop them to 5k gold and delay/set up an ambush for them, just this tactic alone could make a pickpocket thief as or more capable of defending a cabal than a solo healer.

Appraise really belongs in the general thief path. Thematically pickpockets are about fencing stolen goods for copper, in along those lines this should be a general thief path skill BUT a wide variety of pickpocket skills can get minor to major bonuses for having a 90+ Appraise skill.

BINDER PATH:

Binder path is very well balanced, or would be if the chances of the bindings breaking in combat were very low for the first 1-3 rounds and progressively decreased with each round of combat rather than being a flat percentage chance that creates an awful sickening feeling when your clever bind legs binding to rape their mvs snaps right after the first backstab.

I think binders could benefit from gishing if a binding had, say, a base 20 or 30 percent chance to break in the first round of combat, a 10% chance to break every time knife, backstab, murder or grenades are used to open combat, and then that chance of breaking went up by 5-10% every round of combat that passes based on the type of binding, with gag being the least likely to break from struggling (only a 5% chance to break in combat in the first round). Double the per-round break penalty to 15% to 20% per person attacking the victim (even if it happens to not be the binder and the binder stays out of combat, apply this anyway because this was the only way I could guarantee some extremely tough ragers would die in single combat to a bash spamming Nexan) and you'll guarantee that in a gang that person will be able to wimpy out by round 3.

This way you ensure that without tie/truss the bindings will break in combat eventually but provided you don't fail the dismally low and obnoxiously difficult to improve bind legs/bind hands skills to begin with, you will get at least SOME use out of them without having to feel like you need truss to be useful to kill a single target.

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I don't think these need to be implemented all at once, but jazzing up thieves at the sub-30 ranks could be highly beneficial without significantly altering level 42 play. Freeing up an extra 4-6 thief points per path across the board would be potentially very huge for extremely low level thief play where your build would cap out at 50 or 60 thief points and then only multiply in effectiveness up to 42. It would also encourage differentiation between guilds and potentially facilitate inter-guild warfare because participating in lowbie guild warfare either as a third party or a deadly thief with only 300-400ish HP could potentially be more fun than cabal wars at hero.


* (This skill could go up higher in level/cost if it actually could poison potions and be comboed with plant, same with food poison and pills so you could poison ragers with seaweed)

** (needs inhaled anyway so why not make this cost 6 so it's lower than blackjack which is more versatile and similar drawbacks?)

*** (uses include griefing newbies and stupid pranks that rarely help in PK and just end up repoisoning ghosts looting their corpses, without combat steal/counterfeit/a strong KO poison you generally do not have time to use plant to poison a spare weapon, easier to just gang them at that point since using mind control inhaled to order them to wear it is also a colossal waste of time relative to just stabbing them)

Things should be just built into the class. Especially situational/underused abilities. Things like Dual-backstab, climb, should be built into the class. Things like Knife should too but scale with the path you choose (thugs get a better multiplier on knife) for example if they have gouge.

As a general rule, I think most of the general skills should be part o the thief class. With a few exceptions, I've always felt cheapshot should be part of the thug path with the price reduced for them. But I don't know the grand design balance.

I wonder how OP the locksmith skills are. I'm sure there are chests that it would be handy for but you still need to get to the chest...so yeah. Very expensive for a little utility.

TLDR: I guess the whole point is whenever I am playing a thief, I feel like I am scraping by to get the skills and utility skills that I want. Maybe it is only that the general skills need to be made cheaper. But I realize thieves are annoying to kill already even without shield block. So, I know there are reasons why it is so expensive.

EDIT: Realized I made mention to shield block where I shouldn't have and I fixed it.

I agree with you that some things got taken out that shoud not have been. You, me, and the Imms will all disagree with what though.

Advanced lockpick is a funny skill, you either know exactly why you need it or you don't touch it. Exploration involving most locked doors in newish explore areas are not kind to thieves if I recall.

Apply costs as much as cheap shot. Poisoner and trapper's costs are excessively stiff for the early skills and it really stops thug and binder hybrids from being creative pre-35. You really are scraping by to kill anyone cheap shot or parting block doesn't autowin for you.

Weapon nick is also a really bleh skill, you really should tweak it's active bonus downward and apply it passively to all melee attacks to encourage combining it with binder or thug. Then you can make interesting assassin-esque indirect maladicts without going past mind control poison. Just shift the majority of apply's point cost to contact poison mind control, grenade and forgiving cruor. There is no reason this path should be 63 points total and still more work than binder.

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