Poisoners are a real challenge, not that I mind. Some frustrating situations:

- Don't know when to concoct, as the ingredients are are pretty expensive and some heavy. Especially when you see your target and your vials have evaporated.
- Whenever I try to concoct, I step out. So my victim notices me and scrams.
- By the time I finish concoct (excluding the times I've failed), the target could have been long gone from the area.
- Getting a victim unconcious. And then failing the poison application on him. Costs go up and time wasted to re-concoct.
- Stepping out and getting 'locked' while concocting. This is exciting and yet dangerous. Especially when you see his groupmate coming over to you; or you have run out of KO vials and have to run somewhere to re-concoct. Groupmate sees you 'locked' and... *sigh*
- By the time, I managed to apply successfully what I wanted, the guy is up and running off to escape. It's either I apply poisons on him or steal his stuff outright.
- Takes too long to be effective in single pk.

Having played a couple of pure poisoners with one ending in the lower 40s rank, I have a few suggestions:
1. A skill where the poisoner can concoct poison with a small chance of stepping out, perhaps when concoct reaches >90%? What a non-detect-hidden person can see on screen is "A quiet hiss, followed by a sweet/obnoxious smell invades your senses."
2. Lower the cost of ingredients.
3. Still lack of vendors selling poison ingredients as compared to trapper. Perhaps put one in the blackswamp near the elven city; or at the woodland grove. Maybe there is one easily available already (I know I'm out of touch).

Just some ideas.

The one thing I'd change about poisoners is the short evaporation time of the vials. It costs a lot of coins and/or time to gather ingredients, so it's frustrating when you have to reconcoct all the time if you wish to stay at all prepared (and each evaporated vial effectively doubles the cost of the poison with purchased ingredients, not to mention the risk of failing the concoction in the first place). I'd say you could easily go as far as making the vials not evaporate at all, as they must gather and carry all this extra stuff other thieves except for trappers need not bother with. As far as them stepping out of the shadows for concocting, I don't really have a problem with that, especially if the vials were made to last until use.

On a related note the duration of emetic poison seems quite a bit too long, given its countermeasures. Even when/if you are able to apply those countermeasures while affected, the poison remains crippling (enough) for its entire duration. So off the top of my head I'd say something like a max duration of 12-15 hrs would be more balanced.

Having personally played poison thief I can say...
This is a pile of bull.

You are not playing your thief correctly.
I mean... Look at Yanacek. Even disregarding Emperor's powers he was deadly as Hell.

Couple suggestions on my own:
Create more poison types.
Allow to poison potions and pills.

>Having personally played poison thief I can say...
>This is a pile of bull.
>
>You are not playing your thief correctly.
>I mean... Look at Yanacek. Even disregarding Emperor's powers
>he was deadly as Hell.

Was he? Tended to rely on Aristea or silver flasks from what i could see.

Thanks, was about to reply to that. There aren't many successful pure poisoners. Yaneck found a good method, due to some technical flaw. but I give it to him to even think of that.

I've played really a couple, four to be exact with one of them reaching 44 level. Grenade rocks, as do mind-affecting ones. However the peeve is the concocting. Either make it like blackjack where there is a small chance you step out, or make the vials last indefinitely.

Cheers.

I like #1.

I don't like #2 (there are alternatives to buying.)

I think #3 is fixing itself as more areas are added to the game. Also, see my response to #2.