Mon Mar 6 09:38:17 2017

At 11 o'clock AM, Day of the Great Gods, 33rd of the Month of Winter
on the Theran calendar Rettia perished, never to return.

Rolled her to play around with thieves, and specifically binder. Logging in to four-five ragers and a random paladin in PK gets really old after a while and I deleted as there are no mages to fight and no imperials really outside of coordinated ganks. Commander wasn't really expected, but I think I've done pretty well.

Thieves and binders:

Thing is, thieves are not really competitive without DV*2 at hero. Pretty much only thug to third plus cheapshot have a chance, and even then they're strictly worse than assassins. I don't think I'll ever be rolling a PK thief, it's pointless.

Binders can be scary on paper, but they absolutely depend on their skills landing. Garrotte always fails if they can see you, and even when they can't, it fails half the time anyway. The horrible success rate means that I can't even try to bind anyone. In rare cases I do knock someone out, either bind hands or bind legs would fail, which means no further bindings and which means they run away easily. And don't get me started on trying to get the skills up in the first place. The improvement rates are so nerfed it's not even funny. This is like trying to learn evade, but with five skills instead of one.

On rare occasions someone is fully bound, usually everything comes off the first round or two of fighting and they can run away and quaff. There's nothing to be done about it if they're flying. In case am lucky and they're not and there were no allies to word them or unbind or anything and I'm tripping, the cheap shot fails to fire and they flee and quaff.

Don't get me started on shifters either having no hands or no feet and thus impossible to bind up. I simply fail to understand why it's impossible to tie/truss an animal, seems it would be fairly easy once they're down, at least as easy as a giant. In some cases (birds) it would be trivial to fully bind one IRL, but utterly impossible in Thera.

But yes, over the life of the char, there were like two or three kills where the enemy had little to no chance of escape.

My advice: don't bother with thieves, assassinate is much easier not to mention the vastly greater melee, maledicts, martial trance, vanish, even confusion darts.

Am not really a big goodbyes person, but village was cool, most others also, a big FU goes to Aarusemilar(sic?) for random stealing, especially containers and things you can't ever use. If you have a purely griefing char, something's wrong with your life.

Perfected all binding stuff on monks last time in about 4 hours. Binder is the only class that can pretty much kill anyone with if the situation is right. Binder is super OP.

If you don't have all binding skills perfected then yes they fail a lot.

If you want constant consistent wins daily binder isn't for you. If you want the perfect class to create situations by which anyone can be killed binder is the way to go. You just have to be patient and opportunistic.

Went thug for parting block first (because rager doesn't have a hope in hell otherwise), only picked up binder at 42. Monks don't improve crap at 42, plus, you know, human. Nevertheless, got the skills up the hard way. What I meant is that perfected skills fail way too much.

Let me contradict you. How do you kill a rhino/pretty much any shifter? You can maybe garrotte them and bind legs, but you can't do anything else and they kick your ass or leave whenever they want if you get lucky with DB. How do you kill a mummy? You can't do anything to it period. Good luck with the two attacks. Heck, how do you kill STSF emperor? Your garrotte fails five times out of five (that was one of my logins) and he can trip/parting block you all day long while you don't land a hit.

Against most actual foes, the build was hopeless. Heck, even Kromps (the guy who died to anything) ran away easy when the bindings failed.

I'd really like to know how you create a situation where a foe you can't even garrotte or bind up can be killed. This includes all assassins, emperor, all shifters, and 50/50 on anyone else. I was a berserker and it helps with landing lucky DB's, but those times are very few and far between complete fails.

I propose give 20 points to thieves at 47 and get rid of DV and then we can get some semi-competitive builds maybe.

That would be the easiest way to make thieves playable at 51. And good point about undead. No blackjack/garotte. At 42, you can give necromancers a good fight, though you can still be "flee slept" with most openers. Once they turn undead, you're done. Just stay on the other side of Thera.


And I'll add that at hero, trip/cheapshot is not a strategy for any reasonable foe. Forget that they will cut you to ribbons in melee, but everyone who is competent is flying. It's the easiest and cheapest counter in the game (and cheapshot is 14% of your thief points). And as a thug, there are few foes that will drop their weapons even after gut/kidney/gouge (If you're alive after the 5-6 rounds doing all that assuming they all land) because they maledictions are not enough to overcome most hero gear sets.

I don't think making thieves more competitive in late game combat makes the game more fun. Play something else (without steal, bindings, drag, blackjack, etc.) if you want to be strong in melee, because there are lots of things that offer that. If everyone has 20 more thief points to play with, that means more, stronger, flee->immediately hiding thieves and more incentive to only also play a thief, assassin, or duergar to keep them from ruining your day.

Martial trance makes assassins quite powerful and obviously some are better than others at maximizing assassin melee potential. Hero assassins outside of trance, most of the time, get wrecked in melee. And, they can't immediately flee and hide, nor can they resort to hassling their opponents with steal. So, I don't think comparing thieves to assassins in terms of melee potential makes sense.

Rhinos and any other shifter are SUPER easy to kill. You kill them when they aren't in form. You don't jump on top of the rhino with some thin wire and try to hug its neck. You wait til he is puny mage. It is a patience game.

How do you kill assassins/emperor? You keep garroting them until they fall asleep. You missed your garrote? You should probably flee and run away then come back and try again. You're being sort of whiney/exagerative when you say it is *impossible* to garrote someone that can see hidden, because it isn't, and the success rate is very much higher than you're leading others to believe. You mixed thug and binder and unfortunately one is great for balls out PK rapage, and the other one only leads to frustration if you're trying to be balls out pk awesome person. They are two completely different classes of thief to be played 2 completely different ways (at hero I mean, mid range binder/thug hybrids do well). As far as current Emperor there are several ways a binder can kill someone that do not involve combat. Personally I'd keep him locked in a trapped nomagic/noexit room until he suicided.

That #### worked on Twist real easy too.

Certainly binder is feast or famine and there are some enemies you have very little chance of killing. But you might be exaggerating how bad it is.

First, you weren't full binder. Supposedly the skills work better the further along you go in the path. Without having access to the code, its possible that your binder skills were gimped relative to a character who went all the way in the path.

It's not impossible to garrotte someone who can see you. If I recall it's harder, but not impossible. When I played Kasir, what seemed to make a difference was whether someone's adrenaline was high. High adrenaline made it much harder to knock them out. So if your enemy manages to attack you before you can lad the garrotte attempt then its probably going to fail. So flee/return/garrotte doesn't work very well as tactic. The other problem with people who can see you is that they're more likely to have noticed you and prepped before you even reach them.

I wonder how you would have fared if you'd taken blackjack?

Scrolls can be useful to a thief, but then again so are deathblow and resist. So I'm not sure whether, on balance, being a rager helped or hurt you. Certainly it limited your choice of targets.

Some shifter forms have both arms and legs and can be fully bound. The simian ones for sure, but maybe others.

I agree that if you can't garrotte or bind someone then you're not likely to kill them outside of pathological situations. Assassins definitely don't belong on the "impossible to kill" list though. My list would be:

Shifter with a form that doesn't have both arms and legs
Any undead
Most rager warriors if you're not a rager
Invoker who knows what he's doing
STSF Emperor
Most paladin builds, esp. if fortress

With each of the above there's some set of circumstances where you can win; you just have to try and engineer those circumstances. Easier said than done, obviously, and not something you can count on. But it'll occasionally happen. For instance, catching the shifter out of form.

Good luck with catching a shifter out of form at hero. Not saying it can't ever happen, but most/all competent people are out of form only in their guild/cabal inners. And most fly on top of that, so you don't actually get to sneak up on them regardless of form.

Assassins destroyed me in melee and I don't think I ever successfully garrotted one. It might be possible, just saying it never actually happened.

I'll add any communer to your list where you don't know their recall or their recall is actively guarded (like Galadon with the current active tribs).

Taking blackjack is not an option points-wise.

Not taking cheapshot takes away most of what little ability you do have to land a kill, plus really gimps you at midranks.

I think DB+resist>scrolls+potions, especially considering how nerfed thief's scrolls are unless you waste even more points for arcane.

> Good luck with catching a shifter out of form at hero.

There's also "jump them when they're wounded". But I admit it's not a common thing.

> Assassins destroyed me in melee...

That's expected. You want to fight them when they're bound, have no dual wield, can't enter commands and just ate a 500 hp back stab. Also maybe you're hasted if you're a scroll user.

> I'll add any communer to your list where you don't know their recall or their recall is actively guarded

Agreed, that's a hard kill. Scrolls help here (somewhat) in that you can at least try to curse them. High saves and garrotte duration make that tough.

> Taking blackjack is not an option points-wise.

Would have to give up something else, but it's an option. The thug stuff for instance. Could keep cheap shot.

My understanding of garotte is that as you progress up the binder path, the duration of garotte increases to allow for the additional bindings you learn.

Blackjack 's duration never increases. If the above is correct, blackjack would not work for a binder.

If I recall, garrote duration is 3 hours at hero. What's blackjack? I used blackjack with Lithodora but don't remember the duration.

.

pretend to not know about their main skill.

nt

I honestly don't remember what the duration was from when I had the skill on Lithodora. I kind of wish I did remember.

If any current hero thief has blackjack and cares to share the duration I'd be grateful. Should have written it down when I had the chance.

affects: Skill: blackjack modified none for 1 tick.

Just gotta be a relentless bastard.

Or be stupid enough to let Jalim lead your group

I've had two binders. One was super-prominent, but leaned much more RP than PK, and had 44pk wins over 500 hours. The second was
Empire, and much more involved in PKs and had 70pk wins over
almost 400 hours. 70pkwins would currently put him *WELL* into
the top ten of active characters. I'll admit, a Rager's adding
more difficulty to binder than otherwise, but that's a person's
own choice. As others referenced, binders have the ability to
kill characters that *NO-ONE* else can, undead aside (which is a
problem for nearly all thieves anyways). They're also some of the
nastiest options in *any* two-man team, since if you have anyone
with offense, they can literally walk through someone tied up.

As an example - your question as to how to deal with rhino and
other shifters...the solution isn't "what can I do to a rhino",
it's "when can I catch this person when they're unshifted"?
Personally, rager's pretty tough for any thief who's going for the
PK count, unless you're thug.

Anyways, overall Rettia was definitely a solid Rager. Sorry you
didn't get much from Jormyr, just always ended up seeming to be
somewhat awkward.

So, the role I was going for is to start off as this really insecure and kinda scared girl who can only hide mostly. Then she'd develop more security by living in the village and maybe killing some strong foes. Then I'd make a role entry about gaining more self-assurance, self-reliance, confidence in the war, overcoming self-imposed challenges, etc.

But being made Commander before that happened made it kinda awkward, so I wasn't really sure how to proceed. Just making an entry that I won the war with myself was way too early, and making an entry about slowly gaining self-confidence didn't fit as I was already the Commander.

What I was hoping from you was some sort of inspiring or uplifting words or a tough task to kinda help and nudge the char development along, but I couldn't come out and say that.

I do realize it's all on me for making a somewhat non-standard village role. I typically try to do something that wasn't done before rolewise, but this was maybe a touch too far and I lost interest in the char before pulling it off, which I imagine would've happened within 100-200 more hours.

I think you intended to do that though

At hero, thief seems way outclassed. The absence of DV nowdays just amplifies this. I like that they can hide right after combat, but if you compare various thief builds to other classes, melee or otherwise, it's not close. Your options once you hero are often to be a supporting char or grief people. Not the purpose of thieves in my opinion.

Assassins:
Easier to rank
Better PvP
More stealthy than a thief
Better melee even pre-trance
Better PvE (darts/smoke/dust)
Better at escaping (vanish)
Better at traveling (vanish)
Better at hunting (mark)
Better detection (mark/see hidden/see invis)
Better maledictions
Self healing/cure blindness
Has no class they cannot kill

It feels like assassins were designed by someone who was about to roll one, and thieves were designed by someone about to roll a shaman.

I laughed out loud and my co-worker gave me a strange look.

I think the thief class is awesome in design, so props to whomever did it. It's full of great ideas. I just think the variables need to be adjusted. Some possibilities:

-Bump up the malediction strength of skills as you get higher level
-Make skills work more often
-Consider making some path skills base skills for all thieves (shield block/knife/double back/third attack for example.)
-Stop nerfing thief skills (I'm looking at you, weapon trip)
-Give more thief points by default (easiest adjustment to make)
-Reduce the point cost of certain skills
-Remove the locksmith path and give all thieves advanced lockpick. Other classes get lockpick, thieves should be experts at this, and I think it's been nerfed by some changing of locks.
-Remove detect hidden from assassins. They have mark for their prey. If a thief cannot see them hidden in a bush, they should not be able to see a thief hidden in a dumpster.

So, tweaks would work. The design in general is great.

Also, if a high level thief actually had the tools to compete more pk-wise, maybe so many of them wouldn't have to resort to griefing as their only means of payback.

Over the life of the char:

Attempted non-training garrotte: 410 times
Succeeded non-training garrotte: 208 times, 51%

This includes mobs and players, haven't figured an easy way to exclude mob data. At least I know what I trained on. Didn't attempt to garrotte in PK prior to 42 and spamming it up.

Attempted total garrotte: 1870
Succeeded total garrotte: 1190, 63%

So with the training and easy mobs who can't see hidden included, the success is better, but still just 63%
----
Attempted non-training bindlegs/hands: 222
Succeeded non-training bindlegs/hands: 153, 69%

Attempted total bindlegs/hands: 1316
Succeeded total bindlegs/hands: 742, 56%
---

Here we see the benefits of training, the percentage went up, but it's still a fairly miserable success rate. There's 51% to knock someone out and then 69% to bind legs and 69% to bind hands. Do note that both need to be there to attempt to tie, then that has to succeed in order to truss.

It's probably less than 20% overall to bind someone up. But then it doesn't mean you kill him. Sometimes he'd outmelee you, sometimes he's flying and flee/quaffs, sometimes you just miss a trip/cheap shot. Do note that you get two attacks and can completely miss backstab.

If it hits - you have a good chance at messing them up, MAYBE hitting all your bindings and having them stick through killing them, certainly cleaning out their inventory if you are so inclined.

If it misses - you flee and try again later, MAYBE getting gibbed if you tried to garrote someone who can kill you in miss lag.

Edited this just to add - it seems like you are asking for a higher chance to autokill someone. Binders are a class where sometimes the stars align and their enemy dies with no chance at survival. It seems obvious to me that they therefore better be pretty damn weak when the stars don't align.

I'll take him at his word since he just put in the hours playing a binder. But, if you have conflicting data, please share. Maybe your experience with you binder was different.

I think everyone should accept that fully-bound is not an autokill except once in a blue moon.

But, when a class with hide has something that acts as an autokill even a tiny percentage of the time, I think that class better pretty much suck otherwise. I guess a fair point would be that assassinate fits the same bill, with less skills needed to be perfected before it works well... although the one does take a fair amount of work. But, assassin's don't get steal.

Just teasing out thoughts about steal, as Rettia's numbers show, 50% of the time the thief is cleaning out your inventory. The necro spamming sleep at you gets to keep trying without any "protect your neck" defenses. But at least you can try to teleport away and not get your inventory wiped if he does land it... and you don't need to be a certain class, race, or have a unique item to see him coming and get the first hit in.

>But, when a class with hide has something that acts as an autokill even a tiny percentage of the time, I think that class better pretty much suck otherwise. I guess a fair point would be that assassinate fits the same bill, with less skills needed to be perfected before it works well... although the one does take a fair amount of work. But, assassin's don't get steal.<

Assassins don't suck, in fact, you could conceivably play an assassin that never hides and rock a 50% PK ratio.

I don't think Steal makes up for how much better Assassins are in melee. Especially since every class can attempt to steal something

Of course, having straighforward paths to killing otherwise extremely hard to kill characters has its merits. We can disagree on how "powerful" steal is.

Landing garrotte is a prerequisite for anything to happen for a binder, especially for a non-zerker binder. And if one isn't interested in clearing out the inventory (AKA griefing) and would rather get a kill or at least a shot at it, not landing it means you don't get the chance.

I'm not saying it should be a 100%, but something more reasonable would be preferable. I'd take 70%-80% as a good number, which is about what blackjack feels. Maybe it's even more reliable than that, I haven't had a blackjack thief to run the numbers, but it sure knocked my chars out very reliably over the years.

I'd also take the same 50% if it could be repeated, which it currently can't be until the timer runs out. At least with sleep, which feels very close to 50%, you can flee/sleep.

Just think of a perfected flurry hitting 50% of the time. Or hamstring. Or throw. Most if not all key skills/spells have better success rates.

You only need bind hands/bind legs to go through in order to tie/truss anyone. You can repeatedly attempt to both tie and truss so failing them is not a big deal at all. Legs/Hands are the only ones that you can't repeat until timer wears off. It isn't as bad a picture as you're painting. Binders are not supposed to be warriors, not sure why you aren't getting that.

Over life of the char:

Gag success: 441, 78%
Gag fail: 126

Blindfold success: 462, 80%
Blindfold fail: 117

Non-training:

Gag success: 58, 80%
Gag fail: 14


Blindfold success: 66, 83%
Blindfold fail: 13

Thus there is little to no reason to waste time practicing them apparently. Do notice the stable 80% success rates for both as compared to the 50% garrotte and 70% binds.

I think you'd really enjoy playing a whip spec. Eyejab is like blindfold, you get choke to knock out then you have pull to drag. Then you can actually play super aggressive and get a lot of kills and not have to complain so much about not being a warrior.

It's kinda like orcs.

People used to play them like giant warriors, and mostly got rocked. Yeah, the IMMs added a bunch of skills/spells, but I'd argue that it was players figuring out how to play them that made them seem "better" across the board.

As in, Thror and Khaso both had orcs that rocked like 90% PK ratio's back before adaptions/bully/etc.

As Jalim says, binder is possibly the "weakest" in combat thief path, but IF you land all your #### you can #### up an opponent as bad (if not worse) than any other path.

Pretty sure a well-played binder is one of the few things that a beefed up AP or Lich (maybe not the Lich) might worry about.

Binder can do absolutely nothing to a lich except die a horrible death. I suspect if the lich stands there and has no army and does not enter any commands, binder dies anyway to melee damage.

Let's say you bind up a beefy AP and nothing fails and you clean out the inventory. What then? He has hp to stand there until the bindings fail to flee/teleport. If said beefy AP has no fly and no protections, then maybe he dies to cheap shot spam, but I'm not convinced even a rager binder will be able to outmelee a 100-charge weapon. I'm even less convinced that AP skillful enough to become beefy is walking around without protections or fly. I'd say an assassinate is far more likely and is actually something he has to worry about. As evidenced fairly recently, a trapper thief can steal the weapon, but not binder.

Gr

I am purely commenting my perceptions on the binder build that I had and the experiences that I had. If you mean "drag him to no-exit" - that doesn't really work in most situations, plus you have the initial problem of .5*.69*.69=.24 to even attempt, which was the gist of my complaint.

Being a binder has nothing to do with being Commander.

You fail at being a Binder because you think Binder is warrior or melee. The post I was referencing is the perfect example of that mindset, and that is why you fail at being a binder.

You literally have to think way the #### outside the box to be efficient at binding. I still haven't pulled off several tricks I know I'm able to for kills as a binder, because once I do they're gonna get changed. You save things like that for the OP AP.

Do correct me if I'm wrong - but wasn't the plan to bind Ravon and drag him into an insa-death room?

The PLAN was to drag him BESIDE an insta death room and the invoker was going to earth ripple him in. Polearm Paladin could do the same thing to any character. Only in this case group for four Fortress wanted to go check and make sure that up was the insta-death room before earth rippling. I did drag up and had already been told it wouldn't work. I jumped off the cliff without the AP. Also then AP told all of his OOC contacts to roll up something to loot my pit so there were like 4 level 1 characters at two pits spamming get all pit. Good times.

What AP fears about binder is that a binder can truss him WELL past the time his grip wears off. Then its just a matter of either sleepingdisarm from the binder himself or fumble from any shifter or muter.

He went to very great lengths to avoid Iktul ever getting a garrotte attempt on him (was it Iktul?). Iktul was a jalim binder thief. Ravon had the copper mask of Anazu on him at that time and still avoided Iktul like the plague.

Have you ever considered that shadowdrag (I think it no longer allows you to 'vis' out into the open when you're bound) + trussed basically allows you to drag them across a hundred rooms to a death trap? No magic, no escape, locked. You could literally leave them there to suicide. There might be even ways to just put them into a death trap that will kill them: I don't know any ways personally.

I think if jalim rolls another binder now the complaints will come pretty soon

I'm not sure the duration on truss is what it once was. Long-distance dragging may no longer be an option.

This and a lot of other stuff is still possible.

Just waiting on another powerhouse I don't like at this point. =)

That guy played when I did, which was after Ravon. Maybe it is Iltch you were thinking of? Arial thief in Nexus, though no idea if Jalim played that one.

Yeah that was me.

IMMORTALIZED FOREVER IN THE HAMSAH GUILD.

I felt accomplished if only because of the 2 paintings and making other changes to the guild in Hamsah.

You should've been immortalized by mummification.

As I referenced above, I've done binder. A binder who knows his
stuff can utterly destroy any mage (non-undead), healer, shaman, or
AP given time, and opportunity (mostly catching someone w/o friends
to unbind them). If you're *REALLY* after someone dead, it takes a
certain amount of patience, and probably non-rager, since some of the
most evil tricks I ever thought of as a binder required magic.

As an AP, there is literally nothing I'd be more terrified of than a
smart binder who wanted my weapon. Partially due to being rager, and
partially because I have about 1000 hours of binder under my belt,
I guarantee you leaned a little too much on the idea of "bind + cheap
shot", to come up with all the ridiculously nasty things a binder can
do.

Could you drag them into an agro npc and have the npc attack the victim and not the thief?

Though the best binder kill I saw was the guy dragging someone below the docks and the tide came in and drowned him.

Oddly enough, I feel like certain thieves play more as I envision assassins, having to be patient and learning the victim's habits to engineer situations that just kill the guy.

Having to be in the same area and use stalk just isn't the same as actually stalking someone enough to learn habits and design true plots to ensure their death rather than just using assassinate jim after 6 stalks or whatever.

Lunn is very helpful in this situation.

I can't remember, but I want to say Yean was playing some uber-decked Fort paladin and Straklaw was playing an Empire binder.

He literally dragged her from Balator to the Maus. It was insane.

Doing some searches, it's definitely Valryn you're talking about for
the binder. There's an assortment of posts from you commenting about
that story, heh. I couldn't figure out the "original" log, or what
paladin it would be. Nihervia would be around the right time, for an
"uber-paladin", but that's just a guess.

>Could you drag them into an agro npc and have the npc attack
>the victim and not the thief?

Yes.

Rettia has a good point in that certain enemies are going to be drastically harder to kill for a binder than other enemies are. If a given binder constantly finds himself in conflict with "binder resistant" enemies then I agree it could be very frustrating.

Another class of enemy I'd consider "binder resistant" are builds that are garrotte-able and bind-able and trip-able but who have a credible chance of killing the binder on a failed knockout attempt.

Pole spec, giant axe/sword/flail spec, orc, maybe transmuter, anti-paladin with preternatural ability to flee/return/sleep.

Against non-binder-resistant enemies, though, binder is gross.

Unfortunately, another fairly effective anti-binder tactic is to just walk around in a group. That obligates the binder to knock out two people without one waking the other one, and generally increases the likelihood of the binder dying if the initial knockout attempt fails.

You mispelled Shapamatic 2000. Imm approved.

I enjoyed exploring with you. Rettia was lots of fun especially the doll theft. I really was surprised when you stepped down as Commander. That's a pretty big decision after winning the rites and I would have been happy to continue to have you as Commander.