Due to insomnia and nuking a build that wasn't working out that I rolled for a couple weeks from boredom, a few thoughts on thief point costs in light of the lowered playerbase and build versatility at lower levels. My list of proposals is in shorthand and then the reasoning is below for anyone that wants to bounce ideas around:

Cap all main non-magic non-pickpocket paths at 56 points. Binder should lose 1 point on drag, 1 on shadow drag, and poison path badly needs a total rework on costs, see below.

Apply SUGGEST immunity to all mobs across the board above level 40. A few specific mobs gained this immunity in the last week or so, and really mind control poison shouldn't be an excuse for explore area whack-a-mole. 'hit' shouldn't be a viable command for SUGGEST either, admittedly.

Along the lines of the above, if you want to leave the nifty PvE tricks in instead of applying suggest immunity to mobs over level 40, make mind control poison the capstone skill of the path (increase to 42 and increase the point cost). Additionally, make better echoes for suggest immunity so we know what not to try to exploit to circumvent fighting mobs for limited gear/keys.

Make Devious Versatility imm-reward only rather than capping it with a modest imm XP cost, in the vein of re-tuning the impact of edge points. Thief points and thieves rolled should be balanced with the 100 point cap in mind exclusively, and for a small subset of players they really effectively and consistently get 120 or 140 to play with around the 80 or 120 hour mark.

Once mind control poison is moved to level 40 or 42, consider moving emetic poison to at least 33 with contact poison. It's really only effective on idiots before that point and will only work once, after a while people will stop picking up food off the ground in Galadon and you can only pass out so many poisoned apples before it stops being fun to everyone involved.

Lower the thief point cost of envenom, apply, or both. KO poison makes the most sense as an entry level poison but costs a prohibitive 36 points to get total when it really should only be 20 or so. KO poison makes sense at 15, Neurological poison at level 19, and find a way to keep them from costing 44 points to get to because neurological poison is really only worth 26 points total without weapon nick or grenades.

There is a gap on skills between levels 23 and 30 for poisoners. Presumably this is the 'gish gap' where there is supposed to be no skills if you are splashing in here for utility, but 25, 27, 28, 30, 33, and 35 are all great levels to move grenade to if you can limit it appropriately with the damage trap ingredients available. Grenade will have to go up in cost as a result but these points can be taken off of concoct antidote (if you can concoct poison it stands to reason you learn the antidote at the same time) and drink poison. If emetic poison is the balancing factor, move emetic poison to a higher level so that KO poison, neurological poison and fear poison become the utility splash poisons. KO poison should be the modest barrier of entry for this path, not apply. You can potentially move KO poison between neurological and fear poison, I could see KO poison going to level 25 and neuro to 20 without really changing the way poisoners play or their counters.

Additionally, there needs to be a thief poison antidote vendor on the Hamsah seaport docks, this may be something Baerinika could look at after copy/pasting the code from another ship and then making it arrive one a Theran week. This is to allow people to stock up on (prohibitively expensive, 3 to 5k) antidotes in preparation for raids without making it readily available in an emergency for careless play. It will fix Helfinu's problem but still allow fear poison to be useful in shutting down raids, solo levelling with knife, or screwing with people in cursed explore areas. CF has a nasty habit of making the poison also being the cure in many cases (antipathy is another example, so are transmuters) and I think a vendor in this area specifically can alleviate this specific problem without completely ruining the game for poisoners, much like how detect traps is a prohibitive 29 thief points just to negate half of Foedett's class skills for a single individual thief. The mob can concoct the poison in question right in front of the buyer so that the antidote becomes less potent over time, just like poisons that don't have the preservative formaldehyde mixed in. If you make the vendor half-blind and crippled, he can concoct antidotes at an effective 75% skill speed, which allows poisoners to camp him, e.g. no buying antidotes in bulk.

I think if you do all of the above and allow people to be grenadiers at a 36~ish thief point cost, while limiting grenade's code to poisons known by the poisoner, and keep forgiving cruor at a high level (since it's effectively a weaker version of explorer resilience) you will see more poisons at lower levels as utility skills without effectively giving every single thief cheap shot and dual backstab like was the case 10 or 12 years ago. If you can implement a separate edge for each binder skill to be less likely to break in combat that is negated by tie (even if blindfold and gag are unrelated to tie) then you will start to see more interesting builds in the 25 to 35 range for all cabals instead of a constant stream of some variation of thug + pickpocket and/or mystic, and then more exotic builds starved for points from the imms. None of this will let them outclass warriors or assassins at the same level.

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Cheap shot needed to be removed with the skill tree revamp and is appropriately scary for it's point cost. Removing knife and shield block however has proven to be extremely prohibitive cost-wise. Thieves have 23 or 24 dex but in practice if you aren't a thug dealing -stat debuffs, this doesn't make you that much more survivable than a conjurer or AP. Every thief should have an option that isn't backstab and knife fit the bill as moderately threatening.

Likewise, bards kept shield block but thieves lose just as much as bards using it in most cases but it costs 10 points, whereas it really would help to be able to fit it into builds as an option for using combat steal, grenades, weapon nick or the trapper utility skills. e.g. any situation where damage dealt in melee isn't a factor.

Consider folding those skills back into the main tree or dropping their point costs by 60 or 70 percent?

Devious Versatility: This really should be an imm-granted edge only, not merely XP capped. I understand the imm XP cap is merely a formality for certain players, but it should probably be a little less than a given that you write an initial role entry, 3 other role entries over the course of 3 weeks, get 2 or 3k of obs. exp and then putter up to 51 on the coattails of someone to get DV in 80~ hours. Thief points could be looked at again with the cap of 100 in mind to balance for more interesting low levels at the cost of high level path capstones, which isn't currently the case (most thief point costs are weighted toward prohibitive barriers to entry, particularly poisoner and trapper).

Scrolls:
Rangers get an edge to make staff brandishing one round, it would be nice if mystic thieves could get an edge to allow scroll reciting in combat at minimum, or implement a 'memorization' skill to replace hypnotize (just toss it out entirely, no one has figured out how to make any real use of the skill since it's implementation) that lets you memorize a single scroll and cast it using memorize's skill percentage as a spell with the cost being the scroll and an appropriately high mana cost (200 or 300, given thieves dont use mana much).

Otherwise, making scroll recital one round since edges seem to be going the direction of the assassin nerve edge would be really nifty. This skill would obviously require the implementation of some half-decent maladiction and damage scrolls for sale at shops in bulk much like certain choice trap ingredients for grenades, but a mystic thief should have readily available access to curse anyway for the most part or there's not much to the path other than a consistent source of identify, detect alignment and some mediocre damage reduction just as easily gotten by stealing it off your enemies' inventories with your KO skill.

Total thief path costs:

It would probably be logical to rebalance all the main thief paths to take 56 points total. Thug and trapper are perfectly balanced but pickpocket is a bastard child of a path which is basically the acrobatics + pain in the ass path, counterfeit is really only useful to Heralds since lying about trading using counterfeit not only will only work once or twice but quickly spread rumors on the MUD not to trade items with you, and fence's prohibitively long cooldown and low returns are just there so that panhandle and sacrifice suck less.

Likewise binder is 2 points extra somewhere for no good reason (take 1 point off of drag and shadow drag if nothing else) and poisoner is a whopping 63 points for a path that is really mediocre at a lot of utility but good at nothing in particular. Most emetic ingredients are capped to the thief's guild level or penalized by weak ingredients bought in bulk so grenades are crap if you're not sinking literally tens of thousands of gold into prime trap ingredients without the side effects most damage trap ingredients seem to get for a lower investment AND more danger to your person. The damage ingredients nice enough to make up for you not taking third attack from thug all require more in money than you will ever reasonably donate to the thief guilds or Empire as a non cabal leader.

Given that if you are throwing fear, neurological or mind control grenades at all for any reason, you need them to be prohibitively difficult to save against or else you're a sitting duck for virtually any lag move besides trip at 42 and above, KO grenades are mostly useless if you have a better success rate with inhaled and fear grenades or weapon nick would get a better result than KO grenades as a life-saving measure, that leaves emetic grenades and prohibitively expensive, somewhat heavy exotic damage type trap ingredients.

Anything outside of grenades is either you relying on RNG to apply neuro then praying your opponent doesn't just run behind a cabal guardian before the movement affect applies, or blowing six thief points on plant in order to get people to eat emetically poisoned foods or pills that they will probably drop anyway before you can realistically suggest eating them. If you are making people wear things, 'suggest @target td' leaves you lagged too long to take their weapons, fear poison doesn't have the grand nocturne effect of making people throw away their weapon, and most cursed items are usually nodrop in addition to noremove, so you can't do things like make people wear emetically poisoned demon pendants.

On a lot of things here...

I'm just going to reply to things in the order in which you posted them, since I found it very difficult to follow a cohesive train of thought in your post.

Regarding SUGGEST, giving immunity to level 40+ mobs is absolutely ridiculous. There are already plenty of mobs that are either immune to SUGGEST, or at the very least, are heavily resistant to it. Adding any more to this will really begin to weaken one area where poisoners are really strong. As you mentioned (somewhere) in your post, conducting pk largely via poisons is very challenging. You have to think very creatively and plan very carefully to make it work. That being said, for the very crafty thief, it can be very powerful if everything goes off without a hitch. But even so, it's always very costly, monetarily. What's more, several changes have already been made to the way that mind control poison works on NPCs. About a year ago, a mind controlled mob that was aggro (but not prog_greet_aggro) or pissed off at you would become peaceful while affected by mind control. That is no longer the case. Additionally, it seems to me that the fail rate for inhaled application has been dramatically reduced since the last poisoner I played. This means a LOT more pissed off mobs from a failed inhaled mind control attempt, which in turn, means YOU HAVE TO HAVE gentle walk (there's another +3 thief points to spend) to do much of anything with said mob once you finally land the mind control or else it'll just attack you the moment you walk back in. Fear poison will negate the attack, but you still have to land that too, and with some mobs, you don't want them fearful because you want them to stay put, right where they are. SUGGEST is also the most useful against NPCs. Against PCs, smart players just bug out the moment they realize they've been mind controlled. This makes using mind control in PK very difficult. The poisoner only has a very small window in which to use it if using inhaled method. The most effective way to use SUGGEST in pk is if you use mind control grenades. This, however, is either VERY time consuming to gather mind control ingredients, or EXTREMELY expensive to buy them. Mind control as an individual ingredient is not easy to acquire for free. I have yet to find one that can be just repeatedly gathered from pick-up locations or easily defeatable mobs. They're all carried by very challenging mobs, which most thieves cannot defeat solo. If you buy them, they're about 10 gold each. Considering that it might take 2-4 grenades (or even more) to land the poison, that's quite expensive just for a single fight. All of his means that using SUGGEST in pk is often not very practical, which means keeping it very useful in PvE is very important.

I DO agree with you on one point regarding SUGGEST, though. Making a different echo for mobs with immunity to it would be a great time saver.

Regarding Devious Versatility, you're WAY WAY off base. You make it sound as if every thief gets this quite easily, and not only that, but is easily able to get it multiple times. For starters, it requires 2k Imm XP to even be available, and even then, it's THE MOST expensive edge a thief can choose, EVEN THE FIRST TIME. Then, each time you choose it, the edge point cost literally DOUBLES. You make it sound like it's nothing to take the edge twice. I've managed to do it a couple times, but it literally took nearly every edge point my character ever earned in his/her entire life to do it. And I'm VERY good at maxing out edge points gained from obs/explore/commerce xp. I have never been able to take it a third time, and you mentioned people taking it a fourth time (140 thief points). Thee was a post sometime over a year ago from Daevryn concerning Devious Versatility. At that time, he mentioned that only a few manage to take the edge twice, and no one has yet managed to take it three times, but admitted it is conceivably POSSIBLE to do it, though the thief would have to forgo taking ANY other edges for its entire life and be very good at acquiring edge points. Taking DV even once certainly requires a lot more than 2k imm xp and 2 - 3k obs/explore. That wouldn't even get you access to Eyes in the Back of Your Head, which costs less than the first instance of DV. ***IF*** a thief manages to get a pool of thief points higher than 120, then it's because he/she was given bonus thief points as an Imm reward, not because he was able to take DV 3 or 4 times. Though quite frankly, I haven't seen a thief yet who was playing with more thief skills than could be gained by 120 thief points (DV x2). And lets face it, 120 thief points is NOT by any means a game breaker. That's enough points that you can go one full path, and a smattering of some other expensive skills, or two full paths with little to nothing of general skills. Full poisoner + full trapper costs 119 points. That leaves you with enough points left over to take Bribe Mercenary if you feel like it. If you go with two different paths that cost less, you can toss in a few low to mid-cost generals on top, just enough to spice things up a bit without being uber powerful, and it really does takes a LOT of effort to get that (and I'm speaking as someone who has managed to do it a couple times).

Regarding all the changes you suggest to poisoners in general, I found it incredibly difficult to understand ANY of your reasoning on that. Given the massive amount of changes you're suggesting, I can only come to the conclusion that you really have no idea how to play a poisoner, and you either have a serious lack of imagination, or game knowledge. I love the thief class in general, but particularly poisoners. I've played several poisoners now, and I really don't see any need to change them at all. Poisoners and trappers are like the "Scions" of the thief class. By that, I mean the Scions are kind of an elite cabal. It's not the kind of cabal that just anyone can get into. Similarly, playing a successful poisoner or trapper takes a different type of mindset to be successful. You have to explore around and find the best ingredients. Perfecting the skills is TEDIOUSLY slow unless you decide to purchase ingredients for practicing, in which case it becomes EXCESSIVELY expensive instead of tediously slow. In spite of this, I've managed to perfect every single poison skill and STILL succeed at a hostile guild take over 3 times, so your assessment about ingredient cost vs guild donation is also inaccurate. It's not uncommon at all to see thief guild leaders with donations in excess of 10,000 gold or more. During one thief-guild takeover I managed, I had to donate 20,000 gold to surpass the current guild leader by a large enough margin that he couldn't catch up before the end of the vote. But all of this is what it means to be a thief. It adds a lot of flavor to the class.

Regarding scrolls, I agree that using scrolls in pk can be a bit tricky, but it can also be quite powerful. There are a few scrolls in the game which are quite potent and which I've had good success with. Each of these scrolls individually can make a slight bump up in the kill success rate. Spend a little time gathering up a nice supply of each, though, and combining them all on a single target, and the chances of landing the kill go up dramatically. That's just if you're talking offensive scrolls, and says nothing about stone skin/shield/aura/protection/haste scrolls, and of course, detection and recall scrolls. Then there are also the various sources of enchant weapon scrolls for weapons that cannot be dwarf-forged, and a handful of other utility/lesser offensive scrolls like earthbind, various malison, and (GASP) transmute metal to wood. In short, there's a huge variety of useful scrolls out there, many of which are quite useful in pk. I didn't name the potent ones I hinted at because it took me a long time to discover those myself, and not many people know about them yet. But spend some time exploring the game thoroughly to find them, and then use some imagination and think outside the box a bit.

That's what the thief class is all about. They're not little warriors. They're thieves. Read some fantasy adventure novels that use thieves as the main characters, and you'll see just what I'm talking about. Thieves don't just go charging into battle. They're tricky, subtle, and do surprising things that people just don't expect. That's what makes them unique and what makes them fun to play. That's what makes them a serious asset to any adventuring group, whether PvP is your game, or PvE.

(I'm going to skip responding to a bunch of stuff now because this post is long enough as it is)

Regarding your last two paragraphs, you dramatically misunderstand the usefulness of various grenades as well as weapon nick. First off, landing any type of poison with a grenade is pretty reliable, and has a nice damage to go with the attempt, even on a successful save. I usually land any given poison from a grenade within 2 throws, though occasionally it takes a few more, depending on the opponent. This include KO grenades, which I find to be HIGHLY useful. Most people expect that once they've engaged a thief in battle, the thief is stuck in battle until they successfully flee (assuming there isn't an ally mage, healer, or scroll user around to send them home mid-combat). But, if the thief prepared several potent KO grenades before looking for a fight, one toss with the right ingredient, or two tosses with something weaker usually does the trick and pulls your proverbial bacon out of the proverbial fire at the least, if not completely turning the tide of the fight by allowing the thief to then maladict the crap out of his now sleeping victim. Weapon nick is not simply RNG. It's a difficult skill to perfect, but its effectiveness goes up quite noticeably as you approach mastery. By the time you've perfected it, you can often land whichever poison you're nicking (fear or neurological) within a couple attempts, sometimes a little more. I never waste points on PLANT because only idiots fall for that stuff, and if they're stupid enough to fall for that, then there are a whole host of other ways you can mess-up/kill them that also don't require plant and are much faster to execute.

Emetic grenades are fantastic, and frankly, seem like a much better opener to me than backstab. As mentioned previously, trying to use SUGGEST for pk is pretty weak, since any smart player will gtfo as soon as he realizes he's been hit with mind control (all sorts of horrible things could be in store for him if he doesn't, and emetic poison is the least of his worries). The only way you're likely to manage SUGGEST in PK is if you hit them with a mind control grenade mid-combat, so that they don't realize what they've been hit with until you've recovered from the lag and it's too late for them.

A really good strategy, concoct a really potent neurological poison (level 54+ is not out of the question for this) and coat your weapon with it. Open with an emetic grenade instead of backstab, then, if RNG hasn't already landed that potent neurological by the time the emetic is in them, go for weapon nick next. Once the neurological is in them, KO grenade, then mind-control and maladict the crap out of them by whatever other means are at your disposal (scrolls are nice here). Wait for them to be blinded by neurological and afflicted by Forget from mind control. Now they can't see, can't walk straight, and have no access to skills/spells/sups, etc..., AND they are still affected by mind control, so once they're awake, you can now use your SUGGEST TD with perfect effectiveness.

Anyway, I could go on and on with poisoner tactics, but I'm dragging on as it is, and there's something to be said for discovering some things for yourself. The point is, again, stop trying to treat thieves like little warriors or little assassins, and start treating them like genuine thieves. Think outside the box. Be surprising, canny, cunning, inventive, and generally thief-like, and you'll find that the class is already pretty well balanced.


p.s. I do agree with you 100% about Hypnotize, though. Hypnotize fear (whatever it's called) is a good poor-man's fear poison, and hypnotize confuse is nice if you expect your opponent to flee within the next 2 ticks, but otherwise, this skill is very weak, FAR to short of duration, and WAY too expensive for what you can actually do with it. Maybe I'm wrong, here. Maybe I'm just not thinking outside the box enough myself in regard to this skill, but I've experimented with this thing and just haven't been able to find much usefulness out of it at all, and at 7 points, it's awfully darned expensive for such limited uses.

p.p.s. Oh, and you're wrong about fear poison, too. It CAN cause you to toss your weapon in fear, just not every time. But that's not its primary use, just fyi...

>Regarding SUGGEST, giving immunity to level 40+ mobs is
>absolutely ridiculous. There are already plenty of mobs that
>are either immune to SUGGEST, or at the very least, are
>heavily resistant to it. Adding any more to this will really
>begin to weaken one area where poisoners are really strong.

This does not need to be an area where it should be strong, the vast majority of things a poisoner can accomplish with mind control are frequently due to poorly balanced explore areas (too many items with the hidden flag on them in mob inventories in older areas come to mind) not because the skill itself is unique.

Mind control already applies forget in PK. SUGGEST doesn't need to be viable in PK or else you get poisoners, including myself (hi necrotic worms, which trumps everything in your post you could have and/or did propose) looking for the next PWK potion.

>
>I DO agree with you on one point regarding SUGGEST, though.
>Making a different echo for mobs with immunity to it would be
>a great time saver.

There are a ton of skills that need immunity echoes that don't have them. SUGGEST just happens to have a big enough investment to need it. There's other guilty parties such as summon.

>
>Regarding Devious Versatility, you're WAY WAY off base. You
>make it sound as if every thief gets this quite easily, and
>not only that, but is easily able to get it multiple times.

No, I don't. I'm stating that thieves should not be able to plan for getting it and then funnel all their edge points to that end to get around the RP requirements, rather it should be granted directly. The actual cost, easy or hard, is downright irrelevant if they are weak on the balance side of things at 100 points. 2000 imm XP is easy to get, that's a mediocre 1000 XP role and 3 more role entries afterward written with half a brain by a native English speaker at 400 a pop.

>
>Regarding all the changes you suggest to poisoners in general,
>I found it incredibly difficult to understand ANY of your
>reasoning on that. Given the massive amount of changes you're
>suggesting, I can only come to the conclusion that you really
>have no idea how to play a poisoner, and you either have a
>serious lack of imagination, or game knowledge.

To be fair, your reply reads the exact same way to me so we'll agree to disagree. The gold costs are unimportant or downright immaterial. I discussed nearly every subject in my original post at length with other poisoners over the years and very recently.


>Regarding your last two paragraphs, you dramatically
>misunderstand the usefulness of various grenades as well as
>weapon nick.

Everything you cited below this point costs, on average, at least 5k gold per fight and takes twice as long to do as a thug or binder could do (that's not even including the skill practice which is equivalent to binder and a fraction of the time for thug). The only thing that costs more gold to do what you cited is a trapper, which is still more reliable than a poisoner and has more versatile non-trap skills. As soon as you pull off a single trick as a poisoner on a given victim it will only work 2-3 more times on them throughout the poisoner's entire life, after that victims will either burst damage you down or simply get some poison resist to negate half your crap on the dice roll.

Ever fought an opponent who took the Courageous edge for no particular reason at all as a poisoner? Now THAT is beyond infuriating. They don't even care about forget or emetic poison at that point, as soon as they can brute force you, 44 whole points of your skillset are negated by one medium cost edge. Grenades do great damage but you're often too squishy even with preps to actually use them...

>p.p.s. Oh, and you're wrong about fear poison, too. It CAN
>cause you to toss your weapon in fear, just not every time.
>But that's not its primary use, just fyi...

I get the distinct impression you've spent half the time with the sub-class I have based purely on you reciting blindingly obvious tactics I already know, take too much effort to be effective past the first attempt, or that you will never have enough HP to pull off before the opponent either flees or kills you in the skill lag upon failure or even success.

'K.I.S.S.' always applies in PK. As soon as your strategy requires more than 3 or 4 steps, and under ideal conditions (which never occur) more than 10 rounds to kill the opponent, you have generally already lost the fight, overcommitted, or failed to seal the kill.

Poisoners have this problem all over the place, I love poorly understood classes just as much as the next sadist but poisoners have too high a point investment for what they can actually consistently accomplish. A necromancer has a better chance at doing all the stuff poisoners do with less investment before even considering access to a/b/s and removing the sleep spell from consideration.

It's a ridiculously cheap skill.
I don't agree that you should be able to get gear by mind controlling it from mobs close to you level or above.

But maybe for fun stick reasons it has to be done.

I can think of three different curse scrolls at various levels.

The problem is that scrolls generally cast at a spell level below the level at which you can first use them, meaning they're marginally useful against the lower half of your PK range for exactly one level.

e.g. If you're level 25 attempting to curse someone at level 21 with a level 20 spell you might expect to land it in 2-3 attempts, a level 28 opponent with a few saves you're wasting paper, try using it at level 40 against a guy that's had time to gear for saves and you're going to be very sad.

Bards with the librarian edge are basically the only characters which can make any kind of consistent attempts at using offensive talismans/scrolls for said reason; you're always going to be casting at below your level, probably much below your level. Casting level 20 curse on a hero is useless whether you're casting it every round or every two rounds.

This is something that always irked me about CF actually. You can have people hand you uber gear but if they give you a wand or a scroll you have to wait until it's no longer impressive to be able to use it. What kinds of offensive scrolls/wands/talismans are ever actually used in PK? There's one lowbie mages are fond of and it quickly takes a back seat to class abilities around level 20.

Anyway. Librarian edge for everyone! That would help a lot in making scrolls/talismans viable for offensive use.

And start memorizing a set of spells from a single scroll (disappears after use and spell remains memorized on a -1 duration for the current login until cast) then you skill check memorize's skill percentage to see if you can cast the scroll contents...

It's probably a headache to code but still is a much better spell than hypnotize in the long run since depending on what you memorized you could cast it in combat, including word of recall.

You'd start getting rangers having to snare/paste enlarged thieves on Kiadana-rah constantly because of memorize alone, for example.

And then there's other interesting scrolls that would be way better off cast in combat than not (that are actually at a reasonable spell level to be worth using).

But the mystic path's biggest weakness has always been that it's never solved the biggest problem with that skill, it just made you able to read scrolls like a mage and mages aren't generally using more than 50 scrolls their entire lives...

By itself, having something like 'memorize' allowing you to cast a single charge of a memorized scroll set in combat would create a huge incentive to spritz more scrolls throughout Thera in new areas and established shops, without being limited strictly to mundane dam redux, teleportation and debuff scrolls intended for a knocked out target, but rather you could be spewing razor chain and threading in new spell types that you can make more powerful than class abilities because you will never get to use them more than once in a given combat.

You need a spell memorized that is nasty and/or useful enough to be worth trying to use while the opponent is trying to melee you down with flails, axes, a staff or swords and using bash of course, but there's plenty of those types of spells in various scrolls they are just never actually practical to use because of the limitations of the scrolls skill itself.

Imagine a thief intentionally stacking HP gear so he can memorize and use breath spells from scrolls for triple DEMOs or something on a target that's at 40% HP at hero? Nasty.

But not unbalanced.

There are quite a few that are highly useful.

I still remember a lich wasting me with chain lightning underwater, although last time I saw lightning used underwater it seemed to have lost its damage boost. Wondering whether this was unintentional because it made for a more interesting spell.

Personally I've made use of scourge, various malisons, earthbind, slow, plague and dispel in combat via items. Some things are more useful on an enigma warrior, say, than a traditional user of such items.

We see regular use of crushing hand. It shouldn't be possible to gather a few such items and become a wrecking machine; there are some that cast the spell above your current level as well as those that only do the spell relatively weakly.

Scrolls CAN do a lot of what you mentioned, but generally are never worth the effort to mess with. You will in most situations get vastly more mileage out of your normal class skills, and 'mystic' thief path really deserves to shine in creating unexpected tactics against opponents.

If you could actually cast them in combat (a mystic path thief is investing as much as an Enigma warrior to be able to use scrolls if not more and therefore should be able to do this) then you would see more scrolls swapped, traded, and stolen, between bards, rangers, thieves, and mages.

Mages already have several mage_only scrolls from certain vendors very specifically because they were underpowered at low levels and can now get semi-steady damage redux to where you don't have to be well above your opponent's skill level to lowbie PK with a non-shifter non-conjurer, but a scroll focused thief is pretty boned if they didn't all but complete another main path first.

There's also the problem that outside of thug at 26 no thief path is viable in PK before 34 or so, and the general thief skill pool doesn't really fix that aside from knife, weapontrip doesn't start doing good damage until you collect an edge or two and therefore you are focusing a chunk of your build on something that really is just a ####ty assassin throw. Jazzing up scrolls could fix a lot of this, allowing you to sell offensive scrolls tiered at every 5 levels starting at 20 at various vendors, and the tier of scroll you could use is related to the highest mystic thief skill you learned if you learned 'memorize' at 20.

This is all tossing ideas anyway, but the point is that trying to be clever at the beginning of combat pretty frequently wastes resources only for the opponent to quaff a recall potion as soon as things go south and they've been jumped, holding back some burst damage using 'memorize' is one way to fix it.

Never increases the spell level past some fraction of your own level. Even at hero, best thing you get out of it is somewhat longer prep times.

But a level 45 curse against a hero is nearly as laughable as a level 20 one.