I think it's all in how you want to play your thief. I just got finished with a full path thug and decided that permafly and high dex was more important than trying to outmelee people in straight up power, also being able to loot would be easier with more strength. The advantages to higher dex includes not only dodging more, but I think hitting more weaponbutt blackjacks. I could rely on hitting it about 2/3 times, whereas I heard complaints from two other thugs that they had little success with it.

If I wanted to play an evil thug thief, I would have gone with a duergar for strength. It's much easier to get a 70 dam roll with a duergar than it is an arial. I relied on progs to do my damage while cheap shot kept them in combat. As a duergar I would rely on straight up melee damage over progs. You'd be able to loot a lot more, and carry around a lot of preps, but you'd lose permafly from arial.

Personally, if I was going battle, I'd take arial. You wouldn't need detect invis preps, you wouldn't need flight preps, and you can depend on deathblows for damage, resist for taking less damage, and a high jack success rate.

I think a rager with earclap, parting block, permafly, resist, and deathblow would be scary.


Good luck!

As a thief, you only have spear, mace, sword, and dagger. This means you'll be relying on dodge a hell of a lot (against weapons you can't parry). Thus, if you want to be successful in pk, you'll want to be thinking hard about having high dex, regardless of the path you take. I wouldn't take str over dex in any thief path, especially one like thug that relies heavily on melee damage.