Thief

For the mobile, see thief (mobile).

Thieves (or 'scouts') are known to have very special qualities that no other class offers. Many of these qualities can come in handy in many situations, such as picking locks.

Thieves can be played in many different ways. You may sneak and shoot enemies, doing a maximum of damage, whilst taking few blows yourself. As you are quite dextrous, you may also simply dodge most hits whilst attacking with your dagger. Another option would be to backstab your foes while you are hidden from their sight.

Opinion

The most difficult class to play in the game. A thief values stealth over everything and has a lot of difficulty fighting toe-to-toe with the other classes. Playing a thief takes patience, luck, and the ability to know when to strike!

Beginner tips for group play

You can't backstab a fighting opponent, so you're best bets are either to practice piercing weapons, attack and assist a warrior/buffer/tank with a piercing weapon that deals decent damage per second (on aggressive mood), or assist and shoot, or shoot from hidden - which involves sneaking into the room, shooting once, moving out and back in and then shooting again (you'll need good sneak for this). This will use up more moves, but shooting from hidden gives you a bonus to your shot. On the other hand, assisting causes parry split on the target (their parry bonus is divided by the number of melee opponents), so that also helps both your attack and also all the others in melee (close) combat with the target. If you are shooting, and particularly if you are going to sneak in and out of the room, make sure your fellow group mates know you are going to be doing this, and ensure your leader (if that's not you) is fine with waiting a few seconds after kills before moving on for you to recover your arrows. You may wish to only shoot when faced with stronger opponents to avoid the recover delays on opponents that will die quickly.

Other beginner tips

Backstab does not work well until you have it at very high skill levels, so don't bother practising it until you're ready to put the maximum number of practices into it. It's probably not worth using until you're at least level 18(?) or so. Missile weapons are a better option until then.

Shoot/flee

When playing scout early levels until 16 or so: practice sneak, get bow and war arrows or ash arrows. Some absorb equipment - fine rigid leather is a great start. Sneak on, enter room with mobiles, shoot a mob, flee. Wait for sneak to be available again (big S in prompt and a message if previously small s in prompt). Enter again, shoot the mob again, flee. After it dies recover or get the arrows, repeat for the other mobs. Bows do a tons of damage, and shoot from sneak is an invisible action, so your first shot often goes through if you don't get detected by a mob.

Alternatives

You could level up to 18 or so practiced and equipped as a warrior/buffer, but with your thief stats, using citizen mercenaries for parry splitting, retire for 1 month and then get a practice reset and maybe an age reset. Or train off warrior skills and train up thief skills when you get to level 16+.

Other guides

There are better and longer guides out there if you search for them - either in game (check the boards and libraries) or in the forums, like this one. This thread may also be useful.

See also

• Skills