Detecting Hidden is probably one of the most-used, yet least-GMed skills in the game. Anyone interested in the security of their belongings in their house uses this skill on a daily basis, but how many actually know much about it? The Basics Detecting Hidden has many different uses. It's most common use is by house owners to check for intruders (more on that in a bit). At the higher levels, Detect Hidden will also reveal traps set on containers, and is required for the skill "Remove Trap". How much skill is needed to do these things? Well, in more detail... At 0.0 skill, you can use the Detecting Hidden skill to reveal any hidden players in a house that you are a friend, co owner, or owner of, with 100% effectiveness. Between 0.1 ad 49.9 skill, you can reveal hidden players anywhere. and at 50.0 and above, you can use the skill to show if a container has a trap set. How to use it House Security: At 0.0 Detecting Hidden skill, any player can reveal any player in a house that they own or are friended/co-owned to. It's something that absolutely anyone who owns, or ever plans to own, a house MUST know. As soon as you enter your house, you use the detect hidden skill. If you're a friend/co-owner/owner of the house, you will reveal any and all hidden players, pets, animals, monsters, etc, 100% of the time, regardless of their skill in Hiding. Example: Here's me using it after gating into my secure gate spot inside my house. Revealing Hidden Players: From 0.1 Detecting Hidden skill, you have a chance to reveal any players hidden around you. The higher your skill, the better your chance of success. Keep in mind that the Hiding skill of the hidden character has an effect on the possibility of success. Even at GM Detecting Hidden, a GM Hiding character still has a chance to escape detection. (As mentioned above, this does not apply to use of the skill inside a house that you're a friend/co-owner/owner of). Example: Here's me using it at the Trinsic North Bank. Revealing Traps: Once you reach 50.0 Detecting Hidden skill, you have the ability to reveal trapped containers around you. This will not only tell you that a container is trapped, it will also tell you the TYPE of trap you're looking at. You can also reveal multiple trapped containers at once. When you use the skill on a certain tile, every trapped container in the area is revealed simultaneously. Example: Here's me using the skill, then wishing I hadn't. Training the skill Training Detecting Hidden is very easy. 0-30 ... Buy from NPC (Thief Guildmaster) 30-49.9 ... Use the skill on yourself and be patient 50.0-GM ... From this point, you can either continuing the skill on yourself and GM that way, which will take a while, or you can take the shortcut. After 50, every time your skill sees a trapped container, it uses the skill to reveal it. This means that the more trapped containers that are around you, the more times you use the skill at the same time. This can make for very very fast gains. For a quick explanation, I will quote the post for Patch 39: Because of this, the quick method for GMing the skill from 50.0 is to gather as many trapped containers as you can possibly find (I used 50), place them all around you (or put them all into one wooden container and axe the container), then use the skill on yourself. If you have 50 trapped containers near you, then each time you use the skill, you'll actually get 50 uses at the same time, giving you a chance for 50 gains. With enough containers, you can potentially go from 50-GM in 30-45 minutes, or less. If you were to start macroing the skill at 50.0 while standing in the tower pictured above, you would gain the skill very very quickly. Detecting Hidden with other skills Detecting Hidden and Lockpicking For this section, we look back at Patch 39: Basically, having a higher Detecting Hidden skill allows you to pick higher-level locks with lower Lockpicking skill level. The patch notes basically say all that there is to say about this, so there isn't much more that I could add. Detecting Hidden and Remove Traps If you were to pursue the arts of Removing Traps, you would have to have Detecting Hidden. You cannot use or train Remove Traps without having at least 50 Detecting Hidden and 50 Lockpicking. Once you reach this minimum in both skills, you are able to train Remove Traps at the NPC Thief Guildmaster.
Very nice, I never realized the color of the text message indicated the trap type. I believe Detect Hidden also provides a bonus to Tracking, especially (or perhaps exclusively) versus hidden targets.
Basoosh, I have read that too. Supposedly, you compare your Tracking and Detect Hidden to the Hiding and Stealth of the hidden. When testing with a character with 100 Tracking and 100 Detect, against 100 Hiding and 100 Stealth, I noticed no difference between this and a non-hidden non-hiding character. So perhaps the formula is something like: Success% = 100 + (Tracking + DetectHidden) - (Hiding + Stealth) ...and in order to foil a GM tracker, you need GM Hiding and GM stealth to make it 50/50 for the tracker to latch on. Just guessing here; it's hard to really pin this down through manual testing.
From what I remember Telamon saying in IRC one day, the bonus is not actually to success chance. It instead raises the distance from which you can track the target.
Detect-hidden provides an additional bonus to successfully tracking players, most notably those who are hidden &/or a great distance away from the tracker. A character with 100.0 skill in tracking & 0.0 skill in detect would be less efficient at tracking a target which is 90 tiles away, compared to a tracker with both 100.0 in tracking & detect-hidden which would be able to track the same target with a substantially higher success rate. Additionally, at 100.0 tracking & 0.0 detect, attempting to track a hidden target at 75 tiles distance would be much more difficult than attempting to do so with 100.0 in both skills. At the largest distances, (near/at the maximum tracking range) you would have little to no chance of tracking a target who is hidden without any skill in detect. The defenders skill in both hiding & stealth are assumed to be 100.0 in the examples above
Note that if you're just using Detect Hidden to allow yourself access to the Remove Trap skill, you may as well keep it at 50.0. You get no bonus from your Detect Hidden value on your ability to remove a trap. However, you also can't let it drop below 50.0, or you lose the ability to use the Remove Trap skill.
