If this is true, then the disarm thief is pointless. if you have to snoop the bag first before stealing the weapon, the mark will have more than enough time to re equip the weapon. This should not be this way.
Stealing Arms Wrestling fencing anatomy tacs healing This way you can beat them down with their own weapon, adding insult to injury! If they're using a weapon, you don't need resist against them, as they won't have eval in 95/100 cases.
I would always Arms Lore their weapon, run up, disarm and hit steal - last target. Never opened a pack.
I think the element people are missing is the Razor: Last Target vs UOClient: Last Target. Apparently you wont be able to "Last Target" the disarmed weapon using Razor, but using the default/vanilla client "Last Target" macro will grab it. I cant verify yet, and the last time I was effective as a thief was like 2001 lol.
The way it worked when I was on OSI, was that you could open a person's pack, walk away far enough where you COULD NOT steal, then use the stealing skill and target it anyway. You would get the message that you are too far away to steal the item, but you would flag to that person only anyway. This would entice them to attack you, turning them grey to you and making them fair game. This could have been a bug and maybe eventually changed, but it's the way I did it. But the point was to flag on your target any way you could I suppose. The real art was to look weak enough to make them think you're gonna drop easily.
Yes. Only possible if they are not near an npc anywhere, even inside buildings etc, which is basically nowhere people actually are, let alone with a weapon. But doesn't really matter. Disarm is lame anyway since good weapons are only used in instances.
In my observations over the last two weeks of stealing many tens of thousands of gold worth of stuff from AFK'ers at the bank, this isnt true. Srsly, would you really AFK with contracts of employment with 20k on them in your pack?! Its obvious people on this server aren't adapted to thieves, therefore, its pretty easy to steal lots of stuff and skedaddle away and hide. I havent yet got the disarm/steal macro down, but Ive seen a lot of AFK'ers with delicious looking weapons. Diddnt have enough time away from work today, but I was so tempted to trya nd steal someone's repond hally, it was obvious they had no idea I was stealing all the stuff in their pack lol. I stole an entire suit of green-dyed GM leather, piece by piece, from someone holding a nice looking power axe last night. Dude walked off not even knowing I ran and came back and snatched each piece of armor!
NPCs can't detect stealing through walls, but as of the new patch they can detect aggressive actions (attacking to disarm)
Many tens of thousands over a week or weeks is nothing, and green dyed leather or non runic/slayer weapons are mostly worthless, and if it's from AFK players it's not particularly exciting either. I could take a newbie character with "warrior" starting template out and our earn a thief here and probably have more fun while being profitable (of course the thief is more fun, even at 0 profit because UO pvm is lame). The process of stealing and being whacked then scurrying back in your death robe from the healer is pathetic, and not what I know UO stealing can be. You can maintain a character stocked with proper gear, armor, and still steal from people in and out of town, that do not need to be afk, and actually have a profit in traditional UO and most other servers. Are there exceptions? Sure. I'm sure one of the newbie bank thieves here are typing out a "I stole a power repond katana just last month!" as an example, but a rare anecdote is meaningless. Play a thief for fun still, it's a fun class, but it's nerfed hard here due in part from the trammel mechanics themselves and the culture here that revolve around instances and safety.
Our slogan is history perfected, so I think we need to do all we can to acquire era accuracy, and let that be the anchor and main ingredient to reel in new players. It's an awesome shard, and we ALL need to be willing to be flexible on making things right, even if it does our particular playstyle no justice.
@snap dragon, It has been my experience that if you wait til the guards turn their backs, your success chance increases greatly. I've been able to steal right under their noses just by this alone. Then I seen just a crafter (something like that, yall lnow the thief with the crafter name...I like that dude lol) use wall of stone, and totally owned a guy lol the guards didn't see a thing and he would have gotten away with it but I had to yell guards on him becuz it was my mark and I couldn't let him come in and take what I was waiting for, for 10 mins in a few seconds. Sorry, crafter, it was genius, but it was my mark. Edit: there was like 4 thieves trying for the same mark and crafter was the only one able to steal without being caught by guards, until I screamed to the high heavens and ended the competition by just killing the dude and getting the weapon lol. This was about 2 weeks ago.
Era Accuracy isn't a "thing" here on UOR. Nor do I really think it should me. Some other shards have tried it to good success, but it became boring, and often things NOBODY wanted was added (cutting bandaids 1 at a time, etc). About stealing "behind guards backs": There is no directional AI. You're just imagining that. The facing of the guards has no effect and will make no difference.
Well I have no proof otherwise, so ill have to take your word for it, but sure does seem more successful to me.
You don't need to take my word for it. You can go test it yourself. Just steal the same item at the same distance from an npc guard in a town where no players are and write down the outcome and the direction of the guard. Just make sure to do it at least 50 times for each to get some reasonable (but still too small sample) data. You can't listen to anything anyone says in UO (or in many other things). Just test and figure out the facts for yourself.