I was looking at starting a thief, but i'm not really sure which skills are best on UOR for a thief. I also cant really find much in the forums about thieves. I used to play a thief a lot back in the late 90's but mostly played my Semi rare thief template. I had a disarm thief in factions back in the good ol days, but I've read the ( Disarm and Steal the weapon odds are kind of nerfed here) So what I would like to know is.... A) Best skills to start at 50 when making the char - ( I know some skills are a lot easier to gain/macro than others) B) Semi rare thief templates vs PVP or stealing from players templates - which is better money wise? C) I would like to see some of your thief templates and the Pros/Cons of that template. Thank you to anyone who posts and helps!
Start with 50 magery and 50 hiding. The other skills are easy and cheap to gain, including stealing), but hiding and stealth seem to take ages to macro. 100 Steal 100 Snoop 100 Hide 100 Stealth 90 Magery 70 Meditation 90 Wrestling Then 50 Resist or Eval, or just get more med/wrestle/mage with these points, but I find 90/70/90 perfectly fine. Traditionally this was allotted for 50 "Tracking" to make what people call the "matron thief" template. But tracking is nerfed here and mostly useless without 100 points and also 100 Detect Hidden. Start there, then get used to stealthing about and robbing people. Learn how to handle players and not die using just defensive spells, hiding, teleport, and stealing things. Personally I would just do 50 eval, since players with no eval aren't really a threat, and players with GM eval will do just as much damage to you with 50 resist as you with 0 resist. Helps a tiny bit though. From there you can either keep that template, or decide if you want to switch to a different play style. You find yourself not really "stealing items" and more so stalking people, scouting, and looting houses and whatnot? Then consider dropping stealing skill entirely and moving to something like my "a papuan citizen" template. It's a great scout and house looter. People laugh at forensics and I bet 95% here didn't even know I use this on my main character. But forensics is awesome. Can figure out immediately who other thieves are, and if they are perma (so you can kill them and cut the competition). You can find a farming spot, use it on a monster corpse, and see who was farming that spot. Figure out who murdered a player. Find out who looted a corpse, etc.. It's useful if you are a cunning player smart enough to know why this is useful. 100 Hiding 100 Stealth 100 Tracking 100 Detect HIdden 100 Forensic Eval 100 Magery 100 Meditation Find yourself stealing weapons or in situations where you want to steal weapons? Like you are always at the exit points to events where people are bringing their trammel valorite weapons to bank or something? Or know some pvpers who have valuable weapons? Try disarm. The thing about disarm is, if you are a bozo riding around on a horse chasing people down, disguise kit or not, people will learn who you are. After 1 disarm, they aren't going to give you another chance and they will just run away or get some junk weapons to kill you with. I think it's boring to do that and prefer this stealth alternative: 100 Hiding 100 Stealth 100 Stealing 50 Snooping 100 Arms Lore 100 Wrestling 90 Magery 60 Meditation You can stelath right up, attack, disarm, steal and you are 1 invis spell away from stealthing away. Works great when you catch some dexer farming with a slayer weapon. Unfortunately, UOR is basically all tamers running 3 bot characters at champs or spawns, so there's very few good weapons outside of trammel instances. But it's a good template to have as a secondary character at least. What if you want to steal items, not for profit, but so you can kill people afterwards? 90 Magery 90 Evalint 80 Meditation 90 Wrestle 100 Stealing 100 Stealth 70 Snooping 80 Hiding This works just A-okay for robbing a player of their regs and killing them, or at least chasing them all over the map wasting everyone's time. But if you like that sort of thing, have at it. No need for resist, you aren't going to take damage anyway once you disarm their reagents. Someone is sure to suggest a dexer thief template or something. I think it's a waste of time since dexers are fairly lame here without min-maxing the template and using valuable weapons. Adding stealing to the mix makes you a crap dexer and a crap thief, no point. But you try it for yourself, maybe you just have fun in town like that, I don't know. What my suggested templates have in common is they have no resist. I never put resist on a player that isn't going to be a pvper that fights fair duels or plans to take damage in field fights and whatnot, but that stuff is lame anyway. The important thing is not to panic when you take damage and know when to leave. Anyone should be able to survive vs another player indefinitely. A good player can survive vs 2 player indefinitely (or even 3 if one is not very skilled). But you have no chance fighting 3 good players or any more than that. You will always be 1 sync dump or spear-para away from death, not worth your time risking it. If you don't care about dying and risking it just to get 3 pvpers reg bags and other garbage... then you are probably under-equipped yourself. In which case, you definitely will die. Defensive and Healing spells always heal more HP per mana than damage spells can deal, so even at 70 med you can outlast a full on pvp character or two and always have more mana than them. If you aren't attacking someone, you should be able yo outlast any spells they hit you with with just your simple 90 mage/70med no problem. if you are still dying, it's because you are letting them get combos on you and this is generally a poor pvp skill problem, practice will solve that. - Learn how pvpers fight, the general idea of tricking a player into dying to a combo, how sync dumps work and how to avoid them with timed healing, wall of stone spell, invis, teleport, hiding, and whatnot. Practice how to deal with pets with para field, and remember EV is a great spell in tight spaces.
@snap dragon as all your templates are mage based do you go with 100 str 100 int and 25 dex for them?
I go GM steal, stealth, snoop, hiding, tracking, detect, and magery. That being said, I think Snap's templates are probably better suited to current UOR. I built mine before tracking was nerfed. I'll likely switch to something closer to the ones she listed. Her advice is, unsurprisingly, incredible.
That's up to you really. If people you fight normally are very mind-blasty, you might consider adjusting them a bit. Otherwise 100/25/100 is fine. If you do that disarm template, you will benefit from a bit more dex. Don't need to go as extreme as pvpers do though. Remember you will always out-mana an opponent and you can get 20 free dex from a greater agility potion, so even if they realize you are weak to mindblast, you can simply keep re-buffing their un-buffs and you will both be out of mana eventually, or you will have more because you are only using defensive spells. Just always get even STR, (or is it ODD? I forget, it's been a while). The way HP is calculated, you can get 99 hp with 99 str, and 99 hp with 98 str, but 98 str with 98 str, so it's better to have even or odd number of STR due to how HP calculation rounding works. I forget if it;s even or odd though, so you check that out before.
The best thief template here is 100 in Taming Animal lore Magery Music Provoke Vet Enticement Then you can steal the fun away from other play styles.
You won't always out mana an opponent because the vast majority of pvpers have 100 int. Any decent pvper will at least try MB on someone to check their stats. At the very least run 90 str, 100 int, 35 dex and just drink a greater agil potion if you see your target casting MB. You don't need 100 str.
