CLOK BBS

In speaking to some folks, I understand that stealth is meant to be very challenging as it is powerful. However, I feel there are a few things broken with it that I wanted to address, and hopefully get some feedback on.

Here's my situation:

- New thief, getting Holiday skill gains, and regular training gains combined. (3x?)
- Goes out to carriers to ambush to try to get some stealth skill up.
- Sneaks into room with carrier, gets seen 80% of the time. Have to flee the room and hide again. Rinse Repeat, it can take a good 30 seconds to a minute between ambushes or more.

- Finally, I succeed in sneaking into the room without being spotted! Yay! (No skill gains)
- I attack!
- If I hit the target and there is no ! in the roll, (no skill gains).
- If I miss the target, (no skill gains)
- If I get a ! in the rolls, and yet still miss the target, still (no skill gains).

If I finally manage to hit the target, and manage a ! in the skill rolls. Woot! I got a skill gain!

Then I realize I got 19/1000's of a skill point! For probably 3-5 minutes of effort.

In testing this, it took me roughly 30 minutes to get from 51.0 to 51.09 in stealth. and that's with what I assume is a 3x modifier?

Ouch.

Doing a little math: It would take me roughly 10 hours of constant game play, grinding carriers using this method to get 1 skill point. Take away the holiday gains and 2x training and that would be 30 hours of game play for 1 skill point in stealth!

That doesn't account for time spent going to eat, get healed etc.

A few things I think might help -

- Being able to attempt a hide while engaged. Do this by making it attempt to set you to position avoid automatically instead of making you enter both commands. Add +1 RT to the hide if successful? I admittedly didn't know you could try to go position avoid at the time, but why not combine this into 1 step?

- Giving skill gains if you hide successfully in front of a target, or sneak into a room successfully with a hostile target. (not out of a room, no risk there) This target would need to be hostile, and be a challenge for you. (So no script hide/unhiding for skill gains without risk.) Have this be lower gains than a successful ambush.

- Give skill gains on ambuhses that actually hit the target, but don't end up with the ! in them.
OR instead
- Give skill gains on ambushes that end up with a !, but you still miss the target.

One or the other should be happening logically in my opinion. Either they see you coming just in time, but it's not enough to stop you, OR they don't see you coming (stealth at work) and you still manage to miss the attack with the weapon.

As it is right now, it's quite frustrating to try to level stealth up at all. I imagine this gets better as you get more stealth (I hope!) but it feels very broken and not at all worth the time or effort at this level of play.

Stealth is being looked at (and by Rithiel as well as myself, for those who grumble that I hate stealth (nevermind that I love my Guild of Thieves, who are highly stealth-oriented)). You've made some good suggestions.

Just as a tip, don't practice stealth in open plains areas. You get a huge penalty to stealth rolls in open plains since there's nothing to hide behind. We've had people advancing stealth at alarmingly fast rates recently, so I think your main trouble is the situation you're currently in (trying to train it up in a plains environment).

On that note, we're also working on more beginner areas that aren't open plains. We're aware that that's a problem for people starting out.

Thanks for the feedback!

I was also thinking... if you have an active warrant in a town, you should probably get a little bit of skill gains for successfully sneaking past NPC guards of that town, or the constable. So long as it is still a challenge for you, that is.

One more thing...can thieves get guild points from ambushing or anything else?

Grinding the same task gets a little old really fast and amounts to basically the following:

20 breakins for rank 1
30 breakins for rank 2
40 breakins for rank 3 and so forth.

Or at least some other variety in tasks? Like picking the pocket of some traveler out in the wilderness or something? Or 'recovering' a stolen item from a robber, robin hood style?

We're working on lots of new tasks right now, actually, and more thief tasks will certainly be included.

Thieves can get guild points from successfully stealing from a challenging target and successfully picking challenging locks.

Thanks for the responses.

I noticed I don't get any gld points when stealing from a crowd. Is this intended? It seems like it should given that if I screw it up (which is often) there are some pretty nasty consequences.

Also, are there supposed to be 3 constable copies in Shadgard? They make it a PITA to sneak around...

So getting back on the topic of stealth, I tried hunting to raise my stealth again by hunting and here's how it went.

- Hunt hunt hunt 5-20 seconds to find something.
- If it's a deer/stag I never get a successful ambush, they're too perceptive. ( no !)
- Pheasants have 1100 D for some crazy reason, and even with a successful ambush they end up with 300-700 D. So I miss and don't get gains.
- Turkeys have too high of perception, and see me almost everytime, so no successful ambush (no !)

I did manage a bit more success than in carriers, but the turkey fight back and are meaner than even carriers! Mad zombie turkeys? How big are these crazy birds??

Anyhow, in roughly 25-30 minutes I managed to go from 51.09 to 51.369 so that earned me .36 for nearly the same timeframe, not to mention nearly starving to death even after downing about a gallon of stew. (Again, with training and extra skill bonuses.)

Unfortunately, I feel like the system strongly strongly favors those who have enough stealth to actually succeed on a regular basis, and harshly punishes those who don't have very much at all to an extreme degree.

I understand how frustrating training stealth can be, I managed to train my stealth up a bit by hunting red foxes they are pretty non perceptive, but still it was slow and a pita...

Might be worth training up your weapon skills so you miss less often.

I second what Jaster said. You're going to suck at everything at the beginning, so combined activities like stealth attacks will be twice as likely to fail. Train your combat up in the open a little, then train stealth on stuff you can hit with reasonable consistency.

Pheasants are smallish birds that can fly, and aren't undead like the ravens. That's probably why they're so hard to hit. Once you have a little stealth they go down real easy. Try hunting in the northern forests, lots of foxes and skunks which seem nearly blind.

Also the caravan with the infested guards on the road near Mistral is a great place to start.

While the Infested Merchants are a good place to start out in terms of general combat it is not a very good place to practice stealth training for someone new to the MUD due to the fact that the entire area is plains, and will give penalty to the stealth of anyone trying to hide there.

The Infested Diggers are a better place to start training stealth than the Merchants, though difficult at times due to the fact that they have weapons and are in total darkness for a good deal of that area.