Need advice for soloing a thief

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Gonna try and solo a thief/mage. Want to stealth past most of the hordes in the game and focus on taking out the bosses/high exp bad guys.

What is the best way to allocate your thieving skill points. I just played through the game with a 4/5 person party and I used two thiefs, so Im not sure how to best allocate skills to a single thief. Is there a certain find traps level that will pick up most traps pre-durlags tower? Is there a certain pick locks level that can open most locks? Is there a stealth level that keeps you hidden most of the time?

I plan to avoid Durlags dungeon for this run.

Do you have to rely on potions to accomplish all these thieving goals?

Thanks for any advice

-ION

 

Mirror Image can take care of the damage caused by many traps.

Invisibility is going to be your favourite spell (if you take Bassilus down with a few backstabs you should get enough XP easily).

Sneaking is fun but Sirines and Basilisks can yield loads of XP as well.

Don't forget the potions that you can use to boost your thieving abilities (you could also consider using the STR enhancing mage spell and use Draw Upon Holy Might later in the game).

I don't have any precise number in mind but I remember that 90% was enough (potions can help if it's not).

 

M/Ts have only 1 quickslot in unmodded BG. Find a convenient container to store valuable junk, such as defense potions, until the final battle. I like the barrel just to the left of the Jovial Juggler in Beregost. All containers in the world have unlimited space.

M/Ts, thanks to their magic-user levels, can use wands, such as the wand of fire. Note that TOTSC and the most recent patches have deactivated the wand of stunning so that it doesn't actually do anything. Consider using EasyTutu if you want it to work.

The wand of frost is powerful but not worth using against enemies with valuable loot, because it has a tendency to destroy the loot along with the enemy.

With a high lockpick skill, thieves can pick the toughest lock in Winthrop's in to get a star sapphire worth 1000 GP. However, if I'm not mistaken, only halflings with maximum starting points in pick lock can pull this off at level 1 in an unmodded game.

Arrows of dispelling remove protections from pesky "boss" enemies like the fiend from the artifact dig and Sarevok. You can buy them from Sorcerous Sundries in Baldur's Gate.

Arrows of detonation make any archer a fireball-chucking magic-user. You can buy them from Sorcerous Sundries in Baldur's Gate. Not even Sarevok can stand against getting pummeled by repeated fireballs, especially if he's had his protections dispelled.

Necklaces of missiles make anyone a fireball-chucking magic-user. You can buy one at Nashkel carnival, though I believe you may have to complete the mines first to get the merchant to sell it. It's the same merchant who sells the shield amulet and ring of infravision.

You can recharge wands and other items with charges by selling them, then buying them back. It will cost you an arm and a leg, but you're soloing, so you'll be fine.

Killing Drizzt when your reputation is 14 will only drop your rep by 5 points down to 9. Soloing him will obviously give you a huge chunk of XP, which will help if you're looking to dual.

Bassilus' holy symbol is easy money.

You can get boots of stealth from Zhurlong relatively early in the game. After returning them to him, kill him to take them back with no reputation lost. Buy the shadow leather armor from Thunderhammer's for another nice stealth boost, but don't rely solely on those two items. Spend some hide points too. Stealth is a soloing thief's most useful ability, hands-down.

Other must-have items: Algernon's cloak (pickpocket in Beregost), wand of monster summoning (wilderness outside of the mines).

 

Killing Shandalar is a great way to gain 26,000 exp. Do his quest first, then once you get back, don't talk to him. Just summon some creatures or charm a guy with a weapon, and have him attack Shandalar while you walk away beforehand. Limitations in the engine make wacky things happen like he'll stand there and get paddy-whacked for an hour and eventually die. Yes, it is very evil and cheesy, but I specialize in cheesy when it comes to Baldur's Gate.

 

You are mistaken. Any of the smaller races can do it, including a 17 DEX dwarf.

 

You need 60 Open Locks to pick the chest. A Dwarf with 15 Dex can have that.

Everyone starts with 10 OL & 40 points to spend. Racial modifiers: Dwarfs +10, Gnomes and Hobbits +5, Elves -5. For every Dex above 15 you get 5 OL.

So the required Dex is:

Dwarf: 15
Elf: 18
Gnome/Halfling: 16
Other: 17

 

Actually, you only get 30 points to spend from the start, so only the tiny races would be able to open it.

 

Yeah i thought so too, my bad. I guess one of the mods i have changes it.

 

I believe that would be Tutu. With more thief skills to distribute the points to, they increased the beginning and per-level numbers for the BG2 engine thief. So for unmodded it's just the short guys getting the gem.

EDIT: And, incidentally, the "Coran" character downloadable from this site, due to his 20 DEX.

[ January 12, 2007, 22:45: Message edited by: Felinoid ]

 

Bah! Wo needs mods for Baldur's Gate? It's perfect as is!

 

TuTu allows you to play BG using the BG II engine, why wouldn't you want that? Also, mods add more quests, fix broken quests, add kits, etc.

 

Because it's not BG then

 

And i despise the BG2 engine, I would much rather play it in BG1 engine. Heck i'd rather play BG2 in BG1 engine.

 

I never heard that one before. But you are not far from the "thruth"

 

Thanks for the tips

 

Bugs. Tutu is fun, but it *does* have more bugs than vanilla BG. Especially the annoying Beregost bug in Easytutu. I usually take my thieving skills evenly throughout to get a more useful all round thief. There won't be any shortage of experience in a solo run so you should stay ahead of the game anyway