One aim of v2.5 is to enable more viable playstyles. One type of build I wanted to be made more interesting is the stealth/thief build.

Short History

In the earliest versions of TGGW (around Release #1-#4), stealth was one of the most powerful builds you could make, mostly because you could walk around the dungeon without waking any monster up. This was later changed; inanimate monsters no longer sleep. Stealth became less useful and for this reason I introduced other uses for stealth, such as picking up and using traps in #7 (introducing the “avoid traps” derived attribute) and since v2.3 you can also pickpocket merchants (renaming the attribute to “steal/disarm”).

My goal for v2.5 is to make stealth/vision based characters be more viable and with a more distinct playstyle. The steal/diarm attribute makes a third iteration and will now simply be called “thievery”.

The thievery attribute

The thievery attribute is derived form noise and vision just like before: 10*(5+vision-noise)%. In other words, it increases by 10% for each point of vision you increase and for each point of noise you decrese. It will be used for the following purposes:

1. Determine the chance to disarm (and expose) a visible trap.
2. Pickpocket gold from any NPC (see post).
3. Chance to hit with thief weapons (see below).

Of course, the vision and noise attributes have their normal additional benefit: noise helps to not wake monsters and makes it harder for monsters to track you. Vision helps you see monsters before they see you, making it less likely to be surprised and to be able to run away before they see you.

Thief Weapons

There are now a new category of weapons called “thief weapons”. What they have in common is that their chance to hit is always your “thievery” attribute. That means that they will be useful only if you are quite stealthy and have a high vision attribute since theivery is derived from these. Using a thief weapon means that your melee or missile attribute becomes useless (because “thievery” is used in place of those).

Thief weapons are very powerful compared to normal weapons, but do require a certain kind of build to be effective. Three kind of weapons have been reworked into theif weapons:

Daggers

Daggers are now extremely deadly, and are now among the most damaging weapons in the game (the normal dagger now deals 4 damage!). The rationale is that they do critical damage to vital organs. However, they are only reliable to use if your thievery is over 40% or so. This means that you cannot wield noisy equipment with a dagger, and you are usually better off wielding a torch over a shield.

In addition they cause the new “bleeding” status which prevents living monsters from healing (however, there are very few monsters that are able to heal themselves in the first place…).

Whips

Whips are now also a thief weapon and have been upgraded to deal lethal damage. This makes whips the longest reaching damaging weapon in the game and is very powerful. Whips now also deal “surprise damage” which is damage that is applied only if the victim is unaware of its attacker (i.e., cannot see or hear you). It is fun to kill sleeping monsters in one blow.

Bow and Arrow

Bows are now also thief weapons. A bow requires stealth and finesse to operate perfectly. Arrows are now more common, more damaging and deals surprise damage.