Thievery rework/rebalancing

The way theivery works in v2.5 is a bit problematic, and I have identified the following problems:

• Some players feel that thievery builds are more powerful than any other build, to the point of trying to go for thievery builds whenever possible.
• Some players feel that thievery builds are too hard to get get going and feel they rarely get the chance to do a thievery build.
• Some players find the mechanics to be confusing (thievery replacing the melee and/or missile attributes).

These three problems are quite different from each other (point 1 and 2 are also kind of contradict each other). I have tried to address all three points: making pure thievery builds less powerful compared to others, while making them more viable directly from the start. Finally I have tried to make the system more more logical.

New Thievery Formula

The current (v2.5) thievery formula is 5+vision-noise, which gives a starting thievery of 1. Each point of thievery (at least between 1 and 9) is equivalent to +10% in accuracy for thievery weapons (melee or missile).

In v2.6, the formula will instead be 9+vision-noise, which gives a starting thievery of 5. However, each point of thievery will instead account for +5% in accuracy. This means that your thievery starts higher (25% instead of 10%), but is also harder to raise.

Thievery as a modifier instead of a stat

Instead of having the accuracy of thief weapons solely based on your thievery attribute, thief weapons now instead uses thievery as a modifier of its main attribute (melee or missile). For example, a dagger will now use the melee attribute, just like any other melee weapon, but it will be modified by your current thievery value. This means that you can raise (or reduce) the accuracy either by raising/reducing your melee attribute or your thievery. The benefit of this is that you can once again (as pre v2.5) always look at your melee attribute for melee weapons and missile attribute for missile weapons.

To compensate for this, thievery weapons have a much lower base accuracy.

I hope this should make thievery weapons much less confusing, and it now synergizes better with other items and training. Overall thievery feels less extreme and more integerated with the rest of the systems now.

Dealing with Power

The overall power and usefulness of thievery weapons have been nerfed a bit:

• arrows will do 1 damage instead of 2 (but still have high suprise damage)
• scrolls of vision are now uncommon instead of common (which was one of the easiest ways of raising thievery a lot).
• it is generally harder to raise the thievery attribute to very high levels (due to the 5% steps). This also means that disarming traps and stealing from NPCs is generally harder.
• a thief might have to deal with the consequences of low reputation points.

I hope that this, together with the fact that magic builds are now stronger should help balance thievery as a whole.