Replies: 3
The Collector
The purpose of this build is to move around quickly overland and acquire stuff. Let me start by saying:
- Since this is an overland-only build, there is no need for it to be tightly optimized.
- Consequently, various standard conventions for tightly optimized build threads aren’t applicable here.
- In particular, it has many more degrees of freedom than other build threads do.
- I planned to test some more things before posting, but it seems the New Life festival will have some thieving aspects, so I’m posting early.
The focus of this build is to optimize sneak. This lets you:
- Steal stuff, whether in the context of the Thieves Guild or freelance.
- Run quickly past (most) trash mobs in delves, on your way to killing bosses, or doing Mage’s Guild dailies, or grabbing skyshards or whatever.
- Run quickly past most mobs above ground — on foot, so that it’s easy to pick up crafting mats, treasure chests, etc. along the way.
It’s good-enough for combat, but far from optimal. In fact, it’s not a combat build at all. Rather, it’s a list of things you should do for non-combat reasons; then you have free choice to finish the build with a bunch of skills and a few gear items to fight in your preferred manner.
Race
Bosmer or Khajiit, for the Stealthy racial passive. Pick whichever one you prefer for combat, aesthetic, or role-play reasons. (I chose Bosmer.)
Class
Nightblade, for the skills
- Veiled Strike –> Concealed Weapon, which boosts your movement speed while stealthed or invisible.
- Shadow Cloak (either morph), which lets you briefly go invisible when your sneaking is or is about to be detected.
Armor
7 Medium, to maximize the armor passive Improved Sneak. I use:
- 5 pieces of the crafted Night’s Silence set, for the bonus “Ignore the Movement Speed penalty of Sneak”.
- 3 pieces of the dropped (in Stormhaven) Night Terror set, for the reductions in sneak detection radius and stamina cost of sneak.
Alternatively:
- Vampires have a passive that duplicates the Night’s Silence bonus.
- The Night Mother’s Embrace set, from Deshaan, gives you the bonus at 5 pieces that you get from Night Terror at 3. (In the early days of One Tamriel it erroneously dropped as heavy armor, but now it’s medium.)
The usual trait choices are suitable for this build. I have a mix of divines and training on my armor, and of sharpened/training on my weapons.
Champion points
Allocate your Mage/blue and Warrior/red points however you want for combat purposes.
In Thief/green, make sure you get 75 points into The Shadow for the benefit Treasure Hunter. This gets you better loot from treasure chests, safeboxes, and dolmens. The latter is perhaps the most important of all, because of the increased chance to get purple set jewelry. All or almost all of those points should be in Shade (I have 71 there, which gets me 13.1% reduction in sneak cost).
Divide the rest of your points, or at least the overwhelming majority of them, among Warlord and Mooncalf. Mooncalf should get at least 10 for Plentiful Harvest. If you want to be extreme, you could go to 75 for Master Gatherer. I stopped at 10.
Mundus
The Steed would be thematic, but I haven’t tested it. Instead, I use what makes most sense for combat, namely The Thief.
Food/drink
Since I have no problems with stamina regen while sneaking, I go with health/stamina food.
Potions
I only use them for Oh S__ moments in fights. I don’t even carry invisibility/speed potions.
Skills: There is tremendous flexibility in active skill choices, but please note:
- Concealed Weapon is key, for the speed boost. (Unfortunately, that means you can’t use Surprise Attack.)
- A Shadow Cloak morph is important, literally for tight spots when you can’t just sneak by.
- Rapid Maneuver is key, preferably with the Retreating Maneuver morph. It has some use proactively, and it is highly important if you’re trying to escape a guard.
- A typical non-boss-fight starts when sneak fails and one or more enemies jump you.
I’ve been using my standard Bow/DW build, just with 3 buffs removed. But it would probably make more sense to have one of the weapons be 2H, for:
- Rally.
- Brawler.
- Occasionally sneaking behind somebody and bashing them really hard.
Also very helpful are the Legerdemain passives Improved Hiding (40% reduction in Sneak cost!) and Light Fingers (better chance of pickpocketing success, which is key to one set of daily repeatable quests).
It usually takes a few weeks to max out Legerdemain, assuming you do so mainly by stealing-and-fencing stuff, because there’s a daily limit on fence interactions. So plan ahead.
And if you want to gather the best stuff from crafting nodes (alchemy excepted) 100% of the time, then you need to max out the relevant crafting skills. Unfortunately, this requires 9 skill points per craft, in addition to the effort and cost of leveling the crafting skill line to 50.