Nerf Pickpocketing Component?

[faure]

Nerf pickpocketing?

 

Some sort of optional nerfing of pickpocket ability might be a good component in future versions. This ability is so overpowered. Right out of opening dungeon, without investing a single thief poitn into pickpocketing, and without cheesy sell-steal-sell-steal, just by stealing from stores in Promenade, Slums, Docks and selling to shadow thieves fence... I end up with 100k gold and a lot of good spells memorized. I use the gold to buy some stuff and suddenly at the very beginning of the game my solo m/t is outfitted with:

 

Amulet of power

Robe of Vecna

Short Sword of Mask +4

Bracers defense AC3

Belt of 19str

Thousands of magical arrows

 

Alongside this I've got lots of good special use weapons, protective scrolls, etc. etc.

 

In fact this gear would serve me to the end of ToB easily if I wanted to.

 

You might say "well just self-police and decide how much pickpocket to use" but you added components to remove robe of vecna, shield of balduran, etc. from the game so clearly you aren't solely in favor of self-police.

 

Ideas for nerfing pickpocket:

 

-Make potion of master thievery non-cumulative with itself, and/or reduce the bonus to pickpocketing.

-Remove all fences (or just make them regular merchants). This way you could not pickpoket to get rich but rather just to get stuff you wanted.

-Remove ability to pickpocket anything bigger than scrolls/arrows/jewelry.

-If its possible, have a script or something that sets chance to be caught at 1 after 2 or 3 items have been stolen from a given merchant.

 

Also, I think that the Irenicus Dungeon wands should be nerfed so their max # of castings after they've been recharged is like 5 or something. The fully charged wand of cloudkill and wand of monster summoning are very powerful... wand of monster summoning makes even improved liches easy early in the game since you can get the lich to waste his whole spellbook on wave after wave of summons (and since the wand has a bazillion charges you aren't worried about death spell etc., since you just send in another wave).

[polytope]

Rogue Rebalancing at Spellhold Studios has at least some of the options you're looking for (although the revised thievery component also allows talking your way out of a theft).

 

-Remove ability to pickpocket anything bigger than scrolls/arrows/jewelry.

-If its possible, have a script or something that sets chance to be caught at 1 after 2 or 3 items have been stolen from a given merchant.

I don't think these last two are possible when stealing from stores, for creatures it's a different story - a creature's items can be flagged as unstealable, and certain inventory slots cannot be pickpocketted in any case (quiver and quickslot items can, iirc).

 

Also, I think that the Irenicus Dungeon wands should be nerfed so their max # of castings after they've been recharged is like 5 or something. The fully charged wand of cloudkill and wand of monster summoning are very powerful... wand of monster summoning makes even improved liches easy early in the game since you can get the lich to waste his whole spellbook on wave after wave of summons (and since the wand has a bazillion charges you aren't worried about death spell etc., since you just send in another wave).

I don't think selling wands to a merchant should recharge them - wands are supposed to require the spells which they mimic (i.e. cone of cold for a wand of frost), and often some exotic material component... a bit out of SCS's scope.

 

Indeed, AI has problems with swarms of low level summons (a lich could safely melee most of them, given that their attacks count as normal weapons - which can be checked for with 109 proficiency), but using invisibility or dimension door to bypass them is another possibility, albeit difficult to script.