In my recent attempts of a special ending (many months w/o touching adom and then i get hooked again) I found several "known truths" to be kinda faulty, at least for my playstyle.

First... necromancers are just hard to keep alive in the early game if you try to play it as a necromancer... lol. With TH it's fairly easy to get enough castings from spellbooks to play it as a wizard. And necros are even easier to keep alive since they normally get a little more toughness than wizards.

And then... i never found any worthwhile mentions about thiefs in the GB or in the forums, seem like nobody plays the class. Well, i do.... i try at least. And in my opinion this is the hardest melee class to play, and not just in the early game.

Having the ability to stun on critical hits by lvl 30, you assume that the thief is going to play much like an assassin. Therefore, find weakness becomes a *must* if you want to make you char a little less useless. Don't get me wrong, i like thieves, it's very stylish to disarm every door trap you find early on. But they adom is not a "stealth" game. The skill is very useful, especially w/ stealthy talent, i found that it's like having 50% invisibility if you dont run around like a madman, lots of oportunities for backstabbing.

Well, but thieves don't have the assassin skillset to play like one. If you want (and you do) find weakness you gotta play an orc or dark elf. And orcs are just boring! Lol.... then you are stuck with dark elf, wich sucks memorably for early on melee. Also, you don't get the all mighty dodge skill, another favourite of mine (and another reason why i mantain that assassins are the greatest kill machines of all melee characters), lowering your survivability.

So my question is.... has anyone found a way to keep thieves going for a long time? because they never really improve except for stats (they also don't get archery, another awesome assassin trait). You get to use pickpocket virtually on anything from the very start, and you get better items from it at lvl 40, but in the end its just just a luck based character isn't it? I think a bard just sucks a little more in melee, but they have companions. A mindcrafter can safely kill goblins orcs and such until lvl 6 when they get mind blast, wich is very useful, and they still have virtually unlimited acess to confusion attacks wich helps everyone escape from anything. In the end...apart from merchants and farmers (maybe, never played those) the thief is just plain weak. Even gettin the penetration dagger from heir, they still are too fragile to be pushed towards meleeing all the time (although they can cast a little like assassins, and that really helps, bot not until you have good literacy, wich can be a hassle). At lvl 50 having intrisic invisibility when adjacent to walls seems a little crappy since most of the things you want to be careful about will be able to see you nomatter what, although it is a given that it is by far not the worst lvl 50 ability.

Maybe to play a sucessful thief you just gotta be extra careful...all the time, and i just can't do that =P.

A long time ago, when i first started playing adom (and roguelikes) and didn't adapt to the whole...you got killed, LOLZ! thing... i used to save-scum. And i got a thief to like lvl 42 or something, although my luck was just in the toilet because of constant retries, i remember that it was just powerless agains many of the more dangerous foes you find in CoC 40+. It seems that you always have to run from things....always. And then i ask myself if it is even remotely possible to kill andor with a thief...