stealth bonus

[Charlatan73]

does stealth bonus have any effect if you don't have the stealth skill?
For example I found a shadow cloak which gives me 14 stealth bonus, but don't use the stealth activated ability at all. Is there any reason to keep this item?

[edge2054]

nope

[Dranwin]

more regarding stealth...I'm assuming your stealth becomes more effective with levels (does not say this on the tooltip). Also....how effective....like 30 levels in, a rogue with full stealth and assuming a few +stealth pieces, is this promising? or do monsters still always see you.

[yufra]

I just checked and indeed stealth pieces are useless if you don't already have stealth. I am not sure if this is DG's intent, though...

Stealth scales based on cunning and talent level. Let us assume a lvl 30 rogue has maxed Cunning (60) and the Stealth talent (level of 6.5 at a mastery of 1.3). That should result in a stealth "power" of 69. The ability of a creature to see through your stealth is affected by its level, cunning, and a special variable see_stealth that is affected by some spells. A quick look through autolevel_schemes.lua shows a lot of creatures neglect cunning, so you will probably be invisible to a good portion of creatures at that stealth power. The 50/50 breakpoint at 10 cunning would be level 130, and at 60 cunning would be level 88.

Finally, note that stealth is checked each turn. Just because you get a message "Someone sees you" and you are being chased doesn't mean they know exactly where you are. They know approximately where, with that knowledge being worse depending on badly they fail the check that turn. On average they will move towards you, but especially when they start casting spells or shooting at you they are much more likely to miss. This behavior is a bit odd, though, since as soon as you drop stealth they will know exactly where you are even if you managed to break LOS and they last thought you were somewhere else. I think it would be interesting if that were changed...

[Hachem_Muche]

I just checked and indeed stealth pieces are useless if you don't already have stealth. I am not sure if this is DG's intent, though...

Wow. This is surprising, especially given how important stealth is in many other roguelikes. I assumed that stealth would affect the range at which mobs detect you. In fact I've been able to run up to within 3-4 grids of mobs undetected with high stealth from gear but no skill (They still show their target as "none.")

Is there some other reason they wouldn't see me?

[yufra]

I just tested inc_stealth by hacking it to 100 on Trollshaws/Trollmire 1 and was instantly seen by critters. You are probably seeing a NPC FOV bug that has been fixed in the SVN, but I am not sure.