How to make stealth useful

[stinkstink]

The feedback about stealth could be much better.
You have no easy way of knowing when it is doing something or not.
Something to indicate whether an enemy is: completely oblivious to your presence, has seen something and wants to check it out, or can see you directly would be great.

It might help to change the message you get from "%s has seen you!" to something less severe sounding, like "%s glances in your direction." or "%s briefly catches sight of you."

[SageAcrin]

"%s briefly catches sight of you."

I like this one.

[Frumple]

Ouch "end of game" only feature? Well that's not good at all.

16 points isn't endgame. You can easily get that amount of points into Stealth before Dreadfell, without too much hardship.

Yeah, it's an investment, but it's also worth it.

For me, at least, I generally see pretty noticeable (if you're looking for it and know what to look for ) defensive benefit from stealth around the third or forth point in the t1 talent (which can come at... character level two.). Even a single point in shadowstrike gives you a very powerful first-strike option through shadowstrike flurry, and a single point in hide in plain sight can make resetting stealth when dealing with ranged enemies very easy* (which goes a very long way towards neutering them, honestly.). I generally see the stealth tree as a good early investment at 3/0, and a solid mid-game one around 4/1/1 (though obviously more is better, heh.). It makes you a lot more survivable against ranged enemies and provides a fairly solid (and very inexpensive) damage boost via the more-or-less guaranteed crits.

As others have noted, stealth's big issue is feedback and some iffy stuff with the tooltips (see *), not effectiveness. It's rather good at pretty much all points of the game, it can just be rather difficult to notice all the good things it's doing for you.

*Unless it's changed, anyway, or my memory's thrown a hip again. Popping HiPS guarantees stealth when you're outside the normal stealth radius (possibly just through the stealth reset, but what works, works.), and only runs the % chance if you're inside it. Very powerful for throwing off ranged AI targeting.

[Niegy]

Thanks for the answers, but they aren't at all what I noticed, ie enemy seeing you and stealth not stopped, enemy seeing you one turn and not the next turn.

Moreover i'm surprised everybody find cool and good to be blind when in stealth mode.

About enemies going into your direction if they are smart enough, with one square corridors, and very small rooms, the result is hard to interpret well for the player.

Anyway I'll try again and will take care of what's mentioned. I still doubt it really worth it until you get Hide in Plain Sight but well I try more and try observe better.

[SageAcrin]

Moreover i'm surprised everybody find cool and good to be blind when in stealth mode.

Heightened Senses largely fixes that.

[Frumple]

You're not actually blind in stealth mode, just regulated to infravision (which is usually easier, sometimes much easier, to stack up). Easy to miss mechanic for infravision is that if you've got enough of it (though I've forgotten the breakpoint), you start getting light radius equivalent, increasing what you can see around you in terms of terrain on top of being able to see critters out to the full radius.

Terrain vision is a bit of a nuisance for the first few levels if you're running stealth, but a single point in heightened senses gives you a larger detection radius (5) for enemies than you'll likely to find in a lantern for a fair few levels (Barring picking up an early summertide, anyway. You're likely regulated to a light radius of 3-4 max until then.). HS is actually a good single point investment for most classes, if they don't find a high light radius lantern before they dip into Kor'Pul or the Rhaloren encampment, for just that reason. E: Ninja'd!

And yeah, feedback is the major problem. It can be quite difficult to notice when stealth's running in your favor, but once you get used to seeing it, it's pretty obvious. As for the enemies seeing you and stealth not really breaking... an easy way to see if that's happening is if you're still getting shadowstrike crits when you attack. More likely than not, from what I've seen, even if they "see" you at some point, you're still going to end up proccing shadowstrike -- a clear indication stealth is working for you.

[Niegy]

In parts with no light and detection only during stealth, just see the enemy is an interesting information but not see the terrain is a big tactical weakness. More over you can't trigger long range actions. So I still don't understand people happy with that.

[Frumple]

There's a lot of ways around that, not the least of which is just scouting around while stealthed. It's only really an issue in the very early game (and barely then, as terrain awareness isn't really that big of a deal at that point -- most ranged threats at that point come with their own light, undead being basically the only exception.), and during that period there's at least five dungeons to choose from that are lit. After that, you're pretty much guaranteed to have any number of sources of illumination or a high enough infravision to get some extra terrain-seeing radius out of it, if you're still particularly concerned about terrain -- and if you don't there's still OF and Daikara to hit.

People aren't bothered because it's not an issue, just an interesting mechanical quirk that's thematically appropriate. Infravision's arguably better than light anyway, so being forced to go that route (if you build stealth, anyway) isn't exactly a great sacrifice, heh.