Basic Job Description
A thief is a job with many perks which serve many different purposes. A thief is good for getting loot, dealing damage, and controlling hate within your party. Treasure hunter and flee are some of the other perks, making it a fun and useful job not just as a main, but as a subjob as well.
Job Skills Description
Job Abilities
* Perfect Dodge - LV1 - Duration: 30 seconds - Recast: 2 hours : The thief two hour abilities gives what the name implies - a perfect dodge over a period of 30 seconds. In other words, you'll take no physical damage, however you'll still get hit by spells. This is still extremely useful if you: 1) Perfect Dodge > Warp Scroll or /logout and 2) Perfect Dodge > Flee and run away.
* Steal - LV5 - Duration: Instant - Recast: 5 minutes : This is one of the many defining attributes of a thief. In general, you will use steal to steal from beastmen types (goblins, orcs, yagudo) for the various types of beastcoins, or from higher level version of creatures (crawlers for silk, spiders for web, etc…). Having +steal equipment becomes important for a thief when going for those better items, such as gold beastcoins (see http://www.multiplayerstrategies.com/ms/index.cfm?page=topic&topicID=14574&categoryid=18 for a tutorial about stealing gold beastcoins).
* Sneak Attack - LV15 - Duration: 1 minute - Recast: 1 minute : Sneak attack is probably the most basic yet the most important skill thieves will ever get. Using Sneak Attack will give your character a status effect, much like protect or anything else, that causes your next hit to do a large amount of damage if you hit the monster from behind. The effect disappears after your first attempted attack, whether or not the sneak attack is successful. Also note that if done properly, your sneak attack will never miss.
* Flee - LV25 - Duration: 30 seconds - Recast: 5 minutes : Increases your movement speed (approx. the same as a chocobo although it may seem faster) for 30 seconds.
* Trick Attack - LV30 - Duration: 1 minute - Recast: 1 minute : The concept of how trick attack works is similar to sneak attack, it places a status effect that will do extra damage if your next attack meets a certain condition. Your next attack will deal extra damage if there is someone directly in front of you. In other words, there must be You. The damage you do with trick attack, places the hate on the person you trick on (the "Someone else") as if they attacked it themselves. This is very useful considering trick attack stacks with sneak attack (can use them both at once) for a high damage attack which will place a large amount of hate on the person you trick attack on, which is generally the tank. For this to work, you need the monster to face away for sneak attack to work and for a person (who will take the hate) to stand in front of you, therefore this setup requires at least 3 people: Person attacking monster. This will be discussed more later.
* Mug - LV35 - Duration: Instant - Recast: 5 minutes : similar to steal, except you steal a small amount of gil. In general, this skill seems relatively weak, stealing very low amounts of gil.
* Hide - LV45 - Duration: Changes - Recast: 5 minutes : this makes the thief go completely out of sight, also losing all aggro. For example, let's say you're fighting something solo and halfway through the fight, sneak attack is ready. You can use hide and it will stop attacking you (warning: it will not longer be claimed by you), run around behind it, and sneak attack it. This also applies for higher level aggressive monsters. Hide can be particularly useful when applied with steal, for more info see http://www.multiplayerstrategies.com/ms/index.cfm?page=topic&topicID=14574&categoryid=18
Job Traits
* Gilfinder - LV5 : Increases the amount of gil dropped by enemies (only if that enemy drops gil).
* Evasion Bonus - LV10 : Adds a bonus to evasion.
* Treasure Hunter - LV15 : Increases the chance of obtaining items (getting drops). Exactly by what factor is unknown, but this skill is why thief is also a popular subjob for farming items.
* Resist Gravity - LV20 : Adds resistance versus Gravity.
* Evasion Bonus - LV30 : Additional evasion bonus.
* Resist Gravity - LV40 - Additional resistance versus Gravity.
* Treasure Hunter 2 - LV45 : Additional chance of obtaining items. This is currently unique to thief (would require a level 90 main job to have this ability with a subjob). Again, the exact factor is unkown, but it makes thief undoubtedly best for getting rare drops, for example from Notorious Monsters.
* Evasion Bonus - LV50 : Additional evasion bonus.
* Triple Attack - LV55 : Allows for a chance to attack 3 times instead of the usual 1. This is an extremely useful trait which can actually work with the warrior's LV 25 Double Attack (warrior would have to be your subjob), allowing you to either Double Attack or Triple Attack.
* Resist Gravity - LV60 : Additional resistance versus Gravity.
* Evasion Bonus - LV70 : Additional evasion bonus.
* Resist Gravity - LV75: Additional resistance versus Gravity.
Thief's Role in a Party
A thief serves two main purposes in a party situation: being a damage dealer and a hate controller. Until level 30, a thief can only serve as a damage dealer. As a warning, thief is a tough job to start out as. This is because the thief has very little to offer until level 15 when thief gets sneak attack. Until then a thief is much like a weaker version of a warrior: you can do little else than melee attack monsters and can use less equipment than other jobs such as warrior and monk. However, once the thief learns sneak attack all that changes. As described in the above Job Abilties, sneak attack makes your next melee attack (if from behind) do greatly more damage than usual. While I won't get into the very basics of party mechanics, generally your party stays in a safe spot ("camp") while 1 member of your party brings a monster back to your camp to kill. This is the role of the thief, to run up and ranged attack a monster (usually with a boomerang or a bow) and bring it back for killing. What a smart thief does is use Sneak Attack (and Trick Attack) right before using his/her boomerang to bring the monster back to camp - you don't lose your sneak attack when you ranged attack and the status effect duration is as long as the recast timer (1 minute). It should last long enough for your tank to provoke the monster and get your sneak attack in with about 10-30 seconds left on the recast timer, allowing you to practically sneak attack twice in a row.
Sneak attack also allows for greater skillchain damage - the damage done by your skillchain is proportional to the damage done by the weaponskill that ends the skillchain. Sneak Attack will stack in terms of damage with certain weaponskills, generally those that are melee based - for example Wasp Sting (normal attack that can poison) and Shadowstitch (normal attack that can bind), but neither Gust Slash or Cyclone (wind damage attacks) stacks with Sneak Attack.
Aside from being a damage dealer, a thief is used to help place additional hate on the tank at level 30+. As previously stated, sneak attack and trick attack both stack to perform a high damaging attack that will place a lot of hate on the person you use to trick attack (see Job Abilities). For this to be effective, the thief's party setup generally requires that two people have provoke. Generally these can include a warrior/anything, monk/warrior, dark knight/warrior, dragoon/warrior, or a samurai/warrior in addition to a paladin or a ninja tank. Here's an example of the start of fight if your party included a paladin/warrior and a samurai/warrior:
-thief runs out and find a monster he wants to kill for experience.
-warns the party he's about to ranged attack it ("pull" it), uses sneak attack and trick attack, then ranged attacks the monster.
-as the monster gets close, the secondary tank (samurai in this case) provokes the monster, while the main tank stands directly behind the monster, and the thief directly behind the main tank (paladin in this case). So it looks like this, where each arrow indicates which way each thing should be facing ~
* thief-> paladin-> monster-> <-samurai
-everyone attacks the monster, if done right, the thief's first attack should do a large amount of damage while placing all the hate from the attack on the main tank.
-the main tank can now provoke, and use whatever other skills it has to generate more hate.
Generally if done right, it won't matter if the thief sneak and trick attacks off of the secondary tank partway through the fight for additional damage. A thief will almost always use a dagger, at least at LV33+, if not earlier (for reasons discussed below in the Equipment and Stat Focus). The two powerful weaponskills that will use most often are: viper bite (from LV33-60) and dancing edge (from LV60+) and they both skillchain the same way. As described in the second paragraph of this section, the amount of damage your skillchain does is proportional to the damage of the last weaponskill used in the chain - for this reason you will always want to be the second (which is generally the last) weaponskill of the skillchain. With viper bite and dancing edge, you'll always be producing distortion skillchains, which is an ice/water level 2 skillchain, which is convenient because many monsters you level off of are vulnerable to either ice (crawlers, crabs, mandragoras and more) or water (raptors and more).
Subjob suggestions
There are two subjobs which work best with thief in levelling situations when trying to maximize damage. These include ninja and warrior. Ninja allows for dual wielding for easier TP building and some extra stats, depending on what second weapon you use. In addition, you can use some ninjutsu, most importantly utsusemi:ichi. This absorbs three hits, which can be very valuable when pulling for your party (especially if you pull monsters that run quicker than you, such as tigers, raptors, and coeurls). On top of it all, agi and dex are the two most important stats for a thief (see the below Equipment and Stat Focus) and you get some extra dex and agi with ninja subjob (although not all that much more than warrior).
Warrior also contirbutes a lot of extra damage, you get to use berserk for noticeably more damage, as well as have the double attack to do extra damage to offset the lack of dual wield. You also get an extra attack with multi-hit weaponskills such as dancing edge.
But a thief is used for more than just levelling, it is very effective for farming for loot and hunting notorious monsters because of its treasure hunter abilities as well as hunting treasure chests/coffers because of their ability to pick open coffers using thief tools (these include thief tools, living key, and skeleton key in the order of stength of the tool). These situations call for different subjobs. When hunting coffers or chests, it is a good idea to have white mage or red mage subjob at level 25+ for the sneak (level 20) and invisible (level 25) spells taking aggression. When farming for loot, ranger subjob is effective for using the widescan ability to track down the monsters you wish to farm. When hunting Notorious Monsters (NMs) for rare and expensive drops, warrior subjob is again best for using provoke to get it before anyone else.
Equipment and Stat Focus
A thief is a damage dealer, so it would be in your best interest to additionally read http://www.multiplayerstrategies.com/ms/index.cfm?page=topic&topicID=18975&categoryid=18 , which is a damage dealing thread I wrote that will cover a few points that I may leave out in this section. However, unlike some of the other damage dealers where +accuracy is much more important than any other stat, dex and agi are the main stat focuses for thief, where dex is slightly more important than agi. In addition to contributing to the accuracy of your regular attacks, dex will increase the damage of your sneak attack whereas agi will increase the damage of your trick attack. Sneak attack will contribute more damage than trick attack, which is another reason why dex should take precendence over agi if given the option.
Keep in mind that sneak attack will never miss if done properly, and anything stacked with sneak attack (trick attack and weaponskills) won't miss either, making accuracy not so important until you hit 60 and use the multihit weaponskill dancing edge (as long as you have no trouble with missing too much). While dex and agi should be your focus with equipment, meat mithkabobs remain the most helpful and cost efficient food, adding a +5 str and a very large +21.9% attack to boost the damage of all your attacks, including sneak and trick attack.
Thieves have by far the best combat skill rating with dagger, which is why it should be used instead of another weapon. As stated in the damage dealing thread, each point in the dagger combat skill adds +1 attack, so even as early as level 25, your dagger skill cap is 78 compared to the 68 cap with sword, that's a 10 skill point difference. That's essentially like your dagger having an addition +10 attack bonus on the dagger on top of having a better hit rate. Take that into consideration when deciding between sword and dagger (pre-lv 33… at lv33+ you should be using dagger no matter what).
Sample Macros
These are just some sample macros, having the right macros can make the difference between a good thief and a bad one, since timing is everything when stacking sneak and trick attack with weaponskills. My first suggestion is to combine sneak attack and trick attack in a single macro, while placing your weaponskill in a second macro. Note that the square brackets are meant to represent that auto-translator. Here's an example:
Sneak / Trick Attack Macro
/ja "Sneak Attack" <me>
/wait 1
/ja "Trick Attack" <me>
Weaponskill Macro
/ws "Viper Bite" <t>
/wait 1
/p "[Viper Bite] ~ TP : <tp> <call3>
* What's important to notice is that you viper bite a split second before the delay and party chat, that's because after sneak and trick attack you must quickly use your weaponskill or your character will auto-attack with a melee attack, using sneak/trick attack and not stacking it with a weaponskill. This can especially be an issue because you use daggers, which have low delay.
Enemy Sighted Macro
/p [Enemy] @ <pos> - [Found it!] <call14>
Ranged Attack / Pulling Macro
/p [Ranged Attack] >>—-> <t>
/wait 1
/ra <t>
TP Report Macro
/p TP: <tp> @X [Viper Bite] <call14>
* Where the X after the @ is your position in the skillchain, for example if you're second, you put @2 [Viper Bite].
Flee Macro
/ja "Flee" <me>
Steal Macro
/ja "Steal" <t>
Hide Macro
/p Losing aggro >> [Hide]!
/wait 1
/ja "Hide" <me>
I hope this helps, if you have any questions or corrections, feel free to reply to this thread or PM me.
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