I’m writing this to try to gather all stealth and thieving passives in one place, mostly for my own benefit (for my non-NB characters) but maybe it will be useful to others.
I use stealth for general stealing, for reaching objectives quickly (when questing), for the Thieves Guild and Dark Brotherhood dailies, and also for moving quickly around Cyrodiil (pvp). It’s very easy on my NB (as it should be!) but you can get non-NBs to a very reasonable level of stealth.
The passives I look for are to increase stealth speed, reduce cost of stealthing and decreasing the detection range.
- Crafted – Night’s Silence – 5 set bonus: Ignore Movement Penalty speed while sneaking (only requires 2 known traits per armour piece)
- Dropped (medium) – Night Mother’s Embrace – 5 set bonus: Reduce the range you can be detected while hidden by 2 meters. Reduces crouch cost by 25%
- Dropped (medium) – Night Terror– 3 set bonus: Decrease detection radius by 2 meters. Reduce Sneak cost by 25%
- Dropped (light) – Shadow Dancer’s Raiment – 5 set bonus: Ignore movement penalty of sneak
Night’s Silence | Night Mother’s Embrace | Night Terror | Shadow Dancer’s Raiment
I use AlphaGear 2 to save gear & skill sets and have separate sets for pve, pvp and thieving. You can keybind your builds to quickly switch when out of combat. I find a lower level / lower quality of set for thieving, heists and sacraments works just fine as you don’t tend to need to fight. (cheaper). I recommend having either Night’s Silence or Shadow Dancer’s Raiment combined with Night Terror. The dropped sets include jewellery.
General skill line passives:
- Medium armour passives – Windwalker (increase stamina recovery) and Improved Sneak (reduces cost of sneaking and reduces detection area).
- Legerdemain passive – Improved Hiding (reduces stamina cost of sneaking).
- Legerdemain also has Force Lock (very good for Heists), plus pickpocketing, fence interactions and reduction of bounties.
Nightblade skills & passives:
- Shadow Cloak (invisibility* for 2.5 seconds)
- Veiled Strike > Concealed Weapon (increases stealth speed – with Night’s Silence or Dark Stalker, you basically sprint stealthed – really tough decision as the other morph is an excellent dps choice)
Bosmer skill line passive:
- Y’ffre’s endurance (inc stamina regen) and Stealthy (reduces detection radius)
Khajiit skill line passive:
- Stealthy (reduces detection radius)
Vampire skill line passive:
- Dark Stalker (increases stealth speed and enter stealth more quickly at night). N.B. this trait does not stack with the gear set bonus but does stack with the Nightblade’s Concealed Weapon.
Thieves Guild skill line passive:
- Veil of Shadows (Witness range and Guard Accost range reduced by 10%)
- also has many passives useful for general thievery.
Dark Brotherhood skill line passive:
- Shadow Rider: Aggression radius from hostile monsters is decreased by 50% while mounted
Alchemy:
- Invisibility potions are good for busy, hard to hide areas. Take the relevant alchemy trait for longer potion effects.
- The Thief
- Wind Running. Increase all types of movement speed by 2%
- The Shadow:
- Shade. Reduces cost of stealth by x%.
- Fortune Seeker (Rank 10) increases amount of gold found in treasure chests and safeboxes
- Treasure Hunter (Rank 75) increases the quality of items found in treasure chests.
*Invisibility and Stealth are two different mechanics. Stealth is not being noticed and you are less likely to be seen if you are not in their sight path or the further away you are (stealth radius). Invisibility means just that and as far as I know isn’t affected by any skill or set bonus.
Let me know if there’s anything to add or you’ve spotted a mistake 🙂
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