Rogue's Handbook: A Thief Guide

## Preface

This guide was inspired by Rogue's Gallery that was made for retail. It includes a knowledge formed from having a 75 thief on retail era, as well as a main thief on current retail, as well as knowledge gained from leveling and experiencing Thief on HorizonXI. This guide is intended to be ever evolving and is a passion project, so be sure to check the last updated timestamp for relevance.

## Why Thief?

**You should play thief if**

* You enjoy an active class with lots of movement and keystrokes and requires you to stay engaged while playing.
* You enjoy controling of the flow of exp parties.
* You like to see big, spike damage.
* You enjoy farming for gil.

**You should NOT play thief if**

* You're lazy or just want to sit back and chill while fighting enemies.
* You are easily aggravated by others messing up your plans (LOL SATA).
* You want to be a prominent member of end game activities (THF is generally only really used as a TH bot in endgame stuff).
* You are in a hurry to level. (Everyone and their mom is leveling thief right now, so you'll have a lot of competition for party spots).

## Merits

Thief merits are kind of meh. You have a tiny bit of flexibility, but for the most part, there's only really one one to go about them.

### Group 1

* **Flee Recast:** Skip.
* **Hide Recast:** Skip.
* **Sneak Attack Recast:** 5/5 is ideal as SA is going to be your primary source of big deeps. You *could* reduce this a bit to even out with TA if you wanted, but your overall dps will suffer a bit. Your call.
* **Trick Attack Recast:** whatever you don't spend on SA you can put here. Overall, you have 5 points total to spend between this and SA. Choose wisely.
* **Trick Attack Rate:** max this out (5/5) first thing.

## Subjobs

Thief has a few different options for subjobs, but 99% of the time you'll be using either NIN or WAR.

### Ninja

* Shadows, Dual Wield II , Subtle Blow II

Everyone's favorite subjob. /nin gives you access to the icon dual wield. This is great because many of THF's weapons have stat boosts on them, and being able to equip two weapons means double the stat boosts. On Horizon, Dual Wield I doesnt affect delay, so the rate of attack with 2 weapons will just be the combined total of both weapons' delays. But Dual Wield II does give you a slight delay reduction, so after level 50, you should see a nice little uptick in damage from that. That stats are the big thing here though.

In addtion to DW, you also get shadows via Utsusemi: Ichi (and later Utsusemi: Ni). This allows for increased survivability and is especially useful when soloing/farming and pulling.

### Warrior

* Berserk, Warcry, Double Attack I, Attack Bonus I

In terms of raw damage, /WAR is going to provide more than /NIN. however it does so at the cost of survivability. Soloing is much more challenging and requires more resting, and you'll be taking a lot more of a bruising in parties when you inevitably pull some hate from sneak attack.

In terms of utility, you lose out on /NIN's Tonko for invisibility, but you do get Provoke, which can help you take hate in emergencies (staying alive once you have that hate is another thing all together though).

### Dark Knight

* Last Resort, Souleater, Attack Bonus II, Damage Limit+ I. Absorb spells

I haven't actually tested this on horizon, but on paper, it does seem like it could be pretty potent as well as provide some useful utility in certain end game content. Theoretically, it should result in higher attack than even /WAR if your attack isn't already capped, so overall dps could be higher. You also have Absorb spells like Absorb-AGI and Absorb-CHR that can add some extra potency if you can get them to land.

The utility I spoke of comes in endgame content like dynamis where you can use Poisonga to land TH on a bunch of enemies at once and not take any hate since it will almost always be resisted. This is a popular trick in current retail.

Some actual testing of this idea needs to be performed before I can say for sure that it's useful or not, but it has promise at least.