Stealth Archery is OP in Skyrim. Not so much here where there are often multiple enemies in a bunch and no real ability to fool enemy AI.

You might be able to get off a Blade of Woe strike against a single regular add, but otherwise PVE stealth is more about setting up an upfront burst attack that puts you in a good position to wreck the rest of the adds.

In PVP, however, stealth builds such as gankers and bombers are able to create the upfront burst to completely wreck unsuspecting players. That playstyle does involve a certain amount of lying in wait though.

There are actually two sets that remove the stealth movement penalty, the crafted Night's Silence set (other bonuses are stamina oriented) and the overland dropped set Shadow Dancer from Malabal Tor (other bonuses are magicka oriented). Outside of Thieves guild and Dark Brotherhood quests, and pickpocketing/general thieving, it's of limited actual value. I do find it somewhat amusing to try and one shot a lot of the mobs in a delve with a melee heavy from stealth, and it's not really that much slower (using my normal medium PvE sets, go into stealth just outside a mobs detection radius).

I run a stamblade bosmer with night silence set (could go vamp stage 4 if you prefer) and night mother's embrace set, and concealed weapon/shadowy disguise/retreating maneuver slotted. I pretty much sneak at sprinting speed (and at a lower stamina cost) over mobs toes without getting aggro. It's great for doing delves/public dungeons, harvesting or running dark brotherhood, thieves guild, mages guild, clockwork city dailies. Not because it is a combat advantage but because it allows you to bypass 99% of the combat involved in such activities. I do use Dressing Room addon to quickly switch to a proper combat setup if I come across a boss but sometimes I don't even bother, bosses in this type of content can easily be taken out with such a setup.

With the new Jewelry crafting I am thinking of adding 3 swift jewelry and going 5 night silence, 3 night terror and 4 eternal hunt just for such play. Might drop retreating maneuver from the mix then or it might get too fast to keep things under control

Beamer_Miasma wrote: »

I run a stamblade bosmer with night silence set (could go vamp stage 4 if you prefer) and night mother's embrace set, and concealed weapon/shadowy disguise/retreating maneuver slotted. I pretty much sneak at sprinting speed (and at a lower stamina cost) over mobs toes without getting aggro. It's great for doing delves/public dungeons, harvesting or running dark brotherhood, thieves guild, mages guild, clockwork city dailies. Not because it is a combat advantage but because it allows you to bypass 99% of the combat involved in such activities. I do use Dressing Room addon to quickly switch to a proper combat setup if I come across a boss but sometimes I don't even bother, bosses in this type of content can easily be taken out with such a setup.

With the new Jewelry crafting I am thinking of adding 3 swift jewelry and going 5 night silence, 3 night terror and 4 eternal hunt just for such play. Might drop retreating maneuver from the mix then or it might get too fast to keep things under control

Beamer_Miasma wrote: »

I run a stamblade bosmer with night silence set (could go vamp stage 4 if you prefer) and night mother's embrace set, and concealed weapon/shadowy disguise/retreating maneuver slotted. I pretty much sneak at sprinting speed (and at a lower stamina cost) over mobs toes without getting aggro. It's great for doing delves/public dungeons, harvesting or running dark brotherhood, thieves guild, mages guild, clockwork city dailies. Not because it is a combat advantage but because it allows you to bypass 99% of the combat involved in such activities. I do use Dressing Room addon to quickly switch to a proper combat setup if I come across a boss but sometimes I don't even bother, bosses in this type of content can easily be taken out with such a setup.

With the new Jewelry crafting I am thinking of adding 3 swift jewelry and going 5 night silence, 3 night terror and 4 eternal hunt just for such play. Might drop retreating maneuver from the mix then or it might get too fast to keep things under control

This sounds like good fun!

My main character is a pure stealth assassin/thief.

5 Night Mother's Embrace
3 Night Terror
4 Unfathomable Darkness

Khajiit passives
7 medium pieces of armor

You'll be very hard for NPCs to detect because you'll have the best stealth reduction possible, and it still hits hard and has pretty good sustain. Blade of Woe is also a blast to use with this set up.

technohic wrote: »

Then there’s stealing and Thieves Guild. And magicka does better IMO for that. Just double take, concealed weapon and cloak spam. No need for a movement set or vamp but you might want it anyway

I actually have a magblade like that too and run Heists and Sacraments daily on both of them. I don't keep stats on Heists because I just never fail them (and the drop rate is 100% so why count ) but on Sacraments I have the following:

Alert Status    stam    mag
0/5             98      96
1/5             45      41
2/5             14      8
3/5             0       6
4/5             2       3
failed          3       7

Note that when I started counting these, I already had done about 100 of them on each of the 2 characters so I already knew the layout of the areas.

The diff is minimal but I'm doing slightly better on stam. The thing is once you know your way around and have a good feeling for your detection range the only time you'll fail is when you make a mistake, and having to cast invis every 2.7 seconds leaves a lot more room for mistakes than just running around and only using a single invis to slip past the occasional NPC that's blocking a tunnel. Also with my stamblade sitting at capped minimum detection range (0.5m) even if I do make a mistake the chance that I'll get spotted is much lower.

For general thieving the difference is much wider though, since opening a chest breaks invis I get spotted much more often on my magblade, whereas my stamblade can just open a chest right at an NPCs feet without getting seen. For example I can crouch in front of the banker's desk at the Brass Fortress and empty the chest under it on my stamblade without getting spotted by the bank or guard less than 2 meter away. I can't do that on my magblade because she needs invis to stay undetected at such short ranges.

Edit: the undeniable advantage of magblade happens when you do get spotted. It's much easier to get away even when you're indoors