Helpful items:

Merchant

Bank



Choosing your route. I try to balance my circuit so that by the time I am finished with the last chest, the first ones in the circuit are already spawning. This is important as you don’t want to finish your circuit and not have chests that have respawn to pick when you start from the beginning again. Some places that’s 15 chests or so, some places it’s 20-30 chests.

Pick every chest, every time regardless if it’s simple or master I say this for several reasons.

The more chests you pick the more chests will spawn, this means master and advanced chess will spawn, more often.
Take everything from the chest.


Champion Points:

The Tower, Sprinter, the fast you move, the more chests you pick.
The Lover, Master Gatherer, allows harvesting mats faster while you are going from chest to chest.
The Shadow, Treasure Hunter, Increases the quality of the items you get in chests
The Shadow, Fortune Seeker, get more gold from chests you unlock


Gear:

Night Mother’s Embrace:

(5 items) Adds 171 Weapon Damage, Reduces the radius you can be detected while Sneaking by 2 meters. Reduces the cost of Sneak by 25%.

Vesture of Darloc Brae:

(5 items) While crouching and not blocking, you restore 670 Magicka and Stamina and heal for 670 Health every second.

Ring of Wild Hunt:

(1 item) Increases your movement speed by 15% while in combat. Increases your movement speed by 35% while out of combat.

Titanic Cleave: (Use whatever you want here, I use this because it’s oh so good)

(2 items) Increases the direct damage Cleave deals by 1550 for each enemy in its cone, up to maximum 9000 increased damage.
(Perfected) Grants up to 1190 Physical Penetration.

Note: A lot of the suggested thief/lock picking builds suggest you slot skills that allow you to escape more easily. However, if you use the gear above you are almost never detected. If you want to pick a chest with mob around, you can choose to attack instead of hoping not to aggro. With a good weapon that does AOE damage you can easily dispatch mobs. I often engage bosses with this set up, and hardly have any issues with health.

Mundus Stones:

The Steed: Increases run speed by 10% & increases Health recovery by 238
15% speed and 363 Health recovery with 7 Legendary Divine Traits
The Warrior: Increases Weapon Damage by 238
363 with 7 Legendary Divine Traits
I personally use the Warrior because I actively engage mobs with this build. You can choose The Steed instead for a little more speed but I have found that the extra damage serves me far better than the little extra added speed. If you are struggling with health however, The Steed might be a better choice for you.

Slotted Skills:

I’m a nightblade, I use these skills specifically in relation to lock picking.
Shadow Disguise: Cloak yourself in shadow to become invisible for 3 seconds. Your next direct damage attack used within 3 seconds will always be a Critical Strike.
Concealed Weapon: Slash an enemy, dealing 822 Magic Damage. Attacking with Concealed Weapon from the flank stuns the enemy for 3 seconds and sets them Off Balance. While slotted, your Movement Speed while Sneaking or invisible is increased by 25%.
That’s it, the only two skills I use. I use Shadow Disguise to cloak past mobs. I move so fast in some areas that I am constantly using it so I am cloaked 100% of the time, or perm cloaked. It’s very easy to perm cloak with this build with the right buff food.

Food:

Jewels of Misrule: Increase Max Stamina and Magicka Recovery by 319 and Max Health by 3192 for 2 hours. (6 second cooldown)
I use this food for the magicka recovery. I am a stamina nightblade, so all my gear has stamina or damage enchants. I have all my attribute points in stamina. I never have any issues with generating enough magicka so that I can keep a perm cloak if needed. If you are having issues with magicka resources, you can use the new tri stat enchant on you jewelry, it might be a good idea to do so anyway.





Suggestions:


Lock all the inventory items you use yourself, food, lockpicks, gear etc. This will prevent you from selling, deleting or disassembling items you use yourself accidently.

Merchant and bank, I cannot stress how useful these two NPCs are. I can spend as much time lockpicking as I want, without ever leaving the area. I will often put on music, and run my circuit for an hour or two. When my bag is full, I stop, I bank all the items I want to sell and all the purple items I want to disassemble for mats and then sell everything else above 0 value. I auto delete anything of 0 value. I usually make between 5-8k each time I clean my bag by selling the other items to the merchant. When I am getting ready to leave with a full bag, I do not sell to the merchant but instead dissemble everything for mats instead.

Deciding a circuit to run. When I am scoping out a new circuit I try to do it in an area where the chests are closest together, closest to where the terrain allows me to easily move from chest to chest, and to allow for enough chests so that when I’m done with the last one, the first one has already spawned.

Lockpicking in areas where others are. People will call this etiquette but I just see it simply as making a choice of either behaving in a way that you want to be treated and respecting others.

Don’t steal from other players. If you see someone fighting mob hanging close to a chest, either wait to see of they pick it, or move on. There are so many chests, and if you are doing as I suggested and picking all chests more spawn master and advanced so while you might steal from someone, someone else is picking the advanced or master chest you could have. Just don’t do it, I mean really.
Loot everything in the chest. If you are using the addons I suggested, you can auto delete unwanted items. There is absolutely no good reason to leave anything in a chest, it’s bad business. You are negatively affecting how fast the chests spawn, how many more advanced and master chests spawn. If you are doing a circuit you are screwing yourself over and everyone else.
Since I loot so fast, when I am lockpicking in an area with others and I notice they are picking locks I try to be helpful instead of just grabbing everything for myself. I have spent a lot of time, effort, energy and gold perfecting my method, but I know that picking chests the way I do frustrates others. So, I often whisper the other pearson picking locks and ask if they are looking for anything specific. If they are, I tell them when I come across that item I will whisper then and send it to them, and I do, often. I don’t care how much the item is worth because by doing this I create rapport with the other people picking locks and they are far less likely to try to steal a chest from me, or cause other aggravation.
Picking every chest. You by no means have to do this, but I do. I have kept a spreadsheet because I wanted to know how many master and advanced chests I pick when I do things in different ways. I have found that by picking every chest, more advanced and master chests spawn because there are more chests to be spawned. I have also found that much of the green items that spawn in the lower chests have very high value even when not making them purple.
Selling items. This is where I think people make a mistake on how they profit from picking chests. It’s all about turns, how fast you can sell something in your guild traders. I have 5 guild traders, 30 slots each and keep them above 25 items most of the day. I have enough gear banked that I can just run to the bank and fill up my traders again fairly easy. I sell things for slightly less than the market. I know that others will buy and flip what I am selling but I also know they might sit on that item for 5 days. I want to sell my gear today. So if I sell something for 10k and someone else buys it and sells it for 15k they might sit on that for 5 days, while I will sell one a day at 10k and make 50k in 5 days. It’s not about how much you make on each item that matters so much as how many items you sell. I am not going to say how much I make a day, but I will say this. I make far more per day than most of the guides claim they make in a week and spending about the same time picking chests.
Speed is the key to more chests. I auto pick all the chests, I never manually pick them. By doing this, I can start running away during the lock picking animation. In many situations, if I closely watch my chest picking animation I can start running away when mob aggros me instead of having to fight. As you lean forward in your animation, soon as you stop moving forward you can run away. The items in the chest show they have dropped into your inventory as you are running way. I cannot express how much time this saves.
Tap those bosses. When you are running your circuit, specially in dungeons and you see others fighting a boss, stop and help. I have found that by doing so you not only create good will with those you are in the same area with, but you get the boss drops too. No reason to pass up fighting a boss if someone else is engaged. Otherwise, I just skip them because they take too much time, I could loot 2-3 chests in the time it takes to kill a boss solo.
Above all, have fun! If you are starting to feel like it’s not fun stop, stop right there, go do something else. A friend of mine once told me when I played the guitar to put the guitar down when I still wanted to play it so that I always wanted to pick it up again. Same goes for this, stop when you are still having fun so you will want to come back to it.


These are only things I have personally learned, and suggestions I am making. This is by no means directions on how to make millions picking chests, and is not any sort of golden rule. Most of this is already well known and expressed in other guides, builds and discussions. My intent is to simply add to that huge volume of knowledge in my own way.

Have fun!