ESO Best Stealth Thief Build for All Classes (Optimized)

Welcome to the ESO Stealth Thief Build for all Classes. Sometimes in The Elder Scrolls Online, stealing is essential; some skill lines even depend on it. This guide covers how to improve stealth, pickpocketing, and use the Blade of Woe. You can begin this build without all the gear or skills and gradually upgrade as you progress into a true master thief.

Table of Contents for the Thief Build:

• Thief Build Overview: How it works
• Best Races for Thieving
• Recommended Mundus Stone
• Curse Options (Optional)
• Best Gear for Thieving
• Skill Setups
  • Nightblade
  • Arcanist
  • Dragonknight
  • Sorcerer
  • Templar
  • Warden
  • Necromancer
  • Scribing Skills
  • Other Skills
• Champion Points
• Attribute Points
• Buff Food Choices
• Recommended Potions
• Tips on How To Play the Thief Build

---

Thief Build Overview: How it works

When fully optimized, this Thief Build allows for infinite stealth, you can crouch indefinitely without a speed penalty, moving just as fast as if you weren’t sneaking at all. Even more impressively, guards won’t detect you, even if you’re practically standing on their toes. Your stamina will stay above 99% at all times, and your Shadowy Cloak becomes nearly limitless, requiring only brief pauses when magicka runs low and potions are on cooldown.

This build prioritizes stealth-focused stats that let you operate from the shadows, stealing, assassinating, and escaping unnoticed. Key traits include reduced detection radius, increased resource recovery, cost reduction, and bonuses to pickpocketing, lockpicking, and invisibility. Combat takes a backseat here. While this build can handle most overland enemies with ease, it’s not intended for group dungeons or trials.

The focus for the ESO Thief Build is on these skill lines:

• Legerdemain
• Thieves Guild
• Dark Brotherhood

Allocate skill points in all of these skill lines already while you are levelling them up.

---

Best Race for the Thief Build

All races have some passives that help with a stealthy build. Any will do, but Khajiit is the preferred race. Any passive that helps with stealth, stealing, resources, recovery, cost reduction or escape will be beneficial.

Khajiit

Khajiit is hands down the best race for stealth. Most passives are useful for a stealthy thief build. Cutpurse increases your chance to successfully pickpocket by 5%. Robustness Increases your Health, Magicka, and Stamina Recovery by 90. Feline Ambush decreases your detection radius in Stealth by 3 meters.

---

Recommended Mundus Stone

It does not really matter which mundus you use. However, a stealth build will be crouching a lot which slows you down. To mitigate that, you can use The Steed. It gives you a speed buff and also helps to mitigate the lower health recovery if you are a vampire.

The Steed – Activating the stone will grant you the permanent blessing of increased movement speed and health recovery.

---

Vampire Curse (Optional)

While not mandatory, Vampire passives greatly help with a stealthy build. Stage 1 is enough but if you want to run invisible, you can go Stage 4. Nightblade has Shadowy Disguise so stage 4 is not needed, but other classes may benefit from it.

• Dark Stalker – (Stage 1) Ignore the Movement Speed penalty of Sneak. Decreases the time it takes to enter Sneak by 50%.
• Unnatural Movement – (While you are at Vampire Stage 4) Reduces the cost of Sprint by 50%. If you continuously Sprint for 3 seconds you automatically become invisible.

---

Best Gear for Thieving in ESO

This build relies on three sets, The Night Mother’s Embrace, The Vesture of Darloc Brae and The Shadow Queen’s Cowl mythic. The weapon choice is free as we need the five piece bonus only. However, Bow has a passive Hasty Retreat that gives you Major Expedition after a roll dodge. Otherwise any weapon will work. Back bar weapon can be either Darloc Brae or you can equip an arena weapon if you like.

• The Night Mother’s Embrace – the important here is the 5 piece bonus, which reduces the radius you can be detected while Sneaking by 2 meters and reduces the cost of Sneak by 25%.
• Vesture of Darloc Brae – the important bonuses here are the 4 and 5 piece bonuses. 4 piece bonus reduces the radius you can be detected while Sneaking by 2 meters and reduces the cost of Sneak by further 10%. The five piece bonus is important for the Nightblade cloak, While you are crouching and not Bracing, you restore 670 Magicka and Stamina and heal for 670 Health every second. This value scales so it is recommended you upgrade this set to golden for the full 670 restore bonus.

The one piece Magma Incarnate helps with recovery. Back bar (Perfected) Thunderous Volley is not mandatory. It can be any Arena Weapon or it can be Darloc Brae.

The set pieces below show Stamina enchantments, but if you build your character as Magicka-based thieving build, use Magicka enchants. With two light pieces, other recovery bonuses, Darloc Brae, and Reduce Spell Cost enchantments maintaining Shadowy Disguise should be easy enough so you can build this character either Stamina or Magicka.

Skills for Each Class

This build works best with Nightblade, but basically any class will work. Most of the time you don’t need to use any skills for pickpocketing, lockpicking or stealing so feel free to use any class you like. Nightblade has the best escape skill, Shadowy Disguise, and that’s why Nightblade is preferred. With Subclassing any class has access to Nightblade’s Shadow skill line. However, you can make this work even without. In the skills below Subclassing is used, but also the helping skills from each class is there so it is possible to replace the Shadow skills with any skills you may need.

Hiding is done by crouching and the CPs, guild passives, and the gear takes care of most of it. Khajiit and Shadowy Cloak helps. If this is done with other classes than Nightblade, you can substitute Shadowy Cloak with vampire stage 4 running when escaping. Arcanist’s Fleet-Footed Gate, Sorcerer’s Ball of Lightning and Vampire’s Elusive Mist are also useful for escaping.

---

Nightblade Skills optimized for Thieving

Arcanist Skills optimized for Thieving

This works best when you add the Shadow skill line from Nightblade using Subclassing.

Dragonknight Skills optimized for Thieving

This works best when you add the Shadow skill line from Nightblade using Subclassing.

Sorcerer Skills optimized for Thieving

This works best when you add the Shadow skill line from Nightblade using Subclassing.

Templar Skills optimized for Thieving

This works best when you add the Shadow skill line from Nightblade using Subclassing.

Warden Skills optimized for Thieving

This works best when you add the Shadow skill line from Nightblade using Subclassing.

Necromancer Skills optimized for Thieving

This works best when you add the Shadow skill line from Nightblade using Subclassing.

Scribing Skills

Scribing is not really needed, but Restorative Banner can help with the Shadowy Cloak with the reduced cost.

Banner Bearer
Focus – Restore Resources
Signature – Cavalier’s Charge, Class Mastery, or Thief’s Swiftness
Affix – Intellect and Endurance

Other

Vampire
Elusive Mist is a good escape skill similar to Sorcerer’s Streak and Arcanist’s Fleet-footed Path.

---

Champion Points for the Stealth Thief Build in ESO

Attributes

All into Magicka or Stamina, depending on the playstyle you want. Stamina helps you to sprint longer, magicka helps you with magicka skills and to stay longer cloaked with Shadowy Disguise while you are moving.

---

Buff food

It depends on how you set up the build. If you optimise it fully, you don’t technically need any. Recovery is never a bad idea. The higher your magicka recovery is, the shorter time you need to stop while cloaked to recover magicka.

• Orzorga’s Smoked Bear Haunch
• Jewels of Misrule

Any recovery food works best. Either primary resource or both. This build would benefit even from Crown Refreshing Drink you get from Daily Login Rewards.

Crown Refreshing Drink – Increase Health Recovery by 446, Magicka Recovery by 410, and Stamina Recovery by 410 for 2 hours.

You can browse all in the ESO Food and Drinks Database.

---

Potions

Essence of Magicka, Essence of Stamina or Tristat potions to maintain resources.

For escaping:
Invisibility
Speed
Unstoppable

For example Blue Entoloma, Columbine, Namira’s Rot makes a potion with health, unstoppable and invisibility.

The daily login reward Gold Coast Swift Survivor Elixirs include both Major Expedition and Unstoppable.

---

Tips on how to play this build

• To activate this, crouch. That’s pretty much it.
• The movement should be fast enough that you look like sprinting. But you are still crouching and the guards will not see you.
• You can keep Shadowy Disguise on pretty much indefinitely if you wish. If you are running out of magicka, you can either drink a magicka/tristat potion or simply stop for a few seconds.
• If you get caught, you can immediately use Shadowy Disguise, crouch and simply walk away. You should be out of combat very quickly.
• If a guard sees you they may throw a flare on your location. If you have used all the speed enhancements in this build, you should be fast enough to simply walk away from the growing AOE. If not, you can roll dodge. The flare suppresses your ability to hide for a short while and is to be avoided.
• The rest is optional. The skills are suggestions in case you are in combat. The only important ones are the mobility and hiding skills. Those that grant Major Expedition or remove snares and immobilizations. And the teleports from Sorcerer and Arcanist. Otherwise, the actual weapon you use, the other skills, and blue CPs are not that important.

The post ESO Best Stealth Thief Build for All Classes (Optimized) appeared first on AlcastHQ.