Baldur's Gate : The Sword Coast Chronicles : NWN2 Persistent World

This thread is about treasure hunting builds.

The characteristics I find most important in treasure hunting are speed, disable device, not being detected, and opening locks. Most rogue dips can pull it off good.

Things I find useful:

Speed spells: long strider, expeditious retreat, haste, flee the scene, and battle tide are good spells for getting around faster. Any build with these will make your treasure hunting faster.

Movement increases: Grey orcs are one of the best picks for high speed toons because of long gait. Monks, sacred fists, barbarians, bodyguards, and whirling dervishes all get increases to movement. If you plan on making a treasure hunting build, consider making one with any of these.

Rogue is a must for any good treasure hunter, but there are alternatives like divine seeker, and soon, the ninja class. You will want to be able to disable device. You may also want to recover traps for extra gold, so, do not miss out on one of these.

Anything with a way to avoid detection is good for treasure hunting. Invisibility, shadow door, greater sanctuary, ghost step, walk unseen, and HiPS are things you will want to include in your build.

My favorite build is the utility warlock. In my opinion, it is one of the best treasure hunting builds. Monk rogue combos are also top notch.

Post your treasure hunting tips/tricks and favorite builds. No chest bashing builds please.

25 monk 5 shadowdancer

Can kill most of the boss monsters of the game easily, requires no buffs and can pick locks.
Very fast runner and quite tanky.


Other than that, 30 druid is always a solid choice. Doesn't matter what you loot, while Dragonshaped you'll never be encumbered. Extended Storm Avatar lets you travel quickly. Unfortunately, it smashes locked chests... (unless you go 27 druid 3 rogue for lockpicking and Evasion)

Dex based bard 27 shadow dancer 3

Gets Haste, Hips, Invis, plenty skill points and can solo bosses

I was able to solo the UD pit fiend with my dex bard quite easily i think hes a bit stronger than the surface balor?

Kills trash mobs very quickly aswell with requiem. Not that you have to because you can easily skip them but yea

Monk / SD
Barbarian / Rogue
Rogue / SD / Assassin

Better yet any spell caster with invis , haste , knock and sanctuary or jaunt. That pretty much let's you skip the whole game as long as you have spells.

Nobody has mentioned Ranger 30 (STR Based). Can get mid 40's AC, longstrider for speed spell, and can run in stealth making getting from treasure trove A to B simpler since you can avoid mobs along the way. Ranger/Assassin was great before the dispel fix for using Invisibility spell indoors at times as well...

Bard can also do this... They have a song that essentially acts like sanctuary for 1 minute, so with expeditious retreat it's great to get you from one spot to the next without messing with random mobs on the way. However, Bard's can kind of do everything, so long as they have enough places to rest in between.

I tend to disagree a bit with the heavily DEX based builds only because a treasure hunter needs to be able to carry stuff! I have heard many complaints (and have experienced myself) what it is like to go on a "Loot run" where you become overloaded part way through the trip... Is that unidentified plate mail just +1 or regular plate or is it an epic plate of uberness? (which brings up another point, skills! Appraise, and Lore-Arcana are probably just as important as some of the other things listed so you know what you must keep and what to throw away to save inventory space).

One issue I have with the lack of 'bags of holding' is the fact that as a 'treasure hunter' you are locked in to things that IMO can hurt the RP... My Ranger always carried around two or more full sets of equipment for different uses (stealth, tracking, AC, etc.) as well as RP items like a coil of rope, various poisons I never used, heal kits, lots of potions, three sets of melee weapons, plus a bow and several full quivers of arrows... He would have probably looked like a walking armory, but I RP'd him as a survivalist who wanted to be ready for anything. Function over form... This meant even though STR wise he could carry quite a bit, inventory screen wise he nearly always had three full screens before he even started.

Anyway, I really think any set of classes can be a treasure hunter, you don't absolutely 'need' rogue or any other class. I would say Able Learner helps so you can have a bunch of different skills though! Many traps can be avoided rather than disarmed so if you have Search disarm is not a must, even though it can help... I personally want at least decent STR (the higher the better) and as with all of my characters I want to have a fair amount of skill points so Ranger, Rogue, Bard, Wizard are usually my favorites, but Barbarian and really anything with decent INT and 4 or more base skill points per level is ok. For me 2 SP / level is really restrictive, even though many of the classes with low SP have some really great mechanical power elsewhere.

Now, if you are specifically looking for an Indiana Jones type than yes, probably mostly rogue as well as perhaps some fighter levels or something else for some flavor. Treasure Hunter is more of a 'job' than a class. Paladins may be Paladins, but Treasure Hunter could come from many backgrounds... I'm sure this has been as clear as mud and as informative as telling you something is either good or bad.

my monk/cleric was my best treasure hunter. and a simple lore pot can at least tell you if it is just a +1 FP so you can minimize your carry if needed. this was rarely needed due to the low carry weight of the monk's equipment and strength.. i usually even carried plain plate armors on her. plus the cleric allows you to remove cursed items if needed. but that is just an added benefit more than a must have.

Draya

I'm terrible with builds but I'm going for Hin Rogue / W. Dervish / Shadowdancer / W. Stalker.
I can already disable any trap or pick any lock I've met so far, I got +5% fast movement, HIPS, Track feat+Survival and I'll get Camuflage.