Thief: D&D 2024 Optimisation Guide

The sneakiest of rogues. Thieves are great at hiding, stealing and using magical items. Their incredible dexterity means they can do more than other characters in a single turn.

What is a thief?

Expert burglars and pickpockets, thieves are as sneaky as they come. They stick to darkness, operating unseen, preferring stealth to confrontation. Thieves have incredible dexterity, allowing them to pick locks, pockets and disarm traps faster and more capably than anyone else.

While all thieves steal, not all steal in the traditional sense, from homes and pockets (though they are adept at such things). In a world of ancient ruins, buried temples and dragon’s lairs, many thieves end up being adventurers and treasure hunters. Eschewing the small rewards found in people’s pockets, they have their eyes on much larger prizes such as magical artefacts, treasure hordes and ancient tomes. Of course, most thieves are also quite happy pilfering from the common man (as well as the uncommon man) too.

If you’re looking for inspiration for your thief, you can find it in the likes of Flynn Rider from Tangled, Tasslehoff the Kender from the Dragonlance series or Robin Hood. Rocket Raccoon is an example of an artillerist artificer with a healthy multiclass as a thief rogue too.

Thieves are one of the original rogue subclasses from the 2014 Player’s Handbook and they’ve had a refresh in the 2024 revision. This guide will take you through the revised version of the thief with advice around tactics, builds and optimisation.

At a glance

Stealthy class ideal for cunning and sneaky characters
Land high damage hits with sneak attacks
Do things faster than other characters, using bonus actions for things other characters need an action for. Can even get an extra turn at higher levels
Make use of the things you steal with magical acumen, allowing you to use scrolls and magic items

What’s changed in D&D 2024?

Magic item capabilities have changed a fair bit, and you get a new combat ability with your cunning strike that helps thieves stay stealthy in combat. The main changes include:

Supreme sneak – Supreme sneak no longer makes you more stealthy and is now a cunning strike option allowing you to stay hidden when you hit someone while hiding.
More attunements – You can attune 4 magic items instead of the usual 3.
No charge uses – When using a magic item with charges, you can sometimes use it without expending a charge.
Scroll master – You can cast spells from scrolls but must pass a check to use scrolls of 2nd level or higher. But you also no longer get to ignore all class, race and level requirements to use items that have these.

Related articles

Thief features

Fast hands – lv3

How it works

As a bonus action, you can do one of the following things:

Make a sleight of hand check to either pick a lock, disarm a trap or pick a pocket.
Use the utilise action or make a magic action to use a magic item.

Tactics

There’s potential to have a lot of fun here as it means you can do some important stuff in the heat of battle and still have time to land a sneak attack. The only problem is most of this stuff is fairly situational. Traps don’t always exist in combat, doors don’t always need to be unlocked quickly, pockets don’t always have something to pick and you don’t always have magic items you can use.
However, imagine stabbing a wizard with one hand while taking your bonus action to nick his component pouch from off his belt. Or perhaps you decide to unlock all the jail cells to start a riot. You could even unpick a lock with your bonus action, move to another door and use your action to unpick another lock!
If you have a lot of magic items on your hands, especially ones that require a magic action to activate, you could easily make yourself very powerful! Imagine using a necklace of fireballs (for example) to cast fireball with your bonus action, and then perform a sneak attack with your action. You could easily end up with some really high damage turns. You’ll just need to convince your party to let you have all the magic items…

Second-story work – Lv3

How it works

You now have a climb speed equal to your move speed and can jump a distance determined by your dexterity.

Tactics

Great for a bit of burglary, but climbing slowly is rarely an issue outside of combat. You’re more likely to enjoy this in combat when trying to reach high up enemies (or escape somewhere high up). Not all DMs will often provide high locations to use, but if you have one that does, there could be some decent benefits to this.

Supreme sneak – Lv9

How it works

You gain the cunning strike option of stealth attack which costs 1d6 of damage and means that if you are invisible from the hide action, then this action won’t end the invisible condition if you end the turn behind three-quarters or total cover.

Tactics

First off, you get to remain hidden which is useful for continuing gaining sneak attacks on subsequent turns.
The biggest thing here though, is that it preserves your bonus action so you don’t need to continuously use your bonus action to hide each turn. Now you can use it for dual wielding and attacking with your bonus action or even better, using the magic item with a magic weapon (from your fast hands feature).
It’s also important to note that this works even if you come out of your hiding spot. This means you can hop out of your hiding spot, stab someone, go back to it and remain hidden. There’s also no need to keep making skill checks to hide either.

Use magic device – Lv13

How it works

You can now attune an extra magic item, have a 1 in 6 chance of not expending a charge when you use a magic item’s charge and you can use magic scrolls (as long as you pass an arcana check).

Tactics

Extra attunements is useful as you may be using a lot of magic items. Certainly you should be the go to user of magic items in the party.
Scroll use is the big thing here. While expensive, you may want to encourage an ally spellcaster to get proficient with calligrapher’s tools and arcana and get to work making you some spell scrolls.
Make sure you have a decent intelligence if you want to use scrolls a lot. And grab some proficiency and maybe even expertise in arcana to help you succeed in your casting depending on how heavily you want to lean into scroll casting.
Merge this with fast hands (as casting a spell from a scroll uses a magic action) and you can cast spells that normally require an action, as a bonus action. It does still cost to scribe the scroll, but this remains a hugely powerful use of your action economy.

Thief’s reflexes – Lv17

How it works

In the first round of combat, you can take 2 turns instead of one. Your first turn happens at your normal initiative score, and your second turn at your initiative minus 10.

Tactics

A hugely powerful way to cause huge problems for enemies in turn one. Land 2 sneak attacks, use your bonus action to use 2 magic items, all in a single round.
This is one of the few ways to land 2 fireballs in a single round, and you can still add 2 sneak attacks into the mix too. And steady aim makes it easier to make those sneak attacks if you’re unable to gain advantage by hiding, flanking or any of the other ways you might normally get this.

Building a thief

Thieves lean heavily into the stealth and stealing elements of the rogue class. On top of this, they get ways to use their ill-gotten goods with capabilities with magic items as well as being adept at striking from hidden locations.

To make your rogue adept in the right areas, I’ve given some advice on how to build your thief below:

Ability scores

Recommended options

Dexterity: Important for AC, attacks, initiative and stealth skills. A must have for any rogue.
Intelligence: If you’re going to use spell scrolls well, you should probably have a solid intelligence.
Charisma: With all the sneaking around, you may find you need to be a dab-hand at deception or persuasion so a decent charisma is a decent shout for a thief.
Constitution: You might be dodging in and out of danger, but you’ll still likely find yourself regularly getting a bruising. Especially if you plan on getting close to your targets.

Options to avoid

Wisdom: Only useful for skills and saving throws but you’ve got too much else to focus on to worry about this.
Strength: Pointless on a rogue. You should dump this.

Ability score	Point Buy	Standard Array
Strength	8	8
Dexterity	15	15
Constitution	15	13
Intelligence	14	14
Wisdom	8	10
Charisma	10	12

Skills

Recommended options

Acrobatics: Good for any physical activities and works with your dexterity, unlike athletics.
Deception: Top face skill for a thief.
Insight: Great face skill.
Intimidation: Decent face skill.
Investigation: Good option for discovering things.
Perception: Always useful, especially for the guy at the front checking for traps.
Persuasion: Top face skill. Essential for a thief engaging in subterfuge.
Sleight of Hand: You’ll need this for picking locks, pockets and disarming traps.
Stealth: Essential for a thief as you’ll definitely need to sneak around places.
Arcana: You don’t get this as standard as a rogue, but if you can get proficiency in it through something like the skilled origin feat, then this could be worthwhile to help you with using those spell scrolls.

Options to avoid

Athletics: You’re far better off going for acrobatics.

Species/race

There are a few things to consider when choosing a species for a thief:

Safety first: Rogues are not as tough as other martials so anything that can help keep you safe is a good option. Resilience features can be useful too, but they tend to be secondary as thieves in particular, find it easy to avoid damage in combat.
Innate spellcasting: You can’t repeat cast spells unfortunately and fast hands only makes magic actions a bonus action when using magic items, not when casting spells. So picking a species with innate spellcasting won’t stack the benefits here.

Recommended options

Aasimar (2024): Resistance to necrotic and radiant damage increases your hardiness. For celestial revelation, all the options are useful but you usually want to avoid being surrounded by enemies, making flight your best option. Use this to launch projectiles from the relative safety of the skies. And you can still hide in the air, popping out from behind trees, buildings and other things. It’s also useful outside of combat for accessing awkward places, though your climb speed should help a lot here. A bit of healing is a decent emergency option too.
Halflings (2024): Much easier hiding is especially great for a thief, allowing you to hide behind your wizard (or other ranged character of medium size) and jump in and out with sneak attacks. Luck is universally great, but especially good for a class with lots of high risk, high reward rolls like being stealthy, disarming traps, trying to deceive others and attempting to land sneak attacks. Brave gives you a little extra resilience which is always handy.
Gnomes (2024): A Forest Gnome’s minor illusion and speak with animals actually work really well for a thief as they don’t require spell slots. Minor illusion is a cantrip that’s great for distractions and speak with animals can be cast as a ritual for information gathering. Gnomish cunning is an excellent durability feature against some very common saving throws.
Human (2024): A great way to grab arcana proficiency to help with using spells scrolls. Daily heroic inspiration and an extra feat are great for a high risk utility class too.

Options to avoid

Tiefling (2024): It’s hard to justify a cantrip attack over sneak attack, especially when your dexterity will be superior to any spellcasting ability. The other spells can only be cast once, and with an inferior spellcasting ability.

Backgrounds

Backgrounds are much more important now with D&D 2024 as the ability score increases previously tied to your race/species are now linked to your background. Remember that you can either choose to increase one of the ability score options from a background by 2 and the other by 1, or you can choose to increase all 3 ability scores by 1.

You also get an origin feat linked to your background too.

Primarily, you want to focus on increasing key ability scores with the associated origin feat being your next priority. As such, I’d suggest the below are your best backgrounds for a thief:

Name	Ability scores	Origin feat	Skill proficiencies	Tool proficiency
Criminal	Dexterity, constitution, intelligence	Alert	Sleight of hand, stealth	Thieves tools
Charlatan	Dexterity, constitution, charisma	Skilled	Deception, sleight of hand	Forgery kit
Entertainer	Strength, dexterity, charisma	Musician	Acrobatics, performance	One kind of musical instrument
Guide	Dexterity, constitution, wisdom	Magic initiate (druid)	stealth, survival	Cartographer’s tools
Wayfarer	Dexterity, wisdom, charisma	Lucky	Insight, stealth	Thieves’ tools

Criminal and charlatan are probably your best options. Alert offers you an interesting boost to your initiative that will help you with your thief’s reflexes. A charlatan will give you the chance to grab arcana proficiency with skilled.

Feats

At 1st level, you can grab an origin feat through your background and from level 4, you can pick up a general feat (or another origin feat if you want) instead of an ability score increase.

General feats are all half feats now as they give an ability score increase and the traits of a feat. But you’ll only get +1 to an ability score rather than the +2 you’d get from increasing your ability score. Make sure you go with a feat with an appropriate ability score increase too.

Below are some feats I’d recommend for a thief:

Origin feats

Alert – Going early in combat will let you get hidden nice and early, keeping you a bit safer while letting you land your sneak attacks. This gets even better when you get thief’s reflexes.
Lucky – More ways to be reliable at important rolls is universally beneficial. Especially for when you need to land your sneak attack.
Musician – A universally great feat for dishing out heroic inspiration. Great for altruistic rogues. Plus you can ensure you have some heroic inspiration available too.
Skilled – You may find you need a lot of skill proficiencies as subterfuge tends to require a lot of skill proficiencies. Plus, this is a great way to get arcana proficiency.

General feats

Defensive duelist – Better AC at the expense of your reaction is a strong option.
Inspiring leader – Great for charisma-heavy thieves to grant temporary hit points to the party.
Mage slayer – Best against mages, but having what is practically legendary resistance is also great.
Piercer – Better damage for most of the best thief weapons. Especially when you land a critical.
Skulker – Become really reliable at hiding. Blindsight is also great in certain situations that you could even exploit in combat through things like the darkness spell (if you work with an ally).
Speedy – Good for hit and run tactics when you don’t want to use your bonus action on disengaging.

Weapons

You’ll want to go with finesse and ranged weapons that can take advantage of your dexterity for attacks. The specific weapons you choose though, will depend partly on how you want to fight and what weapon mastery properties you want to be using:

A light crossbow is your best ranged option with the highest damage available and long range attacks.
As landing sneak attacks is so important to your damage output, getting a second attack is quite important to ensure you’re not reliant on a single attack. Because you’ll need your bonus action for other things than offhand attacks, this means weapons with the nick weapon mastery are more important for you than the weapon’s damage output. This means going for daggers or scimitars.
You can grab a shortsword to pair with a dagger or scimitar for easy advantage with vex and for your second attack. A scimitar does more damage than a dagger so is a better option, unless you want to take the piercer feat, in which case, go for a dagger.
If you want 2 attacks at range, you can also grab 2 daggers and use their thrown property.

Armor

Your only real option here is studded leather as it’s so cheap that it’s easily available and you can only wear light armor anyway. No other type of light armor is better than studded leather.