For The Shinies! A Guide For Thief

Gilfinder
Gets you 50% more gil on gil-dropping monsters. It's enhanced by your relic legs, but this has never been a relevant source of gil.

Evasion Bonus
Increases your evasion, up to +72 by level 99. This, coupled with your best-in-Vana'diel evasion skill, and naturally high AGI, makes evading attacks a viable form of damage mitigation.

Treasure Hunter
So important, it has its own section in the guide! See section IV.

Resist Gravity
You have up to 30% resist against gaining Weight. Sometimes you can use Flee to remove it as well. Just like in real life!

Triple Attack
You have a base 6% chance to triple attack at 99. With merits, it goes up to 11! With job gifts, up to 19!! We stack this as much as we can on TP gear.

Assassin
Guarantees that a correctly lined up Trick Attack will crit. This is a standard feature of Sneak Attack. While mainjob THFs have no more reason to ever think about this job trait, if you're /THF this means your Trick Attacks are not guaranteed crits.

Ambush (Merited)
Adds accuracy and ranged accuracy when behind a monster, 3 per merit. Relic chest augments give +1% triple attack per merit.

Aura Steal (Merited)
Adds a dispel effect to your Steal ability, IF you didn't steal anything. Extra merits increase the possibility by ~20% per merit that you GAIN the dispelled buff, but beware: you never quite get a 100% absorb rate, and repeated usage of this ability against a single enemy will greatly reduce its effectiveness.

Relic head augments make it dispel+steal two effects instead of one. (ty Calamity)

Crit Attack Bonus
+14% Critical Hit Damage, kapow!

Dual Wield
Gives you up to 25% dual wield delay reduction, which is the same as subbing Ninja! Back when level 75 was the cap and we didn't have this job trait, /NIN was the subjob of choice for the dual wield trait, but now that is no longer a factor. Note that there is a delay cap - your combined actual weapon delay, modified by Dual Wield and Haste, cannot be less than 20% of your base weapon delay, so there is a limit on how much of this you can stack under heavy buff conditions.

Perfect Dodge
This allows you to dodge all melee attacks for 30 seconds. It does NOT affect ranged attacks or spell damage. It may save your life! But pay attention to your target's attack types before you find yourself dead and without your 1-hour.

Augmented relic hands will give you another 10 seconds.

Larceny
Dispels one buff from the enemy and gives it to you, like Aura Steal. What makes it interesting is if the enemy is using a 1-hour ability (original 1-hours, not new ones) you will automatically steal that 1-hour ability. Works great with Mighty Strikes, Hundred Fists, Blood Weapon, or even defensive abilities like Invincible or Perfect Dodge.

Steal
Mostly used these days for Aura Steal, which we recommend you merit at least once.

This is one of your few Job Abilities (besides Mug, Bully, and Despoil) that actively targets an enemy, making it a possible proc against Job Ability-proc monsters.

It does have niche use for actually stealing items, so you can theoretically get up to +38% success rate! Realistically you won't have Rogue's Bonnet (because you upgraded it) or Gorney Ring +1 (because there are much better choices for that quest), so a total of +34.
ItemSet 394782

Sneak Attack
Makes your next melee attack a guaranteed critical hit, and adds your total DEX to the base weapon damage for that hit (/THF does not add the DEX to base weapon damage, only guarantees the crit). You must be behind the target unless you have Hide or Bully up. If you miss, it's because you weren't behind the target. Empyrean gloves increases the DEX bonus to damage, but you will generally use SA only with weaponskills, so you'll focus on weaponskill-damage gloves. The likelihood of Treasure Hunter increasing is also greater on a Sneak Attack: this is the best reason to solo SA and you'll want to use TH gear then.

Flee
Gives you 60% (capped) increased movement speed for 30 seconds, 45+ if activated with AF feet on (they only need to be on for activation). Works well for mass pulling / aggroing, or for crossing Jeuno REALLY QUICKLY.

Trick Attack
The same as Sneak Attack, except it adds your total AGI to the base weapon damage, and you need to be behind an ALLY. All enmity from the attack is transferred to said ally. /THF does not get the AGI bonus to damage, or the guaranteed critical hit, just the hate transfer. Allies include NPCs that are tied to you, such as trusts and pets, but not other people's pets/fellows. AF hands increase the AGI bonus to damage, but like with Sneak Attack you're saving this for weaponskills. There is no way to ignore the positioning requirement on this one.

Trick Attack does not remove any form of Invisible, including Hide.

Mug
You can take a generally pitiful amount of gil from an enemy that normally drops gil.

However, it is also a JA proc, it's a very quick, very low hate method of aggroing something (along with Steal), and with Job Points it becomes a self-cure! It gains a bonus from your relic head.

Hide
A widely misunderstood ability, this allows you to do three things:

1. Give yourself the Invisible effect for a short amount of time. This works in the same manner as the Invisible spell.
   

2. Allows you to remove yourself entirely from the enmity list of a monster if you are at the top. This generally works for sight AND sound-based monsters, but does not give you protection against scent. This means you can be fighting a monster, pop Hide, and the monster will stop attacking you. However, if it's aggressive and sound-based, you have a limited amount of time before it will re-aggro you if you are in its aggro radius, so run away! Great for removing unwanted aggro in solo situations.
   

3. While the Hide buff is on, Sneak Attacks can be used from any direction. However, activating Sneak Attack itself will remove Hide, so remember to use Sneak Attack first. Trick Attack doesn't remove Hide, but isn't affected by it either.
   

Your AF body increases the duration of Hide, but since the most common usages of Hide are #2 and 3 this is not a necessary macro swap.

Accomplice
The 5 minute cooldown, 50% hate stealing cousin of Collaborator. More about this in the next paragraph...

Collaborator
Allows you to steal 25% of the hate of an ally, as long as you're within 20 yalms of your mutual enemy. Only 1 minute cooldown, yet it shares the cooldown with Accomplice. This is GREAT for keeping your squishy mages alive, and if you're in hate-sensitive situations you should spam this ability on your mages. The only time I would ever use Accomplice over this is if your squishy mage would die if hate was not off him/her RIGHT NOW, and you're not expecting your mage to do anything dangerous in the next five minutes.

Another interesting way to use Collaborator is targeting whichever primary DD currently has the most hate. If this makes you the primary hate target, this can work to your advantage: the primary DD can DD harder and not die, while you can swap in some evasion gear and save your healers some MP. However, if for whatever reason you're not better than the DDs at tanking - for example, if your gear is not up to par - this is probably not a good strategic option. This can also horribly backfire if the new primary hate target, thanks to you reducing the melee hate by 25%, is a mage. It is also very bad for you if your mages do something hate-intensive in the minute that Collaborator is down. So, please, exercise caution using Collaborator this way.

Your Empyrean head piece increases hate stolen substantially, for both Accomplice and Collaborator.

Assassin's Charge (Merit)
Your next attack will be a triple attack. We TP too quick to use this for generation, and because we TP so quick we WS too often for this to have substantial DPS gain. Put merit points elsewhere!

Feint (Merit)
After using this ability, your next hit will apply a 30 second, 50% Evasion Down debuff to the target. Meriting this to 5/5 increases the chance of the Feint hit applying a Treasure Hunter increase by 100%, from a base 20% increase. This means your chance is doubled, NOT guaranteed. Best used with a Sneak Attack or a Trick Attack (but not with a weaponskill, it doesn't apply on weaponskills) to both guarantee the next hit landing and to greatly increase a Treasure Hunter increase.

Your relic pants will increase the evasion down by 10 per merit level.

Despoil
This does the same thing as Steal, but adds a random status debuff if you succeed and generally steals a different item. You'll basically never use this for stealing things.

But it's also a JA proc, and with job points, it becomes a TP drain, which is pretty fantastic!

Conspirator
Grants Subtle Blow and Accuracy to party members, except for the player highest on the hate list, for an amount scaling up relative to party size. Your Empyrean chestpiece makes this also grant attack bonus, but it's not worth swapping in - the effect is applied per hit, not when first activated. Great for lowering monster TP gain!

Bully
Applies an intimidation effect to the monster! Very cool, and it works as a monster enfeeble instead of a player buff, so the monster target doesn't matter. Even more cool is that it removes the positioning requirement for Sneak Attack, allowing you to use it when you are the monster target!