Sneaky thief with 2-handed weapons, viable?

[Evilllamas]

The dark brotherhood gloves only double one handed sneak crits

[ninga_express]

Once you get sweep, you might be able to kill 5 people at once if you can gather them in one place(throw voice).

Things I suggest you get are, enchanting so you can get the fortify 2 hand, smithing, to get the best 2 handed weapon possible, and most likely a warhammer since they have the highest damage.

[JimboUK]

mass doesn't make weapons noisier :D

 

a 45 lb daedric warhammer is just as quiet as a dagger until you swing it. :D

after which your sneak skills are the same as with a dagger or bow so hide the same way

and then sneak on a target the same way as a dagger.

 

you wont get 15x damage but you will get about the same overall better or worse,

only difference is that out in the open, you can maul a guy brutally where your

dagger is useless :/

 

That's the beauty of it, if you get caught they've still got a fight on their hands. As or being quiet, the flying enemies tend to make a lot of noise, not that their friends seem to notice, you have to laugh when one says "I must have imagined it" while standing next to the mangled corpse of his dead friend. :D

[Tropxe]

Yes, the gloves double all backstab damage. There's also a perk to raise the backstab damage of swords to x6, so you can do x12 backstab damage with them (though I think this is just one-handed swords). However, a dagger will still do almost double damage with its x30 backstab damage, taking into account that the base damage is less. That said, there are enchants that raise damage that don't work on daggers, only on swords. So the idea is, if you're going to enchant stuff, backstabbing with swords is better. If you're not going to enchant stuff, daggers are almost twice as good. Also note that backstab and critical damage are two different things. Critical damage has a random chance of happening with any hit, and can occur at the same time as backstab damage. There is no way to give daggers a critical chance, but there is with swords. That's another way swords may be considered better.

 

A really good combination with a backstab-based character is the Calm series of spells in the Illusion school. You know how daggers are pretty crappy in a straight forward fight? Well with Calm, you can just make that angry cave bear go passive for a bit, go behind him and backstab him. You can make whole groups of enemies go passive, then just backstab them one by one.

[Excaliburp]

Given the conflicting reports about the Shrouded Gloves' interaction with sneak attacks, I rushed into the DB storyline to test it out. It doesn't work with two-handed weapons. Welp, guess I'll be sticking with Nightingale and Thieves Guild armour then.