Stealth Detection

Allows a creature to detect an enemy with active Stealth ability. The effectiveness of this ability depends by the level difference between the detecting and the stealthed creatures.

A patch in late February, 2011 modified these settings so that a unit with Stealth Detection has a base 2% chance of succeeding against an enemy with Stealth regardless of the level difference. The chance of detection can scale upwards if the levels are more equal or lopsided in the other direction, but the chance of detection will never fall below 2%. There has been no clarification as to whether this check is made for every round that the Stealthed creature is in Awareness range, or whether this check is done only when a Stealthed creature enters the Awareness range of a creature with Stealth Detection.

For defensive purposes, creatures with Stealth Detection can be used to deny scouting attempts by curious overlords, to prevent leveled thieves from looting everything in your dungeons, and to quickly discover and eliminate the thieves that would attempt to disarm all of your traps to assist a large raiding party. Without Stealth Detection, the only way to protect yourself from thieves is to force them to cross traps and hope that the thieves fail to disarm one (a failed disarm will reveal a creature with Stealth).

For the people still using thieves (and you should have at least one for scouting and looting dungeons with no detection), scouting thieves in particular are hurt by this change, as even a single Level 1 Thief in an inactive player's dungeon can detect your scouting/stealing thief, who will probably draw aggro from every enemy creature at once. Players who are massing dark elves for raiding purposes are also virtually immune to Stealthed creatures unless almost all of the dark elves are currently out raiding, as the sheer number of detection checks would give them a very high chance of discovering your thief regardless of level advantage.

And of course, raiding Tier-2 Settlements with thieves will eventually result in their being discovered and killed. Tier-1 Settlements are much safer, as there will almost never be more than 1 Ranger, and they must spawn close enough to the main path to get their detection checks. Players have run hundreds of Tier-1 Settlement raids with level 1 thieves since the patch without having a thief get detected and die, however it does happen. That is not even remotely close to the survival chance for a Tier-2 Settlement.

A level 7 Thief has a fair chance at surviving after being detected in a T1 Settlement. A level 110 Thief has come close to surviving being detected in a T2 Settlement. Due to the HP of the opponents and the poor HP scaling of a Thief (80k at level 1000) it is not anticipated that a Thief can survive a T3 detection.

Raiding high level Fortress reveals that some thief can survive after others are detected. It is unknown if this is due to a limitation on how many can be detected at once, or if it was not possible to kill them all quickly enough.

Data

 * Range: 4
 * Cooldown: 10
 * Activation: 1