If shops work as I think they work. IIRC, as you steal from a shop, a penalty is incurred for your next item, making it that much harder to make a successful grab on that attempt.. If this is the case, does anyone know, or have a base idea at how many attempts I should be making with 488 Thievery, and 61 Str/50 Agil? Right now I'm doing 2 per shop, but only hitting 18/32 experience after doing a run in Crossing and Leth, and am tired of getting multiplat fines, without maxing experience, which is the reason I stopped training it after circle chasing for 3.1. Also, is there a hard limit on the number of attempts regardless of experience?

Lastly, there still remains the random chance of simply being caught regardless of skill, and the cool down of approximately 1 hour for a given shop?

>Mark before each steal and it will tell you the heat level for the shop

Okay, that did it, some shops remain at 2, others are now at 4-6. Also found I can still steal at "shopkeeper looks your way suspiciously" without any issue. Oh, and still like how this has never been fixed:

AFTER PLEADING, AND IN THE JUDGE ROOM
>rub k gweth
You rub your kyanite gwethdesuan.
>rub j gweth
You rub your jadeite gwethdesuan.
>info

OUTSIDE THE GUARD HOUSE
>rub k gweth
You rub your kyanite gwethdesuan.
A chorus of foreign thoughts joins your own.
>rub j gweth
[Assuming you mean an oaken door.]
You rub your jadeite gwethdesuan.
A cacophony of foreign thoughts joins your own.

Could just be that I didn't min/max my opportunities there, but my experience started really dropping off in the xing area with regards to thievery when close to 500 ranks. My run hits leth, crossing, knife clan, arthe, then haven all in one swoop. It was capable of locking around those ranks, but it started to get tediously annoying with regards to capping out at shops, and having to make a bunch of pulls in one shop to get decent experience, particularly with so many shops in a massive run which takes a pretty long time.

If you can climb the undergondola, I highly recommend a shard/surrounding areas/horse clan run. Takes a fraction of the time of my leth/xing/haven run (even with travel to Shard and back), and gets the experience moving faster and better in my experience. Once you get to the point where you can lift from some of the harder areas in Horse clan you get a nice boost to exp too, which makes the range of stealing from that area extend. The only downside is that your run is cut down a little bit since half of Shard's shops close at night. At near 800 ranks it still locks me if I land every pull, and at least gets to 28/34 if I miss the hard ones, and only takes around 10-15 for the whole run.

Just my 2cp

If your useing that progressive stealing script, thats starts to slow around the 400's IIRC. After 400's i pretty much just stole from muspar'i. For a while, and i cant remember what the ranks were, but i was able to get a pretty good abount out of throne city that gave good exp really quickly. Might have been from around 450 to 500 or something, just doing the stones.

Rifkinn