Pickpocketing perks are secretly the best early-game investment and nobody does it

[WhiterunModder]

I'm on my 3rd playthrough and I finally figured out why my early game felt so slow before. I kept dumping perks into Pickpocket thinking it was just for stealing, but the perks that reduce detection and let you reverse pickpocket poisons / paralysis potions actually trivialize combat way harder than leveling Destruction or One-Handed ever did.

Like, at level 8-10 you can slip a paralysis poison into a bandit's inventory and watch them delete themselves the second they drink from their own bottle. Or reverse pickpocket a Fury spell scroll into a mage's pocket and watch the whole dungeon turn on each other. I was literally one-shotting encounters I had no business surviving, and I wasn't even sneaking half the time.

The weird part is nobody talks about this. Everyone's always like "stealth archer is overpowered" but the real broken thing is just... having perks that let you softly control enemy behavior without them ever knowing you did it. You don't even need high Pickpocket skill, just the perks.

Anyone else abuse this early on or am I just late to the party?

 

[TamrielTactician]

You're onto something real here, but I think you're conflating two different things. The reverse pickpocket poison / paralysis thing is genuinely strong, yeah - but it requires you to already have the poison or potion on you, which means you need to either craft it or find it. At level 8-10 you're not crafting paralysis potions yet unless you've been grinding alchemy, and paralysis potions are rare enough that you're not just stumbling into them.

The Fury spell scroll reverse pickpocket is even more niche - you need to find or buy the scroll, have the perk unlocked, and get close enough to pickpocket in the first place. That's a lot of prerequisites for something that only works if the mage actually uses it mid-combat.

Where I think you're actually right is that the early Pickpocket perks (the detection ones especially) are underrated for stealth builds. But "trivializing combat" is a stretch unless you're already geared up with the right tools. Stealth archer gets talked about more because you literally just need a bow and arrows, which are everywhere from level 1. You don't need to plan ahead.

That said, if you're the type of player who does prep work and carries poisons around, yeah, reverse pickpocket is genuinely clever and way less talked about than it should be. It's just not as braindead as regular stealth archer because it requires actual setup. Still fun though - on my current playthrough I've been messing with it and it scratches a different itch than just sneaking and backstabbing.