....What? Stealth is not that useful? Stealth surprise attacks literally grant you 4 separate free surprise turns on each character before you even start the fight, what are you even on?
These are merely surprise attacks. You can sneak up to them by avoiding their vision cones, even in the heaviest armour. No stealth abilities needed beyond clicking the hide button. You don't need Pass Without a Trace, you don't need Blessings of the Trickster. You don't need invisibility most of the time. Just surprise them from behind.
Stealth is not useful in this game in the sense that enemies that you have stealthed past will just join in the fight later on, such as the four masked people in the Hag's lair, making it more efficient to simply kill them on your way to the Hag. You are actually punished for stealthing past them because you would then have to fight them AND the Hag at the same time.
Or, you stealth surprise the hag in her own home and kill her in 1 turn like I did.
Stealth is not useless. It makes pickpocketing much easier, especially Ethel early in the camp as well as the blacksmith, and especially the Zhentarim. Pickpocketing early scale armor+1 is a huge defensive boon to your party.
Besides, you've done a half assed alpha state early access and with no full content availability and think stealth is easy just because the 4-5 bosses in the game are mostly isolated with wide open terrain? Granted, this also means individual surprise attacks may be gone by the end of this alpha, but stealth and stealth checks are two separate matters, and it's certainly more useful at least than the 90% of the garbage concentration spells you can't use because the concentration mechanic makes sure you can use nothing but Bless, Hex, Moonbeam, and Armor of Faith throughout your party.
There's a lot less useful crap in this alpha than stealth. I certainly noticed the difference in annoyance when poisoning the Goblin cauldron at the camp if I used Guidance or not, if I used Blessing of the Trickster, or if I tried stealing boots of speed at the myconid colony.
Now staves, that's what I call useless. How rewarding for a caster to feel compelled to take medium armor proficiency to wear a shield, or a druid just wielding a club and shield instead of his Faithwarden staff because they couldn't be bothered to justify Staves in terms of combat boons to a caster.
