Your problem (for the lack of a better word) is that you're imagining an awesome assassin and then trying to recreate him in the game, regardless of the actual design. As a result you're spreading your points way too thin. In the game the assassins aren't the sneaking around, door-lockpicking types, and the first 3 quests show that. Why expect the second city to be any different?
Are you drunk? Literally the
very first assassin vignette in the game is exactly that kind of ridiculous 'Awesome Assassin'. You enter a guy's hotel room by climbing a rope through a window, shoot him dead and then actually ->throw your fucking crossbow at his bodyguard to distract him and
stab him with an arrow legolas-style<-
This is almost exactly how I envisioned my dude to act later, and given the first mission looking like this, I was certain that I could proceed like this. The Teron palace infiltration also looked like the build was viable.
But after Teron it all fell flat on its face, and while I could still go by in Maadoran at least using some of my skills (and it was still gud back then), when I got to Ganezzar, it suddenly felt like I'd started a completely different class's playthrough. Probably my "favourite" part of the Ganezzar questline is finally getting to poison some dude's (the Legatus's) wine. But what does the check require next to alchemy? STEAL! Because 'steal' is exactly the sort of thing that comes to my mind immediately when I think of an assassin. Maybe I should have dumped all my points in trading to unlock cheesy one-liners such as 'killing is my business and business is good'.
Also, I'm not 'spreading my points too thin'. I was consistenly raising sneak + streetwise and then added some alchemy and lockpick on top. The issue was not spreading those points too thin because I could pass just about all the checks I came across that used those. The issue was spreading them into categories that were simply not fukkin used and then getting trolled by the omnipresent [impersonate] checks.
Roxor, I understand that you don't like the game - never did, never going to
You are wrong. Despite some cheap trollage, I had a lot of fun up until Ganezzar.
Why make shit up though? It's not enough to say you don't like the design and explain why?
I'm not making shit up, I'm saying this as I see it in game. After Teron, I think the only lockpick check I could find was a box in the Maadoran sewer. And for alchemy I haven't found any actual use beyond combat except for getting into the house of that sick guy in Ganezzar. Oh, you can use it to poison the aurelian outpost. Okay, but the alternative is just buying rat poison for 5 gold, so that's pretty banal. Blowing up the hangar door needs crafting. Spiking the legatus's wine needs steal. I don't think I've seen another check at all. So either I'm so extremely unlucky that for some reason I just don't run into all those checks for skills that I'm supposed to meet or there's something not quite right with the game.
You don't have to have Crafting to open that door. Ironically (and you better sit down for this one), you can open it with ... Lockpicking. Cause it opens doors. Who knew, right?
And see, this is just another problem, it's the same as the people saying the Thief questline in Ganezzar is bonkers. If, after Teron, I find a single lockpick 4 check in the entirety of Maadoran, and then I don't find any of it in Ganezzar, I think it is be pretty safe to assume for me that taking lockpick was a mistake and I should not raise it. So after running around with lockpick 4 for 80% of the game and never needing more of it, I finally get to the hangar where it turns out how much exactly is needed? 7? More?
It also has uses in Hellgate, but only if, trololo, I have lorecrafting to disable those generators or whatever the fuck they are behind those locked doors.
As for the Hellgate bomb, it's one of 4 different ways to get past the constructs. We put it there when the crafters complained they couldn't do it. Anyway...
I got past the constructs by having the loremeister craft me an IFF system, so that's not the core of the deal. The issue is for me, as the player who cannot read your mind and deduce that the bomb is only there to get past the constructs, that I run around with high alchemy and a backpack full of bombs, I find some cool new bomb thinking I'll have another panic button to play with and I can do jackshit about it because MUH LORECRAFTING.
You must unlearn what you have learned. Assassins are just killers. Core skills are 1 weapon skill, 1 defense skill and critical strike. The rest is flavor.
I have plenty of those on top of the other stuff. I think the current 140 or something body count that I have is overall a pretty good result for a playthrough this doomed.