The stealth/pickpocket builds benefit greatly from oddity while combat builds suffer.
Nonsense.
Concise and retarded.
Stealth builds usually avoid most combat. This coupled with the fact that Oddity drops are random on enemies often leads to stealth builds not getting as many Odities fom enemies than combat heavy builds but they can often make it up with Lockpicking/Hacking. Therefore it's pretty balanced between the two.
If you want to talk about "retarded" I'd start looking into a mirror if I were you.
Let's make a few things clear.
a) "Stealth builds usually avoid most combat." Stealth builds are still combat builds. Stealth builds
can avoid a great deal of combat, but this fact in no way implies that they
should or
must. If you feel that your stealth character is skipping too much combat, I suggest
not doing so as a remedy to the problem.
b) All oddities from enemies are limited to 1/2/3 maximum. Chances for them to be holding those oddities ranges from 100% to ~20%. And for each enemy with probabilistic oddity drop, there are multiple dozens to over a hundred present in the game itself (and all of them respawn after some amount of time). This means that you can easily avoid the vast majority of combat with these enemies while still collecting all the oddities from them.
c) Hacking and lockpicking (and to a lesser degree, pickpocketing) each offer availability to oddities that cannot be achieved by a character
without those skills until later in the game, sometimes much later.
Given b) and c), it is unavoidable to conclude that characters lacking hacking/lockpicking/pickpocketing will trail behind other characters in terms of oddity XP, all else being equal.
Now, let's consider the same idea from the point of view of classic XP. The majority of enemies in the game respawn after a certain amount of time. Opportunities to use skills like lockpicking and hacking are fixed. This means that combat XP will
inevitably outpace non-combat XP in the long run. The point where this occurs will depend somewhat on playstyle and progression path.
One of the big conveniences of the game for Stealth character is the ability to avoid "unnecessary" combat. If you choose to exercise this ability, though, you lose out on combat XP. This is (among many other reasons involving grinding) a reason that oddity XP is superior in terms of gameplay, character development etc. to classic XP. Choosing to go with oddity XP is kind of like activating a patch that buffs an entire playstyle, making many more cool characters available to play without strings attached.
Thus, we can see that "combat" characters come out ahead in classic XP, and characters which like to avoid (some) combat have the possibility to come out ahead in oddity XP.