Focus | Hints Thief Guide

Among others, focus helps you sneak or allows you to highlight important objects in the surroundings.

Focus performs the supportive role in the game, where using it is drastically limited, especially if you play at the hard difficulty level. What is even more, one of the difficulty level modifiers disables the focus bar completely, which results in playing without this additional asset. The focus bar is located right next to the health bar and, as you use it, it gradually depletes. After you exit the focus mode, it replenishes (very slowly, if you have selected a higher difficulty level) where, this process can be speeded up, if you eat poppy.

Note - even if you deplete the focus bar entirely, you can still use it to a (very) limited extent. By pressing the focus key/button you will be able to highlight quickly the interactive objects.

The main uses of focus are:

• Finding the interactive elements of the environment - this concerns the interactive ladders or venting shaft grates, as well as items that you can take a look at or loot. For obvious reasons, using focus speeds up the exploration and increases your chances to clear a location of all the loot.
• Marking of enemies and their routes - this is a big help, which decreases the risk of running into an opponent and allows you to plan on your next steps better.
• Increased speed of lockpicking- this is especially useful if Garrett is in a disadvantageous situation, while using lockpicks, e.g. in a well-lit corridor guarded by the enemies.
• Quicker pickpocketing of the NPC of the items attached to their belts - also in this case, this decreases the risk of alarming the enemies to the presence of your character.
• Easy stunning and knocking out of opponents - you will not be using this functionality of focus, if you are not going to attack enemies and walk around all of them instead.
• Assisted bow aiming - focus makes it easier for you to hit distant targets and speeds up the process of firing a well-aimed shot. This is definitely a useful function.
• Silencing of Garrett's footsteps - another functionality that is very helpful, which decreases the risk of being detected suddenly, as a result of not keeping the necessary precautions around the enemy units.

An important piece of information is that Garrett can upgrade the selected features of focus, thanks to spending points received from the Queen of Beggars. To learn more about that, see the chapter devoted to the main part of the City.