I'm playing as charismatic mage at the moment and i am seriously annoyed at not having a proper thief in my party.

there are hundreds of locks to pick and i cannot do anything except to blow them up or smash them with my bare hands (and it does not even work on some doors)

are there any good npc who can pick locks? i don't want to waste points now on dex and lockpicking.

Virgil has some lockpicking ability. Not sure about other NPCs. Just so you know, in order to have an NPC follower pick a lock, what you need to do is try and pick it yourself. If your NPC has higher skill than you, they will say something, like "let me do that for you" and then they'll go do it.

Didn't one of Magic schools have some sort of Open spell?

Yep, Unlocking Cantrip is pretty good (the higher your magicka rating the better it is at opening things). It does make lots of noise though, so if you are trying to actually be sneaky it isn't the best.

i know about this. virglil is level 10 char. but has only one skill point there so he is useless. i wonder whether there is any other npc with lockpicking abilities.

and i had to miss the spell. thx for tellking me about it.

oh. thx.

crappy game design. a thief should be available early in the game, not 25 hours in.

Not sure I agree with that actually... the game is designed so that any character you build will have strengths and weaknesses, and no single character will be able to do everything. So if your character lacks thieving skills, then you will have (some) trouble getting through locked doors and chests. Usually you can beat them down, though, and there is the unlocking spell which will be good if you have a high magical ability.

I think if there was a thieving NPC easily available it would give players no reason to build a thief themselves. All the characters I've built so far have not had any thieving ability but they were still perfectly able to get through the game. I just had to smash a few doors and probably missed out on some loot I could have stolen if I were a skilled thief.

I mostly agree with Waltorious. If you want to be a thief character you want to put points into those skills early on. If you don't want to be a thief character but want to do the thief quests and some other such things for the sake of completeness, the companions will do just fine.

You can use Virgil's lockpick skill in a pinch- it isn't too long (lvl 21) before he raises his lockpick skill to 2- still not great but with the auto skeleton key it's enough to be pretty useful (esp. with the magic spell of reload- he jams stuff up somewhat frequently). You can get Sebastian immediately after you've been to Qintarra for the first time to take care of everything else. Tollo is late enough in the game as to not be all that useful esp. given that Sebastian does so many other things well and given that it's much more natural to end up on the good-aligned side.

My understanding is that Unlocking Cantrip is nice if your character is a full-blown mage and therefore strongly magick-aligned but pretty useless otherwise; the noise it makes doesn't help either.

If there's an annoyance about thieving by proxy, it's that you can't get any of your minions to do your pickpocketing dirty work for you. In retrospect I think I should have used up some of those fate points I've been hoarding on this; there aren't all that many pockets a non-thief character really cares about picking, and those that you do care about have really helpful items. An example is the ring of influence on JM Morat in Tarant, which he'll give you if you spend 5 of your precious character points on the relatively useless haggle skill and then pay him 10,000 gold- forget that! It has a big enough bonus to haggle that even if you want to go the Haggle Master route it may be worth spending a fate point to grab it from him first so you can get the master training while only spending four CP.

In my game (haven't finished yet), which it looks like I'll complete with at least a dozen unused fate points, I waited instead, eventually using just 1 CP, a blessing from an altar, and the two pickpocket bonus items to get my pickpocket skill up to where I could train as a master. With that, anybody who goes to sleep is pickpocketable (it's much easier to pick pockets when people are asleep).