Need advice on sneaking past a certain lab

[finalpatch]

Hi folks.  My character is a level 15 xbow+trap+stealth guy.  So far he's being doing pretty well by stealth kill enemies one by one or setup battle field with traps.  However, I find these strategy simply won't work for the epione lab mission for the drones.   For role playing purpose, I would ideally like to just sneak past the guards and complete my mission undetected.  But the position of the front guard means I have seemingly no way to leave his sight within a few seconds.  And a few seconds is all it takes for him to detect me.   So exactly how much stealth do I need to sneak past him?   I have 126 stealth from stats (which I maxout every level) and armor, and +40 from cloaking device, so that adds up to 166 and still it seems far from being able to stay undetected long enough to get past him.

[Turbodevil]

Lure him away with noise (throw grenade but don't hit anyone)

[finalpatch]

Lure him away with noise (throw grenade but don't hit anyone)

Well he's right in front me when I enter the area.  If I throw a grenade I would immediately expose myself right?

[Koveras]

This is south underrail, throwing grenades is totally legal and fine! As long as they don't end up exploding people, of course.

And yes, throwing a grenade is probably your best shot. But you are really making things harder if you try to full sneak that mission, not to mention you'll miss an oddity, maybe two.

[finalpatch]

Thanks, you are right,  grenade does pull them away without triggering combat. So in theory I could throw grenade, enter stealth, move past the front guard's post before he comes back.  But in practice, with my 3 STR and 0 throwing skill,  I can't throw the grenade far enough to create time window that I can sneak in.

In the end I just opened up cheat engine and set my effective stealth skill to 300 and sneaked past the front guard.  Even then I just barely made it to the shadow before his awareness indicator turns red.

IMO this challenge is not fair for a stealth character: it's either fighting 4 soldiers with no corner to hide and no chance to prepare the battle field, not entirely impossible but for a character not optimized for frontal assault will probably have to rely on save scumming for getting criticals and the enemy misses,  or I need to have 300+ stealth which is simply not possible at this stage.

[mattu]

It's a tough sneak, but I'm pretty sure I've done it with less than 300 stealth.

I've used adrenaline (just before entering stealth and then the zone transition) which I believe gives you a bit of a movement boost even in stealth. Likewise Psycho-temporal contraction.

The Interloper feat helps too, you could have waited and gotten that (if you didn't have it already).

I usually fight those guys, but sneaking by initially puts you in a hell of a better position for the fight.