Pickpocketing Items off under level 19 MOBs

[7thGate]

I've been pickpocketing various things on my rogue, trying to get a feel for what the pickpocket mechanics are on P99. I was trying to steal a beer from gnolls in blackburrow, in order to test how item stealing worked, and I found I wasn't able to; I could pickpocket a dozen times unsuccessfully after draining out the stealable coins, then kill the gnoll and still loot a small beer.

I was wondering if maybe pickpocketing items just required a higher skill level or something, but didn't see anything about that on the wiki, so I went and read the pickpocketing code on eqemu to see what the behavior was before P99 made changes (and they definitely have, I've observed a number of differences between the eqemu code and what I'm experiencing in my testing). That's when I discovered that, as far as I can tell, you can't pickpocket items off anything under level 19 on eqemu, and you can on everything levels 19 and over (unless I'm missing something important in my reading of the code).

I did a small amount of testing, where I pickpocketed two dwarven guards near kaladim and got small kite shields, then pickpocketed a goblin whelp around 10 times unsuccessfully before killing it and finding a drink, which would lend some small amount of evidence to that being the case on P99 too, although maybe there is something else going on.

I guess the first question I would have, is has anyone successfully pickpocketed an item off something under level 19 on p99? And second, does anyone know if you should be able to do that? I haven't run across any notes about being unable to pickpocket items off low level creatures when trying to figure out how pickpocket used to work, but I didn't play a rogue on live back in the day so I don't really know what the expected behavior is supposed to be.

[Videri]

I and others have pickpocketed the scalps off of orc pawns, but maybe something has changed since then.