At what point to rogues become "viable" on a TLP? It's not a sarcastic question, I don't play a rogue, so I would like to know.
Defining 'viable' as "there is a reason to have a rogue in the party instead of another DPS class", they're viable with a significant gear advantage. I don't think they meet my bar until Kunark + epic. There are times where they're competitive with everyone else, but that mostly relies on BIS gear. If the rogue player isn't raiding, I'm not sure they meet that bar until.... Underfoot? Or something like that, anyway. Rogues are really dependent on BIS weapons in Velious and PoP to compete with their peers.
They are still behind other melee in that era even with BiS weapons. Monks blow them away until probably depths, when monks still win but rogs can put up ok numbers on some fights. Rog weapons suffer from horrible ratios based on early developers trying to balance them around backstab. Almost never see a rog using 2 daggers for a reason. The biggest gift they had was autoskill working for backstab at lvl 1 now, the only monitoring needed is making sure you stay mostly behind your target now. If they improved rog dagger ratios and brought assassination back to a reasonable expansion, rogs could be a lot better. Right now, by the time they are sold dps again, bards start being top melee just about.
This question always seems to come up in new TLPs. I went rogue main yelinak, and i can say it was rough in the early expansions. My experience: Classic - you are a trash can with garbage dps in both group/raid scene, and bring 0 utility to group/raid. you must really love RP as a rogue, have a soft spot for the class for nostalgic reasons, really want to go against the meta, or just loving being the underdog. Kunark (+ epic) -> luclin --> your dps starts to rise with epic and triple attack, and with much more effort (focused gear plan, using the correct weapons vs the correct mobs, poison choice, general positioning, etc.) you can be in the top 5 or 10 of a parse, but still not beat the monk or caster dps who get there with much less effort and bring much more utility (mob/raid specific who gets the top slot) - still 0 utility to group/raid. I think i had like 5 different weapon sets, and constantly had to change out augs to try to compete vs ice/fire/magic resistant mobs, and swapping in/out the bane weaps for VT clears, etc. Luclin/PoP -> OoO/GoD/DoN -- your dps increases, you can focus on atk gear and with BiS you are more competitive towards the top of parse, but still putting in more effort and not seeing the reward for that increased effort. What i saw was that you would be top 3-5 on the total raid parse for the night including trash and bosses, but a single parse on the boss you were top 5-8. Still 0-10% utility as you can now SoS and pull corpses or disarm traps/pick doors, but that aspect of the game is pretty much non existent these days. Going forward, casters seem to hit a lull in their DPS, monks aren't as dominantly powerful, rangers now go back to swords vs bow, and you have to compete with zerk'ers now. Getting in the top of the total parse for a raid night seems to stay consistent, but now you can get in the top 3/5 slots per raid boss. Utility is still near 0-10%. Recommendations - - Increase DPS - either by boosting the effect of the innate AA that rogues gets as you level to be more powerful so dps increases (don't remember the name); or adjust the daggers available which seems like a larger overhaul. - Increase the utility. (totally huge overall). I think the coolest way would be to revamp early poison making. Get rid of the 1 shot per poison application junk, and give the 40 proc buff's that you see later on. If a rogue could add DD proc (in a variety of resists), a slow proc w/ a big resist modifier so it's useful (to help get mobs slow on incoming), agro reduction proc, snare and weaken procs, i could see rogues being asked to do these in both group and raid play. You will still want a shm slow on raid bosses, but getting some % slow on a boss real quick so that the shm can debuff/slow would be cool. For the group game, the reality is that most groups don't even slow mobs any more, but every mob getting hit with a rogue proc slow wouldn't hurt and could be impactful on the early game when clerics have 100 mana. -- You want to make rogue poison top tier, make some poisons no-rent and applicable to other classes. Tanks want an agro buff, monks want an agro reduction, go find a rogue and buy a few stacks of poisons for your raid or exp evening, or better yet, invite a rogue to your group to supply the team. Reality is rogues are bad in the beginning, but grow overtime to be slightly bad. I don't see darkpaw spending resources on an issue that is only really terrible for 3-6 months of each TLP.
I still think releasing the poison revamp earlier would make rogues much better, and would be a very simple fix.
Just wanted to reply and say this is awesome insight. Poisons adding utility to rogues for main hand and offhand procs would be a welcome addition to classic+.
The very simple suggestion I've seen over the decades of recommendations was melee augments for backstab mods. One merchant per origin town for rogue races with melee aug specific to backstab to make rogues not complete trash cans that literally get out dps'd by necro pets. Call the intern in, we have a job for them.
So these are not my personal suggestions, just ones I've received over the years from the masses when doing this post. Always happy to see peoples thoughts or ideas. Recommendations over the years: Melee Augments specific to 1hp with a backstab mod. Enable Sneak Attack for rogues at level 1. Enable Shroud of Stealth for rogues (Original request was level 1 but, any time in classic would be fine, even level 50.) This would at least enhance a rogues chances at being a rep in groups like The Hole for example. If you pick up a rogue to rep one of your dps you know they can get to camp safely and not die. We’ve all had to go on rescue missions and corpse retrievals for all the other classes.. Baseline chaotic stab because without the ability to backstab you get out dps’d by bards in classic. (and everyone else, but it hurts the most to say bard) That being said, not a big fan of this suggestion, I like the idea of having to be behind a mob to utilize backstab. Everyone wants a revamp of poisons… but we know what a large endeavor that would be, so I’ll leave it here but literally no hopes are going up for this one. Introduce a poison proc AA that procs off of backstab, possibly with some utility. (slow, snare, etc.) I do think it would be really awesome to have a reliable snare and a working intimidation skill. (We all know how useful intimidation is, its literal only use is to get your group wiped as people spam it to raise the skill, even though at max its still useless =D) I also saw a recommendation for reworking Intimidate to be similar to necros’ Screaming Terror (3 ticks) on a 2 minute cooldown. So, instead of Intimidation being a fear, it would be a mez. It would work from a roleplaying standpoint as well, hit intimidation, it automatically turns off attack and has a chance to mez the mob. Or just turn off attack and hit intimidation. These recommendations are pulled from previous years where I’ve posted this same thread. Again, the biggest and simplest fix that would at least cause content is the backstab mod augment for 1hpiercer. I saw an argument I wanted to highlight as well. Someone pointed out that all classes in EQ don’t need to be equal and balanced, but every class should have a reason to play it. There really is no reason to choose a rogue over any other class. They bring nothing to the game that other classes can’t do better. That’s just, all there is to it. Dev’s please consider this for the upcoming TLP.
What's OoO? Omens of Omens? But really though, part of it is monks are over tuned, MOTM does not effect hand to hand as much as it effects weapons for some reason, and rogues are forced to use bad weapons because Backstab requires daggers and daggers deliberately have worse ratios than any other weapon type as a general rule. It's kind of fixed in later expansions when daggers have higher Backstab DMG than normal DMG, but in those early expansions DMG and Backstab DMG are identical so your backstabs aren't amazing and your auto attacks are bad.
Probably can't go much "earlier" than TSS, or whenever OOC regen unlocks, at least for the full power DPS poisons. I would love to see full speed sneak at lvl 1 and never-fail evade tied to never-fail hide.
One thing rogue is missing atm in the Tss+ era, why do warrior and zerkers get that battle leap ability with a 30% dps boost? Give that to rogues too please. No reason a warrior is on par with rogues atm in underfoot Rogues are never not viable btw, you'll be neck and neck with for a long time. They might not be good in classic but a good rogue won't be behind if at all from Kunark to PoP.
your cappin. a good rogue will never top the parse at least from kunark - tss, not sure about later expansions, if there's even a half way decent monk around. monk is just lazy easy mode dps and there is nothing that a rogue can do to match or surpass monks even a bad player as a monk will out dps the best rogues out there. you have to be an especially bad monk or just not getting any adps at all to lose to a rogue. There's exactly 1 fight i can remember from classic - tss where rogues could regularly top the DPS chart, and that is Dagarn the Destroyer in ntov. I'm not sure exactly why but I think rogues have better disciplines than monks in that expansion (monks dont have speed focus and destructive force yet) and that Dagarn fight will typically last exactly as long as a rogue needs to use all their discs and if he dies when the last disc is finished the rogue can be on top but most fights last longer than that and monks will take over again when the discs are over.
