How to fix Rogues

lol this post is so full of ignorance to the rogue class, I really wonder what gave you the idea to even post an opinion that undoubtedly you thought was the correct opinion on the class?

Pick lock in classic? In Unrest and befallen?
Hide/Sneak allowing you to walk right past see invis mobs and the undead?
Steal being a money maker?
D&D?

Wow. Maybe they should just straight up remove backstab now that you mention it. Compared to warriors that can only kick they are quite OP as is.

Actually, yes you can walk right past the undead with sneak/hide. Not that there's much utility in that, but you can. Only "see invis" mobs are a problem. And even then rogues can sneak behind them.

I always changed rogues in D&D. I swapped their THAC0 with clerics. Now clerics in D&D, that was an overpowered class. Tied for best armor. Second best weapon selection. Only class that could turn undead. Only class that could heal a group. Some offensive spells. Man, it was insane. Well, I mean, paladins could turn undead, but omfg did a paladin ruin a group from an RP perspective.

Since they've already gone down the path of adding melee augments to help with balance, couldn't they add a 1hp dmg aug to the vendors to solve this?

Adding a 1dmg aug for piercing weapons only would make rogues mainhand non-backstab damage more reasonable.

I think this is a potentially a great simple solution, but there are a few downsides I can see. I would also suggest making the augs ROG-only rather than piercing--many classes use piercing weapons. The biggest downside I see is that it will mess up itemization a bit by giving preference to low-delay weapons.

Monks have the ultimate stealth: Feign Death. Rogue's need a bump in DPS. I think the devs are being lazy or are extremely out of touch with the playerbase. The fix wouldn't require much effort at all.

Rogues were fixed by separating backstab damage from weapon damage so that daggers could have the same basic ratio as anything else and backstab would use a lower value in its calculation. So as bobby said the fix is to just do this exact change - they did it for newer content and would have to adjust weapons in old content.

Calling the devs lazy for not doing it is a bit of a stretch. This would probably require more work than the dot revamps they hee and hawed about.

Absolutely, changing the ratios of early era piercers would go a long way. They already know common dmg/dly ratios of comparable 1hs and 1hb. Is this more than changing one number in a list for each item? Yea, rogues would benefit from from extra BS dmg if they get lazy and don't separate out the BS dmg, but I always had the most fun when my dps was high enough to threaten pulling aggro. BS dps goes to zero when that happens (at least until much later).

They didn't seem to have any trouble changing the OT hammer weight multiple times.

Increase chance to hit from backstab. It should miss far less often.

Poison should be FAR more effective. Each application should apply a short term "buff" that increases in time based on the level and complexity of the poison. Make it a worth the time invested.

There's a chest icon in the game often seen in many Inns - hit up a handful of random spawn points for chests through various outdoor zones and dungeons just to give lockpicking more value.

Backstab misses and min dmg backstabs being fixed would help a lot.
I do love the idea of making RB a range slot item again though. I'd actually forgotten it HAD been for a while.

The game naturally fixed the rogue backstab miss problem with the backstab modifier on daggers in later expansions (PoP boasting some of the rogues best raid performance, coincidence? i think not)

Just make this backstab mod a core AA to the class and be done with it. Most likely double stacking the AA increase with the dagger mods will push the miss chance close if not to 0%, which I doubt anyone is going to be screaming nerf where the most one dimensional melee dps class in the game might actually be on par or better than monks in later expansions.

Something just occurred to me that would go a looooong way to fix rogue dmg : remove the "behind" mechanic for players like it was done for npc and pets. Far too often a backstab is wasted do that weird little area that counts as behind shifts with the target . Other NPCs types it's hard to even tell where behind is. Also, only make the skill go off when I'm range, like WoW did. Far too often on my rogue I'll go to backstab, get the out of range message yet the skill is on reuse timer. That alone eats a lot of dps.

Reposting here...

Been playing rogues off and on over the last 18 years. I don't find them "boring". If you wanted to increase the utility of rogues in classic without breaking the game, here are a few suggestions.

1) Indoor tracking - They are supposed to be good scouts, especially in dungeons so how about some limited indoor tracking ability?

2) group indoor "invis" - Wouldn't it be cool if a rogue could put everyone in the group into a "sneak/hide" mode in a dungeon? This would synergize well with indoor tracking to try and hunt named mobs in out of the way dungeons but wouldn't allow you to just run to each named as they pop in a populated dungeon. You could also use this to get to camps deep in dungeons without having to fight there.

3) See invis ability - Since rogues are supposed to be good at hiding and disguising themselves, why not also give them a skill to be able to see or detect invis? This wouldn't be huge but I could see some utility for grouping in solb. Not sure where else this might be relevant.

4) How about an aug option that procs an effect which lowers your threat level? Again not a huge change but may let rogues do more dps in groups where the tank has trouble holding aggro.

5) Last suggestion, how about a rogue skill that allows you to CC one mob as long as you are hidden and have no mob aggro? In other words, it would allow you to stealthily "knock out" a mob on incoming if the puller got more than he wanted.

Anyways, these are some of the things I have thought of over the years that might add to a rogue's utility without really changing much in terms of the core class or gameplay in general.

It sucks that rogues suck. If the devs have an easy way of increasing rogues contributions to a group without either (i) nerfing another class or (ii) completely changing how rogues are played, it would be fine with me.

But i imagine the reason nothing has been done is that none of the easy solutions come without problems. A skill cap increase alone likely won't get you there. other ways of increasing damage are likely shared with other classes. Can't add new drops really because not classic.

Maybe a buff to backstab? Would turning on double backstab early help?

Not sure how easy this will be to adjust but I will jump on the bandwagon. The range in damage and low hit chance makes the rogues "unique" skill pretty lackluster and horribly inconsistent, especially in classic/kunark. This doesn't changemuch at all in the next xpacs beyond classic either. MoTM only further complicates matters and creates even larger disparities/hit chances.

I don't think anyone wants to boost rogues to some crazy level, I would however like to know that if I killed the same boss 20 times my damage would be somewhat consistent. Nothing hurts more than popping a disc and missing 75% of the backstabs or hitting the lower end of the variance.

There is a lot of focus on damage in "fix Rogues' threads, and for classic justly so. But every class has a different moment to shine as expansions pass by. The real issue in my opinion is what a Rogue brings to the table or the lack thereof. Rogues have not aged well, where in the real old days Rogues often had a 'hell yes' spot in those painful multi-death-corpseruns-name-calling-and-cleric-leaving-drama dungeons runs which was everyday life in EQ.

Today on TLP that's no more, well not the corpse runs and group just steamroll far more than most people realize compared to true classic. Yes, back in the day I took pride in, and would not trade the one-trick-backstab pony for, that CR desirability.

To roll one on TLP it really takes someone that has a love for the Rogue role and find fun in making live hard for oneself. I do take pride in being the 11th Rogue on the server, but it really shouldn't be this way. Some dev being creative with poison for a couple of man-days could fix both the damage and increase utility while staying within the spirit of the class.

Some good ideas there. Of these, I think the stretch would be #2. Fighting into an area that has see invis is part of the game, in my opinion. Allowing a group to go pretty much anywhere at any time might be too much. Plus, even through The Darkened Sea (the expansion Phinny is on) no class gets dual invis/IVU.

#4 I think is accomplished easily enough with the old evade methods and the Escape AA (later).

I like #1 and #5 in particular. I first read #5 more as a way for rogues to get past a see invis mob that they can't sneak past for whatever reason. But certainly the enchanters knockback with memblur AA could be repurposed for rogues.

That's why in the post above, I don't really advocate for any dps increases. I just think giving rogues some useful tools to use in dungeons would go a long way to replacing the utility they had in the era of corpse runs.

I liked the idea of a rogue or 1 hand pierce only damage aug to put their weapon ratios more in line with other weapons. Instead of going back and fixing each weapon individually.

All melee DPS sucks (except monks) in classic because the weapon ratios are bad. This affects rogues the most because that's their only job, but all non-monk melees suffer. This problem largely goes away in kunark with twink weapons. If you really want to fix this, improve the ratios on weapons in classic EQ to keep up with casters.