Why can't Rogues be viable on TLP?

What if they gave Rogues a third arm? Triple Wield. Problem solved.

Just know if you play a Rogue it's not until level 100 that you will stop consistently losing to Monk.

This. I do agree that lack of focus effects hurts. Running Wizard on Ragefire felt pretty good. Running one on Rizlona, it absolutely took some more cognizance of nuke efficiency and liberal potion use.

Rains are still bread and butter for maximizing Damage-per-mana, but I feel like a lot of Wizards overlook Level 17 Force Snap. It starts off being the most expensive nuke at that level and also packs a stun which tanks at that level aren't going to appreciate, but go on up a little farther when the tanks can manage their aggro some more, and suddenly its an all-star with a fast cast time and great Damage-per-mana. Heck even at low levels if you've got a tank that's good on the taunt key the rest of the group might appreciate the aggro transfer boost. I kept it on the bar for all of classic. 69 mana (nice) gets regen'd pretty fast so Wizards have no excuse for afk medding. If you're fighting stuff that runs a tank getting enough aggro to let you rain + force snap probably has the mob running quite efficiently. The aggro from the stun doesn't matter much if the mob is running once it recovers. Maybe adjust slightly if you are also on snare duty.

False: wizards need to use their newest/highest damage/highest level nuke at all times in all situations. And then make sure you sit down immediately mid fight for extra agro and no extra mana regen.

Don't forget to immediately go AFK after sitting mid-fight. So if and when the player finally comes back from AFK they still have no mana.

Rogue is the worst class in classic by far in TLPS. There really isn't any redeeming quality to the classic Rogue.

Rogues are fine Epic+ and once Velious hits they become especially good in raids and can easily get to the top of dmg meters if played correctly (Lookin at you Rovell!). I'm not much of a rogue grouping guy as Id rather add a second chanter or mage or even a charming necro or monk, but Rogue are fine.

Why aren't rogues viable in........

They are. People have just heard about or grouped with too many bad players.

And even then... just barely beating someone in damage ... most people would still rather have the monk in the group. Monk can back up tank, can keep himself healed with mend, has feign death, can pull etc. So it's like oh wow, a Rogue can finally start to do a smidget more damage than Rangers and Monks late into TLP, but Rangers and Monks still bring a hell of a lot more to the table.

Hardly the case at all. I played a Rogue 20 years ago. I've never experienced something as amazing a Rogue in EverQuest during it's prime -- in no other MMO I've played has there been such a unique class in the sense that they were incredibly unbalanced and felt terrible to play solo and had no utility or survivability, but were also top DPS by a large margin, so the trade off felt good.

Even on P99 I get excited when a geared Rogue joins our group because I know they don't rely on mana and our experience is about to fly through the roof.

Now over here on TLP the class isn't even viable. It's like how in the hell does this make any sense? Why on earth would someone play a Rogue when a Ranger and Monk can out DPS them, but also have way more survivability and utility. Like damn, dudes. Give Rogues double backstab at level 25, and triple backstab at level 45 or something because this is actually crazy and it's weird to see people defending a company butchering a class so hard to the point where they serve no purpose.

Even if people want to talk about Wizards being bad, Wizards can still solo the hell out of some mobs as well as being top DPS in raids. Rogues can't even solo green mobs, and are irrelevant in raids.

Who cares if Monks and rangers slightly out dps them right now? Rogues are competitive after Kunark. Groups are just a grind fest of slaying anyways. Utility is mostly overrated and the deeper into the expansions the less it becomes useful. If people are nit-picking that badly on TLPs they probably aren't that good and compensating by taking in the "superior" classes.

On TLPs they are disadvantaged for 6 months, tops. Play after 6 months and it's a non-issue.

Could rogues use a boost in Classic/Kunark? Probably. But some of it also has to do with the embarassing itemization of gear in those eras. Devs didn't know their a** from their elbow in those years. If rogues has a semi decent dagger in TLP they'd be way better off. However, they don't get that until Velious.

One could also make a strong argument that monks/rangers are OP and need to be brought down some. But that's a different discussion.

Meh, most people don’t play 6 months and would like the time that they do play to actually be fun and productive. Rogues don’t satisfy that metric. Telling people to wait 6 months is terrible business practice, because the biggest appeal of a TLP is community buzz due to the fresh starts for everyone. Other classes need work and it’s in their best interest to do so.

Sounds like a them problem, then. This is a game of 27 expansions over 22 years and everything built on top of itself. To complain about a class issue that lasts 6 months of the roughly 170 months a TLP will last until it hits live is senseless. I see no reason why devs should prioritize an issue that is only prevalent for 3% of a TLP server's life cycle. If a person decides to not play for more than a few months, dealing with the issues of those eras is their problem, not the devs.

Repeating the same era over and over again and expecting something to be different is also insane.

Warriors blows chunks for quite a awhile as well. They literally cannot do their primary job in classic unless exploited (see nerfs to jboots spam). Rangers are pretty laughable dps in classic/kunark as well.

While it would be nice if rogues got a bit of love, they're viable they just don't do as much damage. In a full group of people who are actually paying attention it doesn't matter much if the group is doing a bit less damage. In classic you can invite anyone to your group/raid and have success.

That’s great but doesn’t solve the issue. Telling people to wait 6 months for an issue to be resolved isn’t a solution. EQ tends not to fix issues outside of expansions, which is brought back into light every TLP cycle.

It’s a game, it’s supposed to be fun. The notion to come back in 6 months isn’t a smart solution, because people just don’t play that long.

How long do you think the average EQ TLP player spends on a server?

Again, that's a player problem. If you think devs are going to prioritize a temporary issue because players CHOOSE to not play past a certain era, you're lying to yourself. Pigeonholing yourself in short eras is literally the opposite of the normal MMORPG game dynamic. You are meant to progress almost indefinitely.

The intent of a TLP server is accelerated content with set unlock periods so players can see more content in less amount of time. The intent was never for players to just revolving door the same content over and over. Part of experiencing the content is learning and understanding the ebb and flow of how the game dynamics changed over time. It isn't meant for players to highlight shortcomings of older content based on modern standards and plead for revamps.

The entirety of this post is misleading. "Why are rogues not viable on TLPs?" First of all, they are viable on a TLP for 93% of the content available. Under just about every quantitative metric, 93% is considered quite viable. The more accurate discussion would be "Why aren't rogues viable at the beginning of TLPs" or "Why aren't rogues viable for the eras I choose to play in?". It's literally a self-imposed problem and the solution is laid out in front of their eyes: Continue playing the game.

Also, I love how the ranger class is brought up as an example when they are quite anemic until Luclin, which is right around when rogues start to come into their own. You cannot use the "but TLP players aren't around that long" as an excuse for justifying a boost for the rogues when, from a purely dps perspective, rangers are just as bad during those 6 months.

Yes, changes on live affected older content and that makes it even more difficult to try and maintain some semblance of a more "classic" experience. Certain classes have indirectly benefitted more than others due to these changes, while others have not benefitted as much IE the rogue class. However, TLP players are going to need to deal with some of these downstream side effects of live server changes because the solutions aren't always easy. Devs clearly don't want to affect live as it's their primary concern.

I will say this: Boosting a class is just going to further highlight the ongoing power creep problem of early era TLPs. Almost all content the average TLP player experiences is so trivial and mindlessly easy that any concerns over disparity between the rogue vs monk/ranger is almost laughable. If anything, and I hate saying it, power reduction (the dreaded nerf) should be reviewed for specific classes.

/thread

This is the correct approach for TLP "class balance".

Power creep is real, it's also why we keep getting the "make content harder" posts all the dang time.

It's a big reason why we ended up needing MoTM on raid mobs, that was a "dirty fix" to the problem as it was less time to do that than it was to do a root & branch review & retune of classes.

Trivial content is unrewarding in terms of it being a good player experience.

Boosting classes that are perceived as weak just aggravates the problem even more, there has to be some parity and that does involved rebalancing overpowered classes to bring them back in line with their peers and while there has never been any real dps hierarchy on the dev side the players for sure have always had one - well several actually but with a rough consensus that most dps should be competitive with each other rather than a couple of classes having a huge advantage over all of the others.

Players don't like losing power but sometimes, for the good of the game, they need to.

Does a TLP even need the rogue class? They could delete it and we'd be all fine.

LDoN has a raid that requires rogues