How are rogues in later expansions? I'm considering spinning one up because of how cheap they are to gear, but I've heard they're pretty much one of the worst DPS classes? They're literally the only class in EQ I've never played.
I don't know what the game looks like now, but there was an era from OoW to like SoD where rogues would be top on any fight where they could tee off on some backstabs. Backstabs are like 30%-40% of a rogues damage so you can imagine on fights where you have to switch targets a lot and can't position yourself that DPS is going to suffer. I was playing a rogue during this time and this was when I went hardcore poopsock mode since I'm a bit younger than the rest of you. You only heard about Zerkers out DPSing rogues on extremely short fights or fights like above.
If you do roll a rogue, the rogue channel is interesting, they're so few of us that basically every rogue knows each other, it's like it's own little guild. Part of the reason it's so cheap is that a lot of us have agree'd to not buy overpriced bullshit. For example, during some of the last sky raids we had someone bid on the 41% haste rogue belt to resell. I was telling folks for days that it was coming and not to buy it since it'd be more or less worthless when they got our cakewalk of an epic. Sure enough as soon as he won it, he ran straight to rogue chat and tried to sell it for 20kr and got laughed out of the chat.
I genuinely dont think rogues are nearly as bad as people put them out to be.
In the initial week when nobody outside of mages do dps? sure but once kunark hits and they start double backstabbing and getting decent gear they're quite good
Considering I've heard people claim that rogues are worse than SK pets, not in an exaggerate for comedic effect way, but in a "my improperly set up parse proves it" kind of way. I'd say yeah, we're certainly not as bad as people say. We're super gear dependent, and Mitigation of the Mighty fucks melee classes in general and that's especially obvious with rogues. I parsed myself on one Naggy fight where I did nothing but miss for 43 seconds. That's with skills maxed and 255 strength. Since most TLPs see a mass exodus by the time MotM is removed they never see melee classes without it and just play CasterQuest.
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