Quote Originally Posted by Skrum View Post

They function but they don't impress. At least that's me. They're just kinda there, plunking away. They have an extremely replacement-level feel; like any class could be subbed in and not a single thing the rogue was doing would be missed.
I stopped in amazement at this and then I thought it over and realised that you (when a DM or player) are just dealing with very different encounters to me. Certainly very different to encounters I run as a DM

I tend to run a good number of my encounters as "problem solving while being punched in the face". The encounter will have multiple often competing objectives and part of the design of it in the game is to see which objectives the characters choose to focus on. I very rarely run any encounter where the only objective is kill or be killed. I would definitely state that anything I regard as a centrepiece encounter will be like this, maybe the rather trivial ones that are only there to deplete a few resources don't have that level of thought going into them but the key important ones will be.

So when I am running things the flexibility, mobility and wide skill options of the rogue are all relevant not just outside combat but very often in combat. Rogues are excellent in that environment, they can do things resource-free that casters need to spend resources on doing should they even have an appropriate spell.

In anything resembling a white room environment I can see how Rogue would look the weakest of the classes. Its core class fantasy has been somewhat excluded from the encounter by encounter design.