The Rogue is a class that I really love, conceptually. While I tend to think of my go-to fantasy archetypes as some mix of heavy armor and arcane magic (basically Eldritch Knights, or Battle Smiths/Armorers if we want to add in some steampunk) I also have a soft spot for the sneaky Rogue.
If you were to ask me how to balance a Rogue in a TTRPG, I'd say that it should be basically a martial/physical-damage glass cannon, meaning that while it shouldn't be as resilient as a Fighter, Paladin, or Barbarian, it should be able to make up for that by putting out massive damage numbers.
Now, I think the design intent behind Rogues' Sneak Attack is to do just that, I think in practice a lot of theorycrafters have argued that the class doesn't really do great damage. And while they're the best at skill checks in the game, that utility doesn't quite match what a Wizard can do - being able to pick locks very well isn't that impressive when the Wizard can just cast Knock.
So if Rogues pay a damage tax for their non-combat utility, I don't think they deserve to do so. I'll note that while I still (still) haven't gotten a game of Draw Steel together, I do really like the way that their Shadow is designed. But they're ultimately very different systems.
The question, though, is whether they really are paying such a high tax.
In my last post, I calculated the damage output of a pure Armorer Artificer against a Death Knight at level 10. This would be a tough, final-boss kind of fight (or at least tier boss) where damage output would likely be the most important. My conclusion ultimately was that they could do roughly 28 damage per round. Artificers are also not known as the kings of damage output, but I'm curious how we'd compare a Rogue with them.
Thus, we'll simplify things and just do a level 10 build and figure out their damage.
Ok, let's talk about our loadout:
The Arcane Trickster is still probably the best Rogue subclass, but it's also something of an unusual one, having limited spellcasting options. At level 10, an Arcane Trickster would have 2nd level spells. That's shy of spells like Spirit Shroud or Conjure Minor Elementals, which can really add a lot of damage if we optimize for making lots of attacks. Getting a cantrip like Booming Blade can give you some more damage as well, especially if you attack a foe and then disengage as a bonus action, forcing them to take the extra thunder damage from moving.
But I suspect that our gameplan is actually going to be to try to get as many attacks in per round, and I'll tell you why:
Sneak Attack, by level 10, is going to be doing 5d6, which is more damage than I think we'd ever be doing with a weapon attack alone (our highest-damage weapon I think does a d8, so even with a Vicious Rapier and +5 to Dex, we're doing 1d8+2d6+5, or 16.5, compared with 17.5 from a level 10 Sneak Attack).
We can only get it once per turn, but if we land just one hit (with the proper conditions) we'll get the whole thing.
Thus, I think instead we want to build around a dual-wielding set-up, getting both a Nick off-hand weapon and the Dual-Wielder feat.
Weapons:
So, in other words, we're going to go the Shortsword and Scimitar route. This will let us land two attacks as an action, and with the feat, we can get a third attack as a bonus action (I also think technically we can make that third attack with the Shortsword, as long as the Scimitar was one of the attacks of the attack action). These bonus attacks aren't going to hit very hard, because we don't (and won't be getting) the Two Weapon Fighting Style, but the main thing is to give us some help if we don't hit at first to get that Sneak Attack in.
While it would be good to get at least +1 weapons by this level, I'm going to just act as if we're deprived of magic items from our mean DM.
We're not going Crossbow Expert here to dual-wield hand-crossbows because we wouldn't be able to benefit from Dual Wielder, as they don't have Nick.
Subclass:
If we're not using the Booming Blade trick, I don't know that the Arcane Trickster actually adds a ton of damage at this level. The Assassin has some situational boosts to damage, but to be frank, I don't want to have to calculate whether we have advantage on our first attack because we beat the Death Knight in initiative and take that into consideration for the overall damage output.
Thus, I kind of think we might go subclass-agnostic. Soulknives get Homing Blades at level 9, which could for sure increase damage output. Thieves' Stealth Attack is more useful for a ranged build. So to preserve my sanity, I'm going to not worry about subclass features.
Feats:
We're going to take the Dual-Wielder feat, which allows us to make an attack with a bonus action if we hit with another light weapon as part of our action. If you're not familiar with the 5.5 update to this feat, the effect is that if we have a weapon with the Nick weapon mastery, we're going to be able to make our initial main hand and then off-hand attack within our Action, which then allows us to get effectively a third attack with this feat. Like the additional attack from the Light property, we don't get to add our Dex modifier to the damage, but this gives us a little bit more damage and a third chance to get off our Sneak Attack if the first two attacks missed. Also, because we did use our Scimitar as part of our action, we get to use our Shortsword for this one and potentially get the benefit of the Vex property.
As a Rogue, we will have a third feat by level 10 (we get it at level 10) and thus we can take half-feats/general feats instead of ASIs and get capped at 20 Dex by this point (assuming we took a background with a +2 Dex bonus in it, which I assume we did. Honestly, Criminal is pretty great, though ironically there's some redundancy with the Alert feat if we go Assassin, a subclass that is better but not where I hoped it would be with the 5.5 revamp). Thus, we can consider two other general feats.
Personally, I think Mage Slayer might be the martial equivalent of War Caster, as the feat that basically anyone who likes either Strength or Dexterity will want, because it gives you a limited Legendary Resistance (though only against mental saves, which is mostly Wisdom). This is a solid option, but for damage, we might consider others.
Piercer is worth considering. It won't work with the scimitar, but we could use a dagger instead if we desperately want the bonuses, and honestly, we'd only be sacrificing an average of 1 damage per turn if we went with a dagger, which also has both style points and can be a ranged option. But we get to reroll a die each turn and get a little more damage on crits. And also, if we find ourselves needing to use a ranged weapon, almost all of them also deal piercing damage, so this covers that as well.
Sentinel, actually, can be really good for a melee Rogue, if you're willing to stay in melee with foes, because the Guardian opportunity attack can potentially give you a second Sneak Attack each round, which is a massive boost to your damage output. (This works especially great if you have an Ancestral Guardian or Armorer tanking for you.) The Opp attack isn't guaranteed - the foes might just target you instead - but if you can find a way to disincentivize them from going after you, it can be great (honestly, Uncanny Dodge is a pretty decent survival ability, somewhat akin to a Monk's Deflect Attacks, though it can't ever fully negate an attack like that can).
I think that, while Sentinel sounds amazing, I suspect that monsters (like our Death Knight) might choose to just focus you down without some outside help and incentive. So I think I'll stick to Dual-Wielder, Piercer, and Mage Slayer. The latter won't really have an effect on our damage, but the others will.
Given these choices, I do think I'd actually go Shortsword and Dagger (again, the damage of our weapon itself is somewhat less important due to the fact that we get a bunch of damage from Sneak Attack).
Attack Sequence:
I could be wrong, but I think if we want to make two attacks with the Shortsword, we'll need to attack in this order: Shortsword (thus allowing an off-hand Nick weapon as part of the action), Dagger (thus being a light weapon attack as part of the action, allowing the Dual Wielder feat to let us attack with a different weapon as a bonus action) and then Shortsword. While we could break up our action with a bonus action attack, I think that we need one attack to trigger the next. Another possible attack sequence would actually be to start with the Dagger, then the Shortsword (I think this is Kosher, but I could be wrong. Basically, if the Nick property applies to any use of the Light property, and not just the attack with the weapon that has Nick, we could do the Dagger first) but there's not much advantage to this given that we'll still basically always be sandwiching our dagger attacks between two shortsword attacks, even if they aren't on the same turn. I think Shortsword-Dagger-Shortsword is probably the most reasonable sequence.
Advantage and Weapon Damage:
Oh boy, here's the big question: Sneak Attack is not guaranteed each turn, as we need to either have advantage or a friendly creature within 5 feet of our target.
Now, advantage should be pretty common for us - if we make our first attack on a turn with our Shortsword, we'll get it for our Dagger. We won't get it for our bonus action second shortsword attack, but that should confer it (if it hits) with the first attack on our next turn.
If we get disadvantage, we're in big trouble, as this shuts down our sneak attack entirely. Mage Slayer can help prevent some forms of disadvantage (such as saving against Fear effects) but any Rogue is going to have a terrible time if they're at disadvantage.
For the sake of sanity, again, we're going to want to come up with an abstraction of how often we have advantage. If we assume it's only coming from the Vex property, that simplifies things. So:
At this level, we should have a +9 to hit, and we're attacking a target with an AC of 20, which mercifully gives us a beautifully round 50% hit chance (yes, Death Knights can parry, but let's just ignore that, again, for sanity). If we hit with our Shortsword the previous attack, that becomes a 75% hit chance.
2/3 of our attacks will confer advantage. If these are made straight, then we're essentially getting advantage 50% of the time on one of our attacks and 75% of the time on our other two attacks, so we'll say we have an average chance to have advantage of 67%. It's actually better than that, because hitting on our bonus action shortsword attack at the end of our turn will then make it more likely we hit with the shortsword at the beginning of our next turn.
Our Dagger never confers advantage, so we'll assume that the bonus action attack from Dual Wielder is never made with advantage - oh, this might change what I said in the previous paragraph. In this case, the BA Shortsword is a 50% hit chance (and 5% crit chance), and thus the simplest to calculate.
However, because Vex can carry over from our previous turn, we might have advantage on our first Shortsword attack on a turn because we hit on our previous turn. Thus, 50% of the time, we have advantage, and 50% of the time it's a straight roll.
The Dagger, then, is the most complex, because we're more likely to have gotten the benefit of Vex, because thanks to the 50% chance of advantage on our Action Shortsword attack, we're more likely to have hit.
Let's back up:
For the Action Shortsword attack on turns 2 and onward, our average chance to hit is either 50% half the time or 75% the other half of the time. Thankfully, this just lets us average them, so we get 62.5% to hit. Then, we have a 5% chance to crit half the time and 9.75% chance to crit the other half, so that's an average crit chance of 7.375% chance to crit overall.
For our Dagger, we have a 62.5% chance to have advantage and a 37.5% chance to make a straight roll. So, basically, we're talking 62.5%x75% and 37.5%x50% for our hit chance, which comes to 46.875% and 18.75%, so our total hit chance is 65.625%. Our crit chance on the Dagger, then, is 62.5%x9.75%, or about 6.1% plus 37.5%x5%, or 1.875%, so our total crit chance with the dagger is 7.975% (roughly)
So, let's figure out the damage our weapons are doing. Remember, thanks to Piercer, we're doing a little more on average with each die, and we're also getting beefier crits. The way it's worded, I think we could do the damage reroll on our Sneak Attack if we get it with the Dagger, which is probably slightly better than using it on the d4 from the dagger, but for sanity's sake, we'll assume we can only do it on the weapon die itself.
Action Shortsword:
Hit Damage: 1d6+5, giving us 9.25
Crit Damage: 2d6 extra (not just one extra die, because Piercer) for 7 (yes, we can choose to reroll the die that rolls lowest, so it's a little better, but again, sanity).
Thus, our damage per attack with the Shortsword is 9.25x62.5%, or 5.78 (roughly) plus 7%7.375%, or about .52 damage, and thus a total of 6.3.
Dagger:
Hit Damage: 1d4, which gives us 3 with piercer
Crit Damage: 2d4, or 6 (same caveat)
Thus, per attack, we're talking 8x65.625%, or basically 1.97 ish and then crit damage of 6x7.975%, or .48 ish, so, screw it, let's say it's 2.45.
BA Shortsword:
Hit Damage, this time, is 4.25, as we're not adding Dex
Crit Damage, again, is 7
9.25x50% is 2.125 and then 7x5% is .35, so that's 2.475.
Thus, our total weapon damage, before Sneak Attack, is about 11.2. That's pretty pitiful on its own, but what of Sneak Attack?
Sneak Attack:
Basically, we're going to assume we're using Sneak Attack the first chance we can on a turn rather than holding out for a crit.
While we will get Sneak Attack if we have advantage on our attack, we'll assume ideal circumstances where we have a friend in melee with the target as well, and that any hit will result in Sneak Attack. This won't always be the case, and we might instead use our bonus action to get Steady Aim or some other means of advantage (you can hide and get a melee attack in, I think, though I realize I might be confusing some of the rules here with the ones from Draw Steel. I'd certainly rule that you could hide and then roll that stealth check into the approach to attack someone in melee).
Sneak Attack at this level is 5d6, and while Piercer could apply to its damage to bump it up a little, I'm going to apply its bonuses instead to the weapon damage, as I have already. This is suboptimal, as we should add an extra d6 on a crit even with the dagger, but just for ease of math, I'm doing it this way.
So, we'll need to consider the likelihood of getting a hit or crit with the Action Shortsword, applying that to Sneak Attack damage. Then, if we missed and thus don't get advantage on the dagger attack, we find the average hit and crit damage, with a coefficient for missing on the first Shortsword attack (because if we did hit on it, we'd have already used up our Sneak Attack). Then, finally, we have to find the chance that we missed on both the first Shortsword and the Dagger attack, and use that as our coefficient on the adjusted-for-hit-and-crit chance on the bonus action attack.
To break it down:
Our Sneak Attack damage is 5d6, or an average of 17.5. Because this element is pure dice, it's actually easier to deal with crits, because with a 50% chance to hit and 5% chance to crit, we can just multiply that 17.5 by 55%. But we don't get to do that just yet.
As we determined before, we have a 62.5% chance to hit on our Action Shortsword, and a 7.375% chance to crit, so our Sneak Attack damage on that first attack is 17.5x about 69.9%, or about 12.23.
Now, there's a 37.5% chance we missed on the first attack. On its own, we have a 50% chance to hit with our Dagger (because we didn't get advantage) and 5% crit chance, so 55%x17.5 is 9.625. But we only do this if we missed on the first one, so 9.625x37.5% is about 3.61.
Lastly, that 50% chance to miss with the Dagger times the 37.5% chance to miss on the first Shortsword attack means we've got an 18.75% chance that we need to hold out hope that our bonus action attack is the one that finally gives us our Sneak Attack damage. After missing, of course, our chance to hit and crit is the same for the same amount of Sneak Attack damage, so that's 9.625 again, but this time multiplied by 18.75%, or roughly 1.8.
Bringing it All Together:
So, now we just add it all up: our weapon damage from our three attacks came to 11.2ish, and our Sneak Attack damage adds up to 17.64, roughly. Which means that our total damage output is 28.84.
Some Caveats:
Again, we're not truly using Piercing at its best - we aren't strictly limited to rerolling the weapon dice, and I think in theory we could add a d6 to a Sneak Attack crit and not just a d4 if we crit with the dagger. Still, I think these are pretty marginal boosts. The damage should probably be slightly higher, but only by a very small amount.
Unfortunately, there are some downsides: if we don't have a friend within melee range of our target, we will need to rely either on Vex or Steady Aim or some other source of advantage to get our Sneak Attack. While Vex makes it likely we will get it, bad luck on the dice could screw us, and chop into the greater part of our damage.
Now, we are out-damaging my Armorer build by a little bit, so that's good. I'm tempted to try out an Eldritch Knight build, which I think probably outdoes this, but I'm not sure. I'm certain that a Wizard with Conjure Minor Elementals and Scorching Ray blows maybe anything else out of the water (is there a Sorcerer subclass that gets that? Because Innate Sorcery could make that even better).
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