The rogue thief was worse than a sidekick his abilities were superseded by a yellow notepad full of tricks to avoid the rogue thief doing anything and if you wanted it reliable you had the wizard do it.
It all came down to magic items, in the end, a thief with a ring of invisibility was way better than a magic-user, for example because there were very few slots. Of course, I had this magic-user Thief who had gloves that allowed him to dematerialise any part of his hands and forearms and everything he was holding, which allowed him to search chests without opening them and, in combination with a ring of x-ray vision, to backstab sentinels through walls...
@Lyxen I will say I have no experience with BECMI could you elaborate
The progression was in a sense much slower than AD&D, but the great thing is that it recognised in its inception things which have since been mirrored in a lot of fantastic books/movies of the genre, like Wheel of Time or Sanderson books:
- Lvls 1-3, Basic: clearing out local "dungeons" and threats
- Lvls 4-14, Expert: Wilderness, expanding the scope
- Lvls 15-25, Companion: this is where it got really ground breaking for us with dominion management, because it was fairly simple management of your base/fortress/domain/realm, but it allowed the opportunity for so many adventures, both the the usual kind, but also intrigue with neighbours, alliances and negotiations, wars and sieges environment and what we loved the most, court intrigue.
- Lvls 26-26, Master: Where it recognised that the multiverse was really vast and where the heroes took flight again to counter cosmic threats from gods and demons, and go on the road to godhood, which we did with quite a few campaigns, actually, with varying results but it was always fun.
- And the Immortal set that we didn't like that much because things became very abstract. However, I resuscitated some of the elements to finish our humongous multi-DMs campaign started under 3e because at level 20, things were so complex and took such a long time that players got lost, so I re-created a very simple Immortal game to finish the ascension of characters to godhood. Out of the 100+ characters played in the campaign, about 40 died and about 30 achieved godhood and are now a pantheon that we use in some of our campaigns including 4e and 5e.
I very much consider magic item dependence with basically nothing telling DMs that except a Dragon Mag article years later a flaw not a feature. No effective guidelines about level appropriate hardware existed either.
I completely agree with you, it was a long process of trial and error, with mistakes along the way. I had this elven archmage who was dreaded not for many of class/psionic abilities or her artefacts, but because she had a mirror of mental prowess, and that is really a potentially game breaking item, especially when combined with shenanigans with portable holes.
It was very much over the top, ad hoc, haphazard and usually totally unbalanced with the DM pulling even more outrageous things out of his hat for the abilities of the adversaries. And it required very experienced DMs who had lived through that progression and could invent all these over-the top countermeasures.
And I agree that, in comparison, 4e is a dream of balance and progression, much easier to manage for everyone (teasing here, but only partly though, it's a bit too tame for us, in comparison to our habits of the above).