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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dausuul" data-source="post: 6307799" data-attributes="member: 58197">Keep in mind that the rogue's defenses are different from the fighter's. The fighter's defenses are straightforward: High AC and lots of hit points. No matter what the opposition, the fighter can step out front and say "Bring it on," and proceed to take all kinds of heat.The rogue has decent AC--not the equal of a fighter in plate, but a class with Dex as its primary stat is never going to do badly in the AC department. In hit points, of course, the fighter has a big advantage, partly due to bigger hit dice and partly due to a likely-higher Con score. (The fighter can almost always put her second-highest stat in Con, whereas rogues usually have other priorities.)However, the rogue's main defenses are Cunning Action and Evasion*. Both of these make you very good at defending yourself from a single powerful foe. Cunning Action lets you skip back out of reach without consequence, taking advantage of your ability to switch off between melee and range. Evasion lets you halve the damage of one of that foe's attacks. Taken together, these have the effect of lowering your profile as a target. You don't do any more damage than the fighter, you're hard to get to, and you never seem to take much damage, so why chase you?Of course, Cunning Action and Evasion work far less well against a mob. But your damage is all single-target spike damage, so the mob has little incentive to go after you--it's much more concerned with your wizard pal.None of this is to suggest that rogues are the equals of fighters in combat. They are nothing of the kind. Fighters have better damage, less blow-through, and much less situational defenses. But rogues don't need to be the equals of fighters, they just need to be able to contribute effectively and survive while doing it. I believe 80-90% of fighter damage output fulfills the first requirement, and Cunning Action and Evasion fulfill the second. As soon as the battle is over and the party resumes sneaking through a dungeon full of traps and sentries, the fighter fades way, way back, while the rogue becomes a star.[size=-2]*You don't get Evasion until 5th level, of course. But I don't think it's a coincidence that 5th just happens to be the level when fighters surge ahead of rogues in damage output.[/size]</blockquote>

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