I think a portion of our disconnect comes from your claim that Rogues do double damage of non-Strikers (in a consistent way).
I disagree. I had a player actually quit the game in frustration 2 years ago because his melee Rogue got the snot kicked out of him encounter after encounter after encounter. He wanted a Rogue that could dash in, attack, do a lot of damage, and Tumble out of trouble.
That really doesn't happen too often or even a majority of the time with a Rogue.
Quite frankly, in every game I have been in, Rogues got the snot kicked out of themselves if they go into combat a lot. If they attack from range, they don't always get CA or they need a "special build" and hence, do not always do "twice the amount of damage of other non-strikers".
Well, I don't know what to tell you, other than that my experience differs from yours. My first 4E character was a melee rogue - who usually was too reckless and got beat up, but rarely actually spent time unconscious, just went through surges rather quickly. And did a
lot of damage.
I later played a ranged rogue in LFR, up to level... 7 or 8, I believe. And would consistently be able to set up combat advantage almost every single round of every combat. And that was before Martial Power 2 or other resources that support such a build.
This assumption that a rogue going into melee is nearly guaranteed to end up unconscious... I don't see it. Sure, they will get beat up, if they don't pick their battles wisely. But even ranged characters aren't always safe - enemies that a defender isn't engaging can go after them. If a defender is holding the line, though, that can provide safety for melee characters as well.
Melee characters certainly are more vulnerable than ranged characters, but I don't think it is quite as extreme a difference as you feel.
That is why I posted cases A, B, and C (which you mostly ignored).
I didn't so much ignore them as find them built on false - or at least, incomplete - assumptions. Scenario A wasn't "Both the Rogue and Thief have Combat Advantage" but was instead "The Thief is specifically able to charge into Combat Advantage". It didn't acknowledge what happens if the reason they have CA is because they are already in melee flanking an enemy. Or in melee and able to get to a flank via a shift - both situations that would prevent your build's assumption of the charge, and one of them preventing the use of Acrobat's Trick.
Similarly, Scenario B was what happens when neither have Combat Advantage - in which case the Thief uses Tactical Trick to get his CA. Except that also ignores many factors - such as the most common way to be deprived of CA, which is to be dazed by an enemy, which shuts the Thief down just as well as the Rogue. Or the other likely scenario - not having anyone you are able to flank with, which might mean no allies adjacent to enemies, and thus no Tactical Trick. Or even just being based by an enemy with no allies nearby - even if you have enemies on the other side of the field that Tactical Trick will work against, the Thief would need to suck up an OA to get there.
Yes, there are scenarios where a Thief will have an advantage. But there are many others where they will not. And I think it is largely impossible to measure the difference here, since that will likely change wildly from one game to the next.
In my experience, the rogue very rarely has trouble getting CA. The Thief even less so, though he still gets shut down by the most common difficulty, Daze. The advantage of the Thief is mainly in being able to get CA at range without needing to really focus on doing so - in short, the versatility this provides that allows him to go melee or ranged as the situation demands.
This
is a legitimate benefit. But the Rogue has his own benefits, in the form of Encounter and Daily powers, and arguably specific benefits from his At-Wills. And how useful such benefits are, just like how often Thief Tricks will be important, is hard to quantify, because there really is no cold hard answer.
But in terms of the raw numbers? That's what we can look at. And a Rogue does similar damage compared to a Thief. And both of them compare similarly to non-strikers.
The power creep is that the Thief can do this round in and round out. In 3 levels of our game, our Thief did not get Sneak Attack damage about 3 times and 2 of those times were Action Points used late in an encounter.
That really is unheard of for an original Rogue because a Rogue does not get CA every round.
Well, that's not my experience with Rogues. I admit, the rogues I've played did not get Sneak Attack damage as often as your guy - probably to the extent of one or two attacks without it per session. But almost all of the situations that caused such things were due to conditions like Daze or enemy positioning that would be just as much a problem for a Thief.
Rogues having Combat Advantage every round is in no way
unheard of. Honestly, it's the default assumption of the game, and almost every rogue I've seen played has CA the vast majority of the time.
