Esker
Hero
I also noticed that Fighter outperforms rogue in all instances - mostly because of the lack of fighting styles. So it seems that a rogue must make a 1 level dip in fighter to increase performance.
Generally rogues focused on damage want to do a few things to be competitive with fighters. First, they either want to be using their bonus action to hide (to get advantage regularly), using their bonus action to do two-weapon fighting, since like advantage that gives them a second roll to trigger sneak attack, or they want to be using booming blade, preferably with a familiar using the help action (which arcane tricksters can get automatically and other rogues can get by taking Magic Initiate or Ritual Caster (Wizard)). Elven accuracy is also a good pickup for them, because (a) they are generally using DEX anyway, so it also raises their main attack stat, (b) they can get advantage on most of their attacks so it's relevant often, and (c) because they do a lot of extra damage on a crit.
A rogue with booming blade, elven accuracy, and a high % of advantage can be competitive with most fighter builds, at least in terms of the base class, especially against higher AC enemies. Battlemaster superiority dice used well though (particularly precision attack) synergize extremely well with the -5/+10 feats though, and a rogue isn't going to be able to compete with that.
On a separate note (and stop me if this isn't the place to talk about it), do melee tend to outperform casters in DPR or are there too many variables to compare?
I only ask because, not even an hour before I found this thread, my son was telling me fighters can't really do a lot of damage at 20th level compared to a wizard and I had no way to demonstrate that fighters were good at damage output. I guess the other thing to consider is this is comparing single target damage.
Casters are definitely more complex to model for a variety of reasons: they have a lot more choice points (spells at multiple levels, AoE vs single target, damage vs control, etc.) and their effectiveness is more variable depending on the specific encounters they're facing (moreso than for single-target DPR martials, for whom enemy AC captures much of what you need to know about what's in an encounter).
I do think it's true that, for the most part, full casters who pick the best spells (and who maybe take a level or two in something to shore up weak points or take advantage of good synergies) are going to be more effective than martials --- maybe not in terms of single-target damage, but in terms of overall contribution to a party.
If you can combine a souped up eldritch blast with, say, spirit guardians, and good defenses (e.g., medium armor, shields, and good concentration saves), which is easy to do with a couple of levels in Hexblade and the rest in Divine Soul Sorcerer, say, you're pretty likely to damage the pants off of any martial.
Wizards on the other hand are at their best when they're not focused on damage, but rather on control -- Hypnotic Pattern, Wall of Force, Mass Suggestion, Forcecage, for example -- none of which do any direct damage, but which can single-handedly win encounters nonetheless. But that's much harder to quantify.
Adding Sentinel in there to add reaction attacks would be interesting.
Yeah, one thing on my to-do list which would cover this and several other cases in a fairly straighforward way is to add a "% reaction attacks" slider. I don't necessarily want to make specific assumptions about how often things like Sentinel or PAM, etc. will trigger reaction attacks, so I'd rather just make it an input option.