What happened to be Barb and Pally?! You said "it is still not as much as the "martial" having two or three more attacks." . . . To now say you're only comparing against Fighter 11 is like saying "But what about Monk6/Barb4/Druid2?" ...
Okay, from the top...
This started off with rogues vs other martials in combat effectiveness. So the baseline is not 1 attack +2 offhand attacks. I am comparing against Fighter 11/12, because it brings the simplest calculation possible in the form of a non-expendable 3 attacks (compared to paladin smites, barbarian rages, hex, hunter's mark, spells, etc.) It is also the most directly comparable one to Rogue, as it also uses a non-expendable resource (and, in the case of trickster, some meaningless attack spells).
and a Barb and Pally have the same number of attacks; if hasted/bloodlusted/speed they have ONE more, never 2 or 3.
That's not how haste/speed/bloodlust works, though. It gives you a whole action. For a rogue, that's one attack. For a fighter, that's *three*. For a ranger, paladin, barbarian, bladelock, that's two.
Sure an unoptimized Short Sword attack does nothing compared to GWM, but why would the Rogue in your comparison not be using Sharpshooter?
We really need to set some boundaries here about what we are and are not comparing. Why compare the melee to the ranged? If you require one side of the comparison be ranged sharpshooter, why not the other? Especially since the other side does it better thanks to 2 extra attacks, Archery style, and no positioning/hide/flank requirement.
If you have the melee fighter on one side, you gotta have the melee rogue on the other. Ditto ranged.
The whole point is, 2d6+3+6+10 before any of the hilarious extra damage per hit sources, is not substantially different from 1d6+3+6+10 before any of the hilarious extra damage per hit sources that Sharpshooter is doing.
It is if you hit more times; and per-hit bumps only scale more with more hits.
Rogues can:
Dash and still get 2 attacks, which combined with their range lets them chase down and eliminate fleeing targets before they pull in more adds.
I have seen exactly one fleeing target that threatened to pull in more adds in the entire game, and chasing that one is meaningless since it is bugged and always "succeeds" anyway (the goblin going for the drum in Act 1).
A Fighter who dashes consumes their action, a ranged build Fighter who dashes gets *one* attack after doing so, not two. A melee Fighter who dashes gets *zero* attacks after doing so, as GWM and PAM bonus actions are both conditional.
Sure. And a fighter that jumps can cover an entire movement's distance (and more!) in one leap, and then still move to get in range and unleash full attacks (minus the bonus action one, I guess).
Take out priority targets on the other side of difficult chasms or inopportune surfaces.
Chasms? Fighter jump them better.
If we're talking ranged, sure, again I would hope Fighters specifically would do so as that's literally their entire value to the party. But what happened to Pally and Barb? If we're talking a Melee fighter, the kind who has Strength for jumping, then we get into the situation below...
Again with the dirty comparison of melee fighter vs ranged rogue. Why? Is there a rule that prevents fighters from being hand-crossbow-sharpshooters in your game?
Disengage while surrounded and still get 2 attacks against whatever was surrounding them. . .
But that's the entire point - I've seen it play out personally multiple times, a Martial character has 3 worthless adds nipping at their feet. They would love to go after the big bad but taking 3 opportunity attacks to do so sucks, and the pathing to get there with them in the way doesn't really work out anyway. So they spend the turn attacking the things that are barely a threat, while if a Rogue is surrounded they can disengage and still fire back on whatever was in that cluster also freeing up space for party members to AOE it if warranted thanks to how turns work, or can spend the 2 attacks on the big bad or whatever else actually warrants it.
If something is surrounding the fighter and actually has worrying amounts of damage that you'd rather not eat as opportunity attacks, then it is not a worthless add, and is instead fully worth it to invest fighter attacks into killing. If it is a worthless add, and there is a move juicy target somewhere else, the fighter is easily best served eating the opportunity attacks (relying on superior AC and health), and just going for the high value target.
If fighters strength is huge, they're melee, and in that case, no, they can't equal the range of a crossbow's field of fire in a single bound, even with super jump on, and that's not typically on in combat. This is inaccurate.
Again. Do you have a homerule against sharpshooter fighters, or something? Ditto melee rogues?
5d6(Sneak)+1d6(Hand Crossbow)+2(Enchant)+6(Dex)+10(Sharpshooter)+1d4(Fire)+1(Ring)+2(Archery)= 28-61 damage from primary attack (average 44)
1d6(Hand Crossbow)+2(Enchant)+6(Dex)+10(Sharpshooter)+1d4(Fire)+1(Ring)+2(Archery)+1d4(Piercing)= 24-35 damage each (2 bonus attacks, average 29, total 58)
Granted, "Every turn" is a bit of a misleading statement, as certainly there are misses, times where it's worth it to turn off sharpshooter, overkill, and times where the damage averages on the low side. But there are also times where I hit the high end (including the 10%+ of the time where I crit, which for me means an extra 20+ damage), and this is ignoring Bless or other buffs, elemental arrows, and so forth. So yeah, average damage, 100+ per round. Obviously this is late game with a lot of magic items at play, but you asked for the math, and this is what my character is doing
That's... actually pretty nice, yeah.
while our martials often have to sort out how exactly they're going to get to and try to damage the correct targets, and end up just hitting unimportant targets at their feet instead. . .
We've already covered disengage (which eats their whole turn), but yeah, varied elevation is also very much so a thing, as is hazardous terrain, and suboptimal positions to end your turn. Maybe it's never been a problem for you, but it's certainly a problem for them.
Again, I really can't take into consideration playstyle and refusal to use the Jump ability in this comparison.
I have encountered more phantom railings becoming impenetrable projectile-blocking than I have terrain that I can't work around with a leap.
Not really, just saying. I picked up Medium Armor on my Rogue because it granted +1 Dex and gave shields and access to, of course, medium armor. Not just the actual armor itself which is never worth it, but the gloves and so forth as well, in which case Barb has no equipment advantage whatsoever over Rogue.
There are three no-max-dex medium armors in the game. With them, you can get *hilarious* AC values at ~no cost to the rest of your build.
But of course not every Rogue will do that, there just aren't that many other good feats to take a 17 Dex to an 18 while providing another tangential benefit, and it's certainly an option as they have an extra feat compared to Barbs etc.
For this reason, I stopped taking odd main stats on most builds. An ASI and a feat to get a 17 to 20 has the same total cost as two ASIs to gt a 16 to 20, and few of the +1 Ability feats are really good.
Hey YMMV, if it hasn't worked out for you it hasn't worked out for you. I'm just saying my experience in my campaigns, both Multiplayer where I'm playing as one and Single Player where I've got Asterion filling that role, is that they've been absolutely tops on damage due to the nature of ranged attacks and have contributed massively out of combat as well. If you can't find suitable targets for a ranged character to take out while having no problem with melee positioning that's, well, rather unusual in my opinion but entirely fair, it just hasn't been my experience whatsoever.
No, you misunderstand. I can *find* the suitable target, but that suitable target is also more swiftly dealt with by just a bonk to the face... even if this again gets us back to the unclean comparison of melee fighter vs ranged rogue.
I fully understand how a ranged rogue can be effective, if not the optimal choice for the role. Far as I'm concerned, the *crucial* lacking territory is in any melee rogue variant; it is just never ever worth it to risk being so exposed to the front line and in plain view of all the enemies, just to stab someone in the spleen for ~1.5x of a fighter's basic attack.
