The TL;DR is in bold and in the middle of the post. It is one of three changes I suggest, the other 2 are giving melee rogues a lot more threat reduction, or giving them a lot more damage to make up for the problems inherent in the class.
The list of melee rogue problems is too dense and specific to be hashed out in its entirety, so I'll just mention the basics. Rogues need to flank to do real damage in melee, but the problem is that there's no indication of the angles you can flank from except directly behind; otherwise, you're literally taking stabs in the dark and hoping you're doing the extra damage. In DA:O, the attack animation changed. In this game there's, as far as I can tell, nothing.
It's too hard to get into flanking position, and 4x as hard in the tactical camera (which is insane and ridiculous). Skills miss in tac cam if you queue them up and don't then take control directly. You get hit and die in very few hits. The skill to jump out of danger can be blocked because of collision detection with enemies, which defeats the purpose of it existing at all. You still get hit even a second or two after entering stealth, even with it upgraded, for God know's what reason. Threat reduction passive doesn't do enough at all. It should be 75% reduced for melee rogues, all things considered. I think that's a bad solution, but that would be one to help alleviate the inherent bias towards ranged dps. I have an idea for a solution below.
When flanking, a larger enemy which does AoE damage on every hit will kill rogues almost instantly. Bears and those larger guys that swing their hammers do this, making them ineffective in those fights entirely. How this was not recognized very early in development, I don't know.
Most enemies have a way of moving around the battlefield very rapidly, or transporting, and rogues do not. WHAT???? Isn't that the entire theme of the class? Entering and exiting swiftly from combat? Oh, the jump skill is supposed to do that? Please. How can a warrior go from one side of the battle to another faster with his bull skill than with any skill the rogue has????????? This makes them constantly chase around enemies futilely, as ranged simply move where they're aiming and are uninterrupted.
Ranged rogues can stand away from damage, can still enter stealth, can still get the same threat reduction passive, can move around as they fire, and have some insanely overpowered skills. That's all fine. Nothing is overpowered in a single player game as far as I'm concerned, only underpowered. Which brings me to my next point: mages and warriors have barrier/guard respectively, but rogues get nothing. Archers don't need much (mage barrier is enough for them), but melee gets crushed. Even warriors without guard get crushed, so obviously rogues who can't get behind enemies that are always moving will get crushed 10x harder.
One way to cure the many, many balance issues with melee rogues would be to give them something called "EVADE." It would generate constantly and be diminished the longer you are attacked directly. You would avoid all damage, but it would eat up your "EVADE" to do so. The longer you go without being hit for, the more EVADE you build back up. Passives could be unlocked to increase the total amount you can have at once or how quickly it regenerates, and Barrier would take precedence by eating damage before EVADE was lowered (like for guard now). Evade should only mean avoiding damage, not stuns from those large AoE guys.
Why the game was shipped out with these balancing issues is something I've been spending the past couple hours wondering about. Melee rogues are unplayable without some kind of massive overhaul because they die constantly and don't do enough damage to make up for it, and they spend half the battle running around hitting nothing. If they attack bosses from behind (flank position) they still die from the AoE hits. Tac cam attack queuing is broken for rogue skills and it makes them miss way more than not. Either up all the damage of our skills by a ton, give us a ton more threat reduction, or give us Evade so that we don't get this ridiculous scenario where it seems that damage is unavoidable for such an easily damaged class.
How was this not noticed in QA testing? It just bothers me because I've spent so many hours and the game has so much potential to be one of the best in a long time, were it not for some strange issues. 2h warriors and the AI also have massive issues, as does the tac cam, but those can be saved for other posts. The combat is really weird in the game and the decision to leave out healing has left the entire rogue class in the dust.
Oh, and to the inevitable "JUST RE-ROLL ARCHER" people: no. That's not an answer. I don't want to be an archer, I already have 2 archers that are just fine. I don't want to bring 2 archers to every mission if I happen to want Varric or Sera there. I also didn't want to play as one to begin with, or else I would've chosen it. I chose melee rogue because I like it in theory. I kept with it long, thinking that of course it would get better later on because the game would never be this imbalanced. I've spent too many hours to want to go through the game again at this point. I'm at the midway stage roughly. I would be a mage if I got the chance to actually re-roll, but that's clearly not an option, so this is something that is on my mind.
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