Rogues

I want to write today about probably the single greatest source of emotional pain which currently exists in my life at this point, as ridiculous as it may sound; the Rogue class in World of Warcraft.

Most people, even the most positive and mature, have at least one thing in their lives that bothers them to the point of complete and total irrationality. For some people it's spiders. For others it's cockroaches or slugs. For me, it's the Rogue class in this game. I actually don't like mentioning the above animals in association with Rogues, since to be honest, my feelings towards those three groups of animals are actually highly compassionate and tolerant, compared to how I feel towards Rogues.

In just under two years of playing this game, I can honestly say that I have encountered three rogues who were played by people that I did not consider at least partially (and usually completely) sociopathic. The rest were people who had no concept whatsoever of working with people in a group, and generally caused silence and bad feeling in groups, as well as having an overwhelming tendency to hijack control of groups and engage in dominant behaviour.

In other scenarios where, for example, a member of a group had died and needed help getting back to our position in an instance due to respawns, the Rogues that I have grouped with will generally refuse to assist the rest of the group, instead announcing that they would rather continue to solo mobs in the instance by themselves. They also tend to be obsessive about people waiting for Sap, and I have no patience for that...mainly because I know that virtually every other form of CC in the game can be used after combat begins.

Part of the reason why I think they are like that is because the mechanics of their class are actually designed around sociopathic behaviour. The class was fairly obviously designed almost exclusively with pvp griefing in mind; with possibly the single exception of Sap, it has virtually no value within a group pve scenario at all. An adjunct of this is that, despite the shameless favouritism that the class has been shown by Blizzard historically where class balance is concerned, players of the class typically have the gall to turn around and accuse other classes of being overpowered. Of course, I understand; in a Rogue player's mind, any class is overpowered unless said class is completely unable to defend itself against a Rogue. If any of the other classes in the game are in any way able to defend themselves against the Rogue, then in the archetypical Rogue player's mind, said other classes are overpowered.

The Rogue can do generic DPS, yes...but for group PvE I'd generally prefer to get that from another class which not only usually doesn't attract the same degree of psychological problems, and from a mechanic point of view has other redeeming characteristics as well.

Given the consistently negative experiences that I've had with players of this class over time, I will confess that it is the one class in the game that I now refuse to group with or really associate with in any way at all. This might come across as bigoted, discriminatory, and generally highly unpleasant...but on one side of the coin there are the number of problems I've had with Rogues, and on the other, as I've stated, the fact that the class contributes nothing whatsoever that cannot be obtained from virtually any other.

I tell myself it's immature...I tell myself it's petty, and that it only brings me down...but I can't bring myself to cease honestly, fervently wishing that the Rogue class in general quite simply did not exist.