Sad Rogue Talents

[Witch's Knight]

A recurring theme I've seen whenever I read about the rogue is that their talents are sub-par when compared to feats or to those of other classes. The two that get mentioned most often are Powerful Sneak and Deadly Sneak. What are other rogue talents that fail to do whatever it is that they're meant to do?

And, more importantly, how would you fix them?

For instance, with the talents mentioned above, a fix might be to remove the attack penalty, or allow the rogue to simply re-roll 1s (2s with Deadly Sneak), or both.

Go!

[Nicos]

Witch's Knight wrote:

A recurring theme I've seen whenever I read about the rogue is that their talents are sub-par when compared to feats or to those of other classes. The two that get mentioned most often are Powerful Sneak and Deadly Sneak. What are other rogue talents that fail to do whatever it is that they're meant to do?

And, more importantly, how would you fix them?

All those feats taht let you rool twice a skill once per day. Rolling swim two times once per day suck bad.

A rogue who takes a rogue talent to be better at a particualar skill should be very good at that skill.

Change "once per day..." for "everytime...", for example, this woudl be my version of peerless maneuver

"Benefit: A rogue with this talent roll two dice while making an Acrobatics check, and take the better result.

[Saluzi]

1. The good ones are in the APG. Many are not at all once per day. Some would be great for an investigator - especially the Advanced Thoughtful Rexamining
2. Think of once per day as like scroll spells. Not to be used in battle.

[Painful Bugger]

Hide In Plain Sight, it requires significant investment in favored terrains that for this talent to be effective thus becoming really good at stealth he ironically have to become less effective overall. The ranger shouldn't be more effective at stealth then the rogue. Just remove the part about favored terrain and have the rogue be able to hide anywhere. Or at the very least have him choose a number of favored terrains based on a character level formula or Int modifier.

[Lord Twig]

These are from Ultimate Combat, and I almost think they were meant as a joke.

Hold Breath (Ex)
Benefit: A rogue with this talent increases the number of rounds she can hold her breath by 2.
Special: A rogue can take this talent multiple times. (Yay!)

Iron Guts (Ex)
Benefit: A rogue with this talent has a cast-iron stomach or has trained herself to withstand poisons, especially ingested ones. She gains a +1 bonus on all saves against ingested poisons as well as a +4 bonus on saves against all spells and effects that cause the rogue to be nauseated or sickened. (Good against Stinking Cloud, and the dwarf's cooking.)

How to fix? Remove then from the game and pretend they never happened.