Well, yes and no. The new subclasses has ways of adding more damage but that's not what they revolve around. The fact that damage is all that most players focus on is a user problem, not a fault of the class itself. For example, when talking about the Gloom Stalker's ability to be invisible to creatures with darkvision most people talk about its combat utility but ignore the other parts of the game. Why not talk about the exploration aspect of having someone who can scout through a dark mansion at night or, scare the pants of someone by sneaking up on them during a blackout at a dinner party?
There more to the game than combat but if all you focus on is damage, that's all youäre going to see.
This I absolutely agree with. Combat is easy to quantify, but it doesn't define everything you can do. Hell, I'm considering moving to games where Combat isn't the one and only thing you roll for. (Hyperbole)

That said, the only out of combat niche that a Ranger fills that obviously clashes with a Rogue is the Beastmaster or Drakewarden. Outside of that, the supernatural stealth artist is obviously not, say, a Fighter, but equally fits Ranger and Rogue. The Phantom Rogue could have just as easily been a Ranger, and the Monster Slayer's actual abilities play incredibly nicely with a single target Sneak Attack (There, I fall back into combat for that last example).


Again, yes and no. They have a lot of abilities that are good for thieves but that doesn't mean that they have to be thieves. Much of this goes back to previous editions where your class was not just "the stuff you are trained in" but also "what you" which is something that 5E tends to get away from. A character in 5E is more than there class so the way of thinking "Hi, I'm Steve. I'm a Rogue" (that's nice Steve, but what do you actually *do*?) doesn't really work. For example, being able to use thieves' tools is not only useful for actual thieves but also for locksmiths, private investigators, police officers, spies and a lot of other professions. A trader, especially a shady one, would be very happy to have expertise in deception and persuasion and say a paramedic or park ranger could have great use of expertise in perception nad medicine, for example.
In short, you don't have to limit the usefulness of certain abilities to a few specific areas.
This lies somewhere between a design flaw and a user error. Yeah, Rogues can be more than Thieves (I've had that exact conversation before, painstakingly explaining that class and career can be easily different) but also: Thieves' Tools can be useful for a lot of professions, but, say, a Doctor has limited need for them. A Cook probably wouldn't know Thieves Cant. It isn't pervasive, but the assumption is definitely there.


QUOTE]Really no need to lump them all together and you can already achieve what you want by multiclassing or picking the right subclass. You would only lose variety if you force classes together. [/QUOTE]
I don't think we would lose variety, though. In point of fact, with a Warlock style split (Subclass and Pact Boon are separate splits) there could be as many variations as the classes split off from each other. Also, the end goal of this thought exercise isn't to achieve a character vision; multiclassing is. . . totally unrelated.

Besides, how are you supposed to pick what abilities from which class to keep? You are either going to get a new class that is very over-powered or a class that lacks the more iconic features of their "parent" class.
So for the Rogue, the iconic abilities are Sneak Attack, some means for being a skill monkey, and Evasion. For the Ranger, it's, I think, Favored Enemies (dual wielding, archery, having a pet. . . for some reason they seem like they should be iconic but really aren't). I see no reason that these aren't mutually compatible. In the first post I had the Sneak Attack/Favored Enemy/Hunter's Mark "Pact Boon" as a way these could coexist, and while I like it, it is by no means the only way for them all to work.

I don't recognize the problem with bards that you are talking about. Nor do you really need to make rogue more martial
Bards are so versatile that in the little Venn diagram of my head they overlap with Rogues a lot - heck, they both get double proficiency just by different names. Giving the Rogue more headway in a direction lets it cover more stuff that a Bard totally can't.
All of that is totally beside the point and not really a tenable argument, though. Ignore it is it makes the conversation flow better.