What drives a poor reputation for the Rogue class?

[QuickLyRaiNbow]

I don't know about you, but Con damage was absolutely terrifying.

Yes, it was. It just didn't apply to many NPCs, and many others had high Con saves, making it difficult to start that particular train rolling. By the time something failed enough Con saves to die... it was probably already dead. Scary as hell when aimed at players, though.

The issue with poisons is they didn't have much in the way of meaningful DCs. Most characters on both DM and PC side ended up out scaling them in the before times. Now days though with bounded accuracy, DC 15 poisons for effects would be all kinds of situationaly useful.

They slowed down combat, too. In order to effectively get poisons to work, you had to hit a lot. That meant rolling a lot of d20s to attack, then making the DM roll a lot of d20s for saves.