I play rogue since P1. I always thought of a rogue as a fast, agile highly reactive class with high damage.
But lately, I started playing as a paladin and must say, boy is that playstyle fast and reactive. Paladins get so many counters, in every situation you have like 4 different actions you could take. Dispell slow, activate sprint, hammer of righteousness, holy shock as damage or heal on yourself? Blessing of freedom on a group mate, blessing of protetion, interrupt that spell… heal etc. It is so much fun!
Then rogue on the other hand has a very linear playstyle: Frost novad, oh vanish on cooldown. Trinket? Also on cooldown. Well, let´s wait. Unfreezes, shadowstep, opponent moves, slowly start moving towards opponent. Kick? Not enough energy, well let´s wait… When the cooldowns are available, you have like a linear counter you MUST take. It´s not that you can choose if you blind or vanish in that situation, but there is only one right solution.
Now that I have played another class as comparison, I must say, I don´t like the overall playstyle as a rogue. I feel like the key to rogue gameplay is to hit a few buttons and hope the enemy dies quicker than you do. It is very linear, you have exactly one counter to an enemies actions and this counter has a 5 minute cooldown. There are very few occasions when actual reactions are required. E.g. trinketing fear or sapping an opponent, waiting for him to use insignia, then quickly use vanish and sap again…
But all these reactions are reliant on really long cooldowns. 5 min cooldown in SoD feels so outdated. I already know how the fight will end, depending on the cooldowns I have available and if the enemy has first hit. When another rogue attacks me, he wins if he has as many cooldowns ready as I have. If he does not have insignia up, but I do, I win. End of story, as boring as that.
In SoD all classes got so many more ways of crowd control, movement and dots.
Then, you have to choose if you go for a DOT based playstyle and do quite a lot of damage, but render 50 % of your abilities useless or you go for the long stunlock playstyle, do little damage and keep your opponent motionless in a chain of always-the-same attacks over a timespan of 20 seconds.
I know, it´s Blizzard´s choice how they design a class, but I would have expected something else. Something like 1 min cooldown for vanish, cloak of shadows, maybe tune down damage a bit to compensate for higher versatility? It´s just not fun to rely on 5 min cooldowns for basic gameplay.
And don´t get me started on what benefits rogues have for their groups. In comparison to other classes, they bring the group absolutely zero benefit.