If this doesn't convince you rouges are utter trash, I dont know what will.

I spammed outlaw/thug all game vs mass rouge...and gained map control.

They clearly do not do their job at all.

there has never been a time when I didnt think rogues were trash

Shield mirror meta has always been just thuglaw tbh since racketeer was dosed with CART

A rogue is better than no skirm at all, but worse than every skirm in every situation :/

dyth68 i was distracted for like 2 seconds which resulted in both an army suicide and a ded commander for me, idk how the game would have turned out if that didnt happen.
That roach (snitch) blowup actually happend because i was frustrated about my iris going into Wait Mode every 0.5 sec when i guarded it with my roaches.
This resulted in me having to move it around and reset the Wait state multiple times and blew up my army because my units clustered because lack of micro.

What actually made it impossible to push without facswitch was the lack of los.
I had to build frontline radars to just get slightly vision on cloaked stingers because my units else suicide without knowing what happend.
Neither my Rackateers nor my Rougues were able to do anything after Fealthas reached the critical mass of shieldball which was able to overwhelm anything i build against him.

The only thing which would have saved me at that point would have been either a Annithilator or a Cerberus, after Fealthas finished his cerb first i could only resign.

the obvious "fix" to rogue is to increase its cost by 20% and and projectile speed by 40% so it hits mobile units more reliably, like recluse does, same thing with ronin.

They'd still suck against raiders in small numbers.

but no, that would make it "evil".

[Spoiler]

2-3 recluses aren't cheap, and the reason you often have to switch is because they're one of the highest ranged low cost skirmishers that can still hit other mobile units, while having good dps/cost considering their range. The tradeoff relative to other skirmishers is lower hp/cost, but that doesn't matter in skirmisher vs skirmisher situations if they can't be hit back.

If the recluses have riot cover you can still hold them off with a stinger and send an assault/raider army somewhere else. If there's nowhere else to go, you switch. These types of interactions happen often in early game ZK.

Normally shorter ranged but faster skirmishers could be usable against recluses cost-effectively, but atm they're calibrated to do other stuff (many have raw power but can't reach them, or outrange them more than they'd need but are expensive and unreliable).