You are so wrong with saying all rogues match or surpass runeblades damage......
Bard has more silences and aoes but dosnt surpass the damage
Ninja requires backstabs
and Lets go off of Rangers melee cuz u cant compare to totally different things like that
Bard's melee damage is 60 with a melee disc.
Ninja's melee damage is only 2 lower;
Ranger's melee damage is 4 lower, however ranger's damage with a bow is astronomical when they go full agility. (Quite common)
Most of bard's skills are support, but the skills they do have match the scaling of runeblade's highest scaling skills such as fire rune. Bards have
way more health and armour than runeblade. Voidsong's scaling is the same as fire rune's. Sure rune does catch you on fire, but then again fire rune isn't a 7 block aoe... I would mention Boastful Bellow but DuskBlade is pretty good actually. Anyways while Bard doesn't really have higher damage it definitely matches, and Bard still is way tankier.
Ninja's require backstab. Are you serious? First off don't you dare make it sound like backstab is just going to break it even. Backstab is a huge buff to ninja's damage. Then let's take into account ninja's other skills shall we?
Blitz - The absolute minimum damage on blitz is higher than what a runeblade with 35 int can deal with toxic rune + blitz ignores armour
Eviscerate - Deals an insane amount of damage, again absolute minimum is higher than 35 int runeblade's damage with toxic rune + eviscerate ignores armour
Backstab - It's a passive, even when you're not sneaking every single time you manage to get behind someone it deals a lot of extra damage
Then ninja also has its own silence. Compare ninja's kick to void rune. Not only does ninja's kick naturally do more damage, it has a shorter cool down
and the silence is longer. Ninja's don't have a slow, but then again they really don't them. Backflip has a cool down of 6 seconds. I've seen ninja's get pretty darn good at using backflip not only for escapes, but for closing in. Don't bring up mana vs stamina costs. Rogues regen stamina pretty fast + ninja has energize.
So I have to say Jupiter, I in no way whatsoever think you're correct in saying "Ninja requires backstab", that's one of the stupidest things I've ever heard. Ninja has higher health, a bit higher armour albeit not much, and
considerably higher damage.
I'm not just going to compare rangers melee damage. Rangers don't do as much damage as runeblades when it comes to melee, but ranger actually still has pretty damn good melee damage. I find it stupid that a ranger (which is supposed to play ranged) does considerable more damage than dread knights and paladins with its axe. Getting back on topic anyways.
Rangers with high agility do a ton of damage with bows. As for skills, explosive shot + aimed shot. 0% chance of missing + extreme damage. That's all I have to say.