I'm leveling a Rogue... just got it up to 25.
Been reading and everybody agrees to buy as much gear as you can at each level. Apparently, rogue has the worst armor rating in the game, cloth types included because of no magical buffs.
So... between paying for constantly updated weapons and armor and leveling jewelcrafting and enchanting with no gathering professions this guy is going to cost my 80 Hunter a fortune to maintain.
Rule #1 on WoW - 95%+ of the population have no clue what they are doing. Most all of the content from low level guilds/trade or gen chat is going to be incorrect.
There is no reason to buy gear at a every level. Gear doesnt make nearly as big of a difference in leveling, especially the gear pre-60. It is very easy to hit level 58 as a rogue in full level 20 greens. Weapons are the only things wihch are nice to have for leveling, and even those only need an upgrade once every 10 levels or so. Most of the time you can jump from quest weapon to quest weapon.
Rogues "armor rating" (Im assuming this means character armor after self-buffs) isn't a huge deal. As PvP specs, it is true most clotheis have +armor talents, but even then, I am not sure that they have more armor than rogues. Armor scales directly with ilvl. Agi gives 2 points of armor per point also. That being said, rogues do have low armor one way or another. However, for grinding/pve, its pretty irrelevant. Rogues dodge is also obscenely high, and if youre combat with some parry talents, its that much better. You also have stuns, blind and evasion if you overpull. Youll also get dismantle which is great for pve and pvp. Dont forget feint also reduces any aoe damage by 50%.
Enchanting is pretty easy to level if you DE all your quest mats. JC is a little annoying to level, but once you get to around ~285ish its pretty easy also.
In PvP, rogues have a lot and very little survivability. Youll get prep in pvp at 80, so you can go through cooldowns twice. Once your CDs are down though, youre fairly squishy.
And as for any class, you can argue under situational rotations. Its the same for any class. It also depends on spec. s&d every time if you have cut to the chase, but if the jump between mobs is 15-20 seconds, youre better off envenoming or eviscerating, or even kidney shotting.