1) Because when compared to every other zerker its not hit and run, its hit retreat hit retreat hit run or hit hit hit hit run.
2) And the fact that thief is balanced around idea that if they exhaust initiative for one thing then they cant use it for something else makes them broken.
3) As i said previously in theory it would be fine that if thief exhausts all initiative for killing someone then he has no defense left, but if hes in situation where he doesnt need any defense then he just did OP dmg output with no downside.
Same with infiltrators arrow, if he uses all ini to get to point then he cant kill anyone on that point and that would be balanced but if there is noone on the point then again he used all initiative in OP way while having no downside to it.
4) On any other class you take risks, if you use that lightning flash for decap you cant use it to run away, if you use that fear to interrupt you cant use it get melee off you, you use that immobilize to stop someone from coming to you, you cant use it to stop him from getting away.
5) And others take these things in consideration yet with thief its all up to him noone knows how much initiative he has and will he be able to interrupt your heal or do you have to use stability to protect the heal etc.Maybe another solution would be adding initiative somewhere on portrait so you know with what you are dealing and what to expect (same should be done for death shroud cause atm when you engage necro you have no idea how much life force he has and that gives RNG aspect to battle too)
1) So the actual problem you have isn’t that the thief can do what it can do, you have a problem with the thief being a snowflake class, in that other playstyles don’t have comparable hit and run tactics.
This is why I wish ANet would have just scaled the elementalists Ride the Lightning with toughness, the higher your toughness the higher RTL’s recharge. The reason they nerfed it is specifically, because they wanted only the thief to do exactly what it does (which at least one class needs to do to allow for creating numbers advantages/decaps). Keeping RTL at 15 seconds for recharge and 1550 range allowed elementalists to be insanely mobile bunkers, which would make them a clear favorite in taking up the mobility role. That’s why scaling RTL with toughness would have been a good option.
Just to be clear again, there’s no problem with the thief being a snowflake, people just don’t like that their class can’t do what the thief does, and it’s a lot easier to argue the thief is somehow OP because no other class has comparible mobility. Actually Warrior and Ranger do, but they don’t have blinks, and ele does too, but not as frequent access to that mobility.
2) This is called a resource pool, and has been established in numerous games for decades. There’s really nothing to talk about here.
3) These are examples of effectively managing your resource pool. A similar concept applies to all other classes. It’s called managing your resources, whether those be mobility resources, defensive resources, offensive resources, utility resources that can be used multiple ways, etc. This goes back to point 1 and 2 where some people feel it’s unfair that the thief is a snowflake with a resource pool and can exaust all their resources into 1 task and temporarily be useless at everything else.
The point about exhausting all your initiative on mobility would be valid if you could lock the other team out of using a thief as well. People just don’t like that the thief is the only class that has the mobility that it does with blinks. If ele still had a 15 second RTL with Lightning flash, you wouldn’t see people saying thief is OP, because of this. You’d see people saying Ele and Thief can do this, so why can’t my class.
4) On thief if you use up your initiative to fight, you can’t use it to get away. Like point 2, there’s really nothing to say about this.
5) Necro doesn’t show death shroud available, warrior doesn’t show adrenaline available, elementalist doesn’t show what attunements it can swap to, mesmer doesn’t show what shatters it can use. Engi doesn’t show what Toolkit skills are off cooldown. Ranger doesn’t show when it will be able to swap pets. Guardian doesn’t show the recharge on it’s virtues. You can’t just make a couple class mechanics completely transparent without making changes to rebalance all of them.
tl;dr
I think this will summarize everything fairly well and I get it, people don’t like that there’s a snowflake class. To put it bluntly, people either want the snowflake as “ugly” as some of the others or they want some of the others to be as “beautiful” as the snowflake.
Norn Guardian – Aurora Lustyr (Lv 80)
Mia A Shadows Glow – Human Thief (Lv 80)