Condi shatter is a lot easier to handle then the older pu non chrono as a thief tbh.
Are people claiming thief it self is op or jus d/p? I sometimes see power d/d and s/d but they don’t get much hate at all.
D/D is mostly a one trick pony with not a whole lot going on outside of a “teleport onto a guy with precast C&D and backstab” sure it’s an instagib on anything remotely squishy if you can’t see them but that’s about it. By can’t see them I mean someone who is hiding round a corner to teleport or in a small scale fight where you don’t know it’s D/D yet.
S/D I honestly have only seen maybe 3 thieves in WvW running S/D since HoT so have no idea tbh.
The rest of the dislike comes from how apart from shadowstep thieves have very low cool downs on thier skills. Adding on the ability to be immune to all soft CC and get away from absolutely everything except another thief or druid longbow if they start rapid fire at close range as they try to run. It’s like a lot of other HoT specs there’s very little risk and a lot of reward vs anything that has moderate to high risk.
This is from a power shatter perspective though where even 0.5s lapse in attention will mean death. There’s just so little risk in the meta builds now vs non meta and all classes suffer, it’s especially hilarious seeing people act like berserker, DH, scrapper and rev are not part of the problem.
Same for everything though. D/P Daredevil and to some extent staff are pretty overloaded while the rest of the thief is straight garbage being a gimmick at best unless there’s a serious skill disparity.
Utility cooldowns are pretty standard outside of the Daredevil ones which are just absurdly low for whatever reason, though this is the case with every elite. Understand that the mesmer has pretty high cooldowns but its utilities are also typically much stronger per cast as stand-alone abilities. BV’s probably one of the big exceptions in regards to low-cooldown utilities, but depending on the matchup it can have more/less impact than others.
It pretty much comes down to stealth stacking and ease-of-play on the elites, though.
Shadowstep is a flat out better version than blink, and infiltrator’s signet is another free gap closer that also feeds you initiative and breaks stun, again. Your last slot is pure choice, and not only do we have shadow refuge, haste, or roll for initative assuming that for some reason you don’t want to use assassin’s signet.
Before you’d have to sacrifice your heal slot for hide in shadows if you wanted some condi clear and some investment into shadow arts.
But now all you need is a freaking daredevil trait that cleanses conditions every time you evade, on a clkittened up with evades, so you can also take the heal that not only heals you for a metric ton and gives you even more evades, but is on a low cooldown to boot compared to the 30 sec of hide in shadows.
Thieves just say every other set is bad because every other set is not as OP as is the benchmark of D/P or staff.
A fair amount of S/P thieves and even a few S/D were running before HoT came along and broke everything to hell by gifting thief a traitline that combined all of acrobatics and shadow arts appeals of condi clense and evasion in one and gave you a bunch of extra damage modifiers to boot in addition to complete immunity to snares and roots.
.