Thief or ele for pve as of patch?
As someone who owns both with few exo gears.
I’m in love with ele in PvP matter, but despite being group support, i wouldn’t consider it as best PvE class. The huge cons of PvE D/D ele is that you have to be “awake” all the time if you want to get more out of proffession. So it’s mobility skills, combos (mostly might stacking), attunement swapping. No longer “brainless” skill spamming with good effect.
S/P thief (now with improvment healing signet) is much better. Can tank for it’s own and deal huge amount of damage without any bigger effort and it takes 30sec to change build to suit it for WvW needs.
Personally, during 500h on ele, excluding exp, I spent probably less than 30h on it farming/doing dungeons. Whenever I need to farm tokens/cash I just log onto thief and it goes way more smooth.