Guild Wars 2

Thief’s SB is probably the only weapon in the game (besides necro and guardian staff?) which has not being used as main weapon. SB is only usable as your offset. You don’t see “SB Thieves” around, right? You weapon swap to SB when you need utility, mobility, escape, maybe for some aoe dmg …
I really hope we will see some nice dmg buffs to SB in near future, mostly for Power Thieves, since SB still do more dmg as condi weapon, especially with Venoms.

Of course you can have SB thieves. Spam 4 in not pvp for Condi or Rupt, or spam cluster bomb for a strong power burst.

The chinese client also used to have an SB meta in wvw where thieves would drop Choking Gas all over and the zerg would combo through that.

I wouldn’t want to lose any of shortbows utility to balance. It has a nice range of actions like staff and feels as natural.

My WvW condi build is pretty much a shortbow build, P/D only really comes out if I can guarantee a kill and it’s 1v1. If you build for immobs, poison and interrupts it’s pretty nice.

If you are condi with 100% poison duration, you can pretty brainlessly take out most enemies that rely on melee only. Even ones with access to resistance if you slot sigil of absorption.

It’s not a good main choice if your opponent has any ranged/kiting pressure, though.

Like others have said it can be used as a primary for a lot of condi specs for the poison, and I have even fought power thieves that start shortbow as primary to steal/cluster bomb. Believe it or not that kitten can hurt when you catch all the explosions point blank (7-8k total?). I think it’s just the fact it’s a difficult weapon to use makes it seem less appealing to use primary, but with some practice you can blow people up.