Black Powder was overpowered the way it was. It was bad if you stood in the absolute center. If you moved just as hair, it was absurdly strong. Very few still playing have fought my P/P healing power build from back then. In melee, it was almost impossible to kill outside of a 4v1 in sPvP and it didn’t run stealth.
SA had to get nerfed massively with the separation of stats from gear, anyways. It offered more damage than DA and CS with the best sustain on the thief.
S/D got “nerfed” not because of people asking for build diversity. Engaging stealing 3 non-stacking boons and then all stacks of two more boons at the same time was deemed too strong by boon-tank players in what was a boon-heavy meta. Do I need to remind you that S/D 3 has been reworked four times and changed three more since launch, even when D/D was objectively overpowered? It’s been a problem skill for people since launch, and there are still many successful S/D players out there, myself included. The nerfs to Acro killed S/D’s sustain viability in sPvP because it carried S/D and the thief’s non-stealth game, and Daredevil, despite offering what once was and so much more, does not compete against what currently exists in the scope of monster bunker-builds that came with HoT on other professions, lacks the point-sustain presence in organized PvP relative to these other professions given the increase in CC and boon accessibility to which S/D cannot keep up.
The thief was only ever relevant in sPvP when it was overpowered because of the way sPvP is designed. The class is fine in WvW if not excellent in what it specializes in, and has been forever. That’s telling enough as it is that the problems don’t lay entirely on the profession-design level but instead mathematical problems associated with sPvP.
My personal theory is that we lack build diversity because the ANet balance team recognizes they’ll get mass QQ and quitting as soon as the only dominant sets are made relatively equal to others, since the majority of players who still play the game and their professions prefer those sets or don’t mind playing them, while the others silently left (See: Sizer).
Defending D/P’s existence forcing neglect of other sets on the pretext that it’d make the thief less usable than currently is logically the same argument as requesting nerfs to the dominant set, except it’s even more unfounded since it lacks any coherent strategy to improve the others while not boosting the profession into an undesirable power-level, while doing the former is heavily-steeped in analysis and suggestions to do so.
