I think the annoying part about this (and other) threads regarding Thief in WvW is that main Thief players constantly roll out the “Oh, you must not have ever played a Thief!” excuse. Interestingly, I’m assuming the reverse of “Oh, you’ve only ever played a Thief so you are clearly biased” argument wouldn’t go over too well.
I have played Thief, Mesmer and Engineer (at level 80, and in that order) in WvW, and I just want to put my name in on the opinion that the skill required to play most Thief builds is incredibly low. This is in part due to the ridiculous ease of access to stealth that the class has, but I’d say that it’s not too much of a problem on any build except D/P.
While CnD can be avoided, Shadow Refuge can be countered (either knock them out or it gives you a clear AOE target rather than a 360-degree guessing game), and things like Blinding Powder and even HiS are on actual cooldowns, the spammability of Black Powder + Heartseeker is just absurd.
It cannot reliably be countered because the Thief is usually not near you when he executes it. It is usually done after a Shadowstep (because you landed a substantial burst or condition combo on him), or after/during a HiS in which the Thief has gained substantial ground away from you due to no mobility penalty for being in stealth.
This takes any sort of counterplay out of the picture because it’s absurd to try and predict the backstab (either by dodging or blocking) during an 8+ second stealth. Most classes have limited (if any) blocks and many builds don’t have a high vigor uptime. This is made worse by the fact that blocks (including Aegis) and dodges don’t reveal the Thief anyway upon a failed backstab. In my case, at least with a normal 4 second stealth, I can reliably block it with my Gear Shield or Static Shield or dodge due to perma-vigor giving me enough dodges if I plan accordingly.
I don’t think Thief is broken or OP overall. In fact, I think Thief in general needs some serious rethinking because lots of its builds are essentially terrible (P/P since release…) and the only ones that are really good (D/P and S/D) rely on cheesy mechanics of spamming (due to the initiative system) stealths and/or evades/teleports.
But to the topic of the thread, D/P is currently a terrible design due to how trivial it is to reset the fight the second something doesn’t go your way. If a Thief wants to win, they should have to play skillfully by being forced to land CnD or something that has real counterplay.
I wont pretend to know how best to adjust the Thief moving forward, but something needs to be done. Less of an emphasis on stealth? Removing the initiative system? I’m not sure.