For what is OP simply look at how a class is represented.
To take the only area they seem to balance the game on – tPvP, there are 5 slots in a team between 8 classes, for the entirety of the game thief has been an automatic choice for one of those slots for nearly every decent team, objectively it is OP in tPvP.
Interesting…
Let’s look at another team based game for a second… League of Legends.
So typically the team composition, consisting of 5, is something like 1 ADC, 1 Support, 1 AP-carry, 1 Top, 1 Jungler.
Jungler can be a tanky one or an assassin one depending on the top.
Top can be a bruiser or a tanky type.
Mid is typically an AP-carry, most of the time bursty too. Sometimes it’s an AD mid as well (Zed/Yasuio).
Supports are generally characters that have a kit/skills that are very much suited for supporting, not really dealing damage. Sometimes the Support can be replaced for another AD/AP character that will still support in anyway they can while also doing a bit of damage.
Lastly the ADC. You need to have an ADC.
So going off what you said, the ADC is then considered the most OP role, since it’s always picked without any variation to it.
It is, however, not the most OP role. It, the ADC, fills the niche/role of being a full-on glass-cannon machine gun that’s sole purpose is to maw down the enemies while letting their team handle a lot of the rest (warding, peeling, cc’ing, ganking, …).
Similarly for GW2, the thief is is on nearly every team. It fills the niche/role of being a roamer, back-capper, and someone that makes fights unfair (turning that 1v1 into a 2v1, a 3v3 into a 4v3 (picking off easy targets(people with low health/ones that do more damage))).
If thief was truely OP, you would see teams composed of more than just 1 thief, since, being OP, it can/should handle more than what I’ve listed above.
In a weird way though, if you would have said that the meta-composition is OP, you would have been kind of correct, simply because it IS the meta. And I agree, the meta is OP, that’s why it’s the meta.
Now, you might say “but in League of Legends you have more ADC’s too choose from, while in GW2 there’s only the thief.” – well, for starters, what you were trying to do with saying the thief is OP because it’s in every team, is a team/role-composition issue as opposed to an issue pretaining specifically to a class/character. The other thing is, that example was brought up to hopefully explain something as a opposed to comparing the two games side by side. While there might not be variation among class to fill that role, there are slight/subtle variation in builds. And lastly, in my opinion, GW2 is an MMO with very limited class and build choice, due to it’s design – comparing it to say something like WoW (11 classes).
It is trying to expend in that area, as you can probably tell by the up-coming changes/expansion – the elite specs, the addition of “new” weapons to classes.
Going back to League of Legends, it was released in 2009 (today is 2015, 6 years later) – I have played way before season 1 started (so before 2010), back in the days when having a tank on your team would mean almost certain victory, back when having 2 top was more likely while a jungler was something rarely seen (1 character could do it), back when there was no concept of support and the adc went solo-middle – the game changed so much that you could consider pre-season 1 and todays game to be completely to different games. In time (don’t hold your breath though), GW2 might reach the same level of maturity.
All that is to say, yes the meta (composition in this case) is OP. Nice try spinning something off of it.
Edited: But Zero Day, the teef is still the only profession being sloted for that role – Give it some time, maybe they will release another profession (next exp? lol) that can fufill the role, and then you can blindly call both that profession and the thief OP. Anyways, enjoy the read guys :P .
