You are mainly pointing to the evade frames. But the issue was his damage output not the build as a whole.
I personally think the evade spam is overtuned (along with the block spam etc).
As to 4K attacks…I see a lot of very close to 4k attacks if not in one hit then on the follow up hit half a second later. Power thief builds will erase 10k hp in 1.5 seconds if they are well built. The point stands that if he had been struck by a competent thief he would have died.
And you keep comparing instant damage to over time damage without any cleanse. The better comparison is damage over 10 seconds from both power and conditions with cleanse, the same over 30 seconds, and then over 1 minute. Each would probably be different outcomes in terms of which is better.
It’s all related though, most power builds can’t throw out attacks while in evade frames constantly like thief can in both power and condi builds. The outlier is thief, specifically daredevil.
4k auto attacks I rarely see on anything that isn’t full zerk with a considerable amount of might. I might see it as the final hit of the chain but it’s closer to 3k on crit. This is another crucial point, they generally have to crit to hit that high. I won’t lie and say power builds can’t instantly spike for a ton of damage, they can of 10-20k depending on how glassy they are and circumstances but the output of those builds drops to barely anything after that for 5-12s usually and need an opening for such damage which can be lowered in many ways.
Comparing damage over 30s is biased to power builds as the condition builds will keep ticking long after. Let’s say you get hit by 2 death blossoms, that’s 14k damage you will take from a dire/krait/agony sigil daredevil. Condition cleansing works on first in last out, you’re likely to also have cripple and possibly torment on you with the heels having occured first. So a 2 condition cleanse won’t work, you need a 3 or some mixture of cleansing.
Some build can just keep cleansing like warriors, eles, guards and some mesmer builds. Other builds might not be able to keep up with the cleansing and be forced to space them out every 5s or so or even worse rely on transfering back which brings us back to the evade frames. Put simply you’re unable to pressure the DD due to evade frames consistently (god help if you have a three way causing map wide lag) but there’s also many builds that will have to take various amounts of damage as they try to get rid of that bleed stack that is last to be cleansed.
Finally if you run out of cleanses you have to wait till the next one is up, some classes might have to wait 10-20s before this happens. It’s hard to make a comparison with power as you say it’s straight up damage but condition is DoT but you can’t simply say any damage you might take after 30s on DoTs is ignored. If you don’t have a cleanse for it then that damage matters and will kill you.
