As a deadeye player this is my perspective: Condi mirage is the most overpowered build in the game by far. The core design of multi-casting in mesmer (weapon/utils/shatters/clones) allows for a certain persistent offensive pressure that just works too well with condition damage; this is the same reason people complain about condition thief despite this only being true to a lesser extent with daredevil. This offensive pressure combined with the amount of defensive uptime condition mirage can manage essentially leaves it with no vulnerability windows and no major weaknesses. You can't kite them well if at all because of their mobility in addition to bodyblocking from clones and reflects. You can't offensively pressure them via melee because most of their damage mitigation doesn't occupy their casting queue, leaving them free to weapon attack and use utilities to punish you. You can't reliably CC them because of access to stability/stunbreaks/mirage cloak evade and because MOST OF THEIR INVULN ANIMATIONS DONT PROPERLY RENDER. ESPECIALLY OUT OF STEALTH. This seems to be partly caused when they clone spam as the rendering engine just seemingly gives up with the sudden visual clutter. You can't really avoid their damage because the core design of condition damage/application when combined with the multi-cast pressure of mirage means that evading even their condi burst you will probably lose half your health from passive clone application followed by autoattacks and AoE. Another issue being the efficacy of AI casters- clones are way too fast and way too persistently perfect in their attacks and I think if anything this speaks to overtly easy design of condition damage as I've never had issue with power mesmer/chrono/mirage clones. On Thief: I want to really stress how wrong a lot of people are about thief in general. Condition daredevil might be annoying but that's all it is in my opinion. Unlike the aforementioned condition mirage, condition daredevil doesn't really have much in the way of sustain and relies too heavily on one or two attacks that can be avoided (steal/infiltrator's strike) leading them to be predictable and easy to manage. Every time thief has gotten a viable condition build it quickly gets nerfed because everyone bemoans the simplicity and ease despite this being chiefly an issue with the core design of condition damage itself... I don't play condition at all, but my main issue is that nerfing condition thief will almost certainly end up nerfing power S/D builds for the billionth time and power S/D is already pretty bad.I didn't even really know about staff thief until this thread. People have been trying to make a viable bunker thief build since the dawn of time. It never works because thief just can't chain together mitigation by design, unlike firebrand/scrapper/druid/etc. Apparently it's popular in automated tournaments. I've only ever faced this build in ranked once, but anybody with a slight clue to the vulnerability frames on thief evades should be able to handle this build. Please do not nerf power staff builds as they are already largely irrelevant and you will be relegating them to further irrelevance. Oneshot/stealth thief builds are extraordinarily gimmicky. They are absolutely sitting ducks 90% of the time. If anything needs to be changed its the stealth uptime shadow arts allows deadeye because that alone allows for these builds to exist.
