I thought I'd take the time to share my adventure of playing 158 ranked games last season on E X C L U S I V E L Y a core thief with 1 pistol and a shortbow.
Record: 87W-71L including DCs
Rating: 1547
Rank: 192 NA
Build: [&DQUUGyw+HCsMAYUAWQEAAD4BAABYAAAAKAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA=]; carrion/krait, agony / cleansing/energy
The game plan: move around the map, get cheeky 1 shots by abusing the low initiative cost of repeater (why is there a unique upside to not playing a full build???) and the interaction between smoke screen, repeater, and cloaked in shadow for frankly stupid burst and sustain potential, and you can spam repeater for like 12s at 4 bullets/second.
The additional challenge: only allowed to speak in keyboard smashes. who needs to communicate anyways.
So, I get my thief rolling. To make things very clear: I am not, nor do I masquerade as, a good thief player. My mains are guard/ranger/engi/ele. I took the build straight into ranked, and refused to swap regardless of who else was on the team (my usual ranked principles revolve heavily around multiclassing effectively). As I started spam q'ing, the strangest thing happened: I was winning. I was utterly decking people in fights with quicknessed, venomed stealth attacks and repeater spam. I even went back and forth setting repeater as autoattack, but it kept revealing me so I eventually decided against it, and had no autoattack at all. The burst potential: annoyingly passable. 20+ bleed stack burst with ample cover condis and insane damage mitigation from perma-blind. The mobility: spending almost no initiative means you can devote much more to moving around instead of saving initiative for fights like a good thief, because your burst is so low of a burst initiative cost.
I decided new account, let's do my hardest title run yet (the one before that was titling a f2p acct, that one got baron cause valk ranger OP). I was taking matches off of the best of the best players, including a match off helio & jaden, ckod & albert, zyn & emdrix duos. And well, I already included the result at the beginning, the title run was a success, almost too easy of one for a player with no mechanical skill on thief.
I'd like to end this post with the question: WHY????
Why is something like this possible? It's not a handicap, but a meme choice that actually has unique upside compared to a 'proper' condi thief, where your damage output per initiative is way higher, and the venoms make it burst just about as hard by literally holding 1 button.
Repeater, and thief single mainhand skills need to be looked at again, this shouldn't be possible.
Last but not least, an album of fun images: https://imgur.com/a/GbNOLh1