And people keep asking me what I'm on about when I call rev "Thief with Defiant Stance." Both classes are equally castles built on sand, through: Revenant, the "other, other Thief" and Thief, the "beta-test stealth showcase." As for the main gripe of this thread, Thief is inherently broken because it has no weapon CDs in a game that is exclusively balanced by CDs. Now, is balancing a game's unique abilities entirely by cooldowns a good idea? Absolutely not. Would GW2 have benefited from the implementation of a more universal resource system for skill use management? Truthfully, the fact that Initiative, on GW2, is confined to Thief is an egregious crime of game design. That said, Thief was never balanced because it was always the worst offender of "haha, I'm evading and teleporting repeatedly while attacking" and no class had any means to stop it. Thieves never truly have to commit to a fight, and that's why its a hollow "playstyle" which ultimately does nothing but harm to a PvP environment. Fighting a Thief is basically just a slow game of whack-a-mole unless the Thief player knows that your CDs will constantly cycle over his windows during which he can spam evades and teleports while attacking (at which point, he just spans shortbow 5 in the opposite direction). If a Thief dies, it's never really the fault of the opponent because the "meta" Thief has always had a means of free escape. The only reason that the class underperforms now is because anet gave every other class (all with higher HP pools) basically the same sort of meme cancer that had kept the Thief in every PvP game prior to HoT. Thief was never a skill-based class: it was a "know hard counters for free kills and watch the minimap" class. In fact, its combat paradigm, once exported to every other class in GW2, only further saddled the game's skill ceiling to claustrophobicly low heights. No class requires skill, it's about reading your enemy and rotate skill cool downs because of passive stuff.