I returned to GW2 about a month ago after and extended hiatus and have gotten into it quite a bit.
I play a Thief, and only a Thief and most thing remain unchanged compared to February, when I left.
However after realizing that sPvP awarded laurels and playing it quite a bit I did notice a number of changes and ones I am having a hard-time adjusting to. Ironically they seem to have less to do with the Thief class itself and more to do with all the others.
The thing is, I do fairly well in WvW. The "Revealed" debuff is only 3 seconds and due to more gear-options we can specialize more than in sPvP.
But in sPvP I can't seem to take many classes 1v1 any more. It feels like everyone and their mother is playing some sort of semi-tankish build with high-protection uptime and an abundance of CC. Warriors especially all seem to be running some stun-heavy build combined with at least 2 immunity cooldowns.
Rangers are similar as they all seem to have 4 stun-happy pets following them. Pets also have this annoying "feature" of eating backstabs due to seemingly random target choices. Select the Ranger as a target? Nevermind, attack the pet anyway. And then Rangers too all seem to be hopping around like mad with 60% Protection uptime.
And then there's the abundance of splash-damage. Ranged options for Thieves are very limited and offer little utility. So melee has to be viable. Unfortunately due to the massive amount of random AoE damage flying around, be it Mesmer Illusions, Pets, arcing swings or just standard AoE, I can't seem to sustain myself longer than a few seconds.
So TL;DR is that the following points are causing me grievance in sPvP:
-Abundance of stuns
-Everyone having a high Protection uptime
-Constant splash-damage
I have yet to find a build that can somehow deal with this. I have seen a number of Thieves run some sort of Sword + Dagger/Pistol "Evade-spam" build which basically has them evading near constantly. I'm not sure what the build exactly so maybe someone could link it.