Thief players, what is fun about your thief?

...and then the Phantom nerf hit, and once again, despite thinking it wouldn't be too bad, it completely crippled the class for me. The damage aspect wasn't too bad as I had spent a lot of time funding it already, so I didn't really mind as I wasn't losing much, but the cooldown on skills and loss of critical rate was just like a punch in the face.

While I agree on the cooldown part, the critical rate part barely had an impact at all. Since you had hypers to compensate and give back 10% crit rate along with the new buff skill that can stack with judgement card and will activate all of them at the same time. you can literally get 90% crit rate already without SE or rings. Personally, I may have overcompensated myself with critical rate. I have 91% crit rate base without rings. If I had a critical ring I can easily knock myself up to 100% without buffs, but all I got is a DB 5% crit ring which I took off later on because I was packing too much extra critical now. I made up for the critical nerfs by getting a 12% crit rate 85% boss damage card, followed up with a 21% crit rate inner ability. Making up for the nerfs makes you have to put in extra effort into the class which is kind of annoying but I guess its part of building every character out there. Since they nerfed all stolen skills I used mille mostly, which I rather liked using anyways along with SE where you'd get even more crit rate and damage. Its nice flowing with 100% crit rate around, its something most jobs don't get to have (except for DB), and it impacts your damage too since carte noire relys on it.

In the end yes, the part I never really could compensate much on is the damage nerfs, stolen skill damage became a joke that its not even "fun" to use them anymore without looking weak with it. While I did like using mille for most things anyways, I wanted to at least play around with skills without getting slapped in the face with a skill change CD and can't even see the stupid CD time. The biggest impact if you're a boss fad is the fact that you spend a lot of time buffing, like seriously, buffing lol. You got way too many buffs now when you add in hypers and AB link, you really spend too much time standing there buffing. The upside to that is now I can run around on my Phantom character with 85-105% stat resist easily and with avoid to make up for me wasting time standing there so I won't get hit. Once unlimited comes I may start feeling greatly impacted since I really don't like trying to pot in between buffs a lot. Think of the current Chaos Pierre if you ever gone there, he seriously whacks you too much too fast, I'm not going to keep trying to run away and buff all the time.