On release, the overall balance wasn’t too bad, albeit there were only a few acceptable builds but each had a win condition and fairly balanced. The overall movement of each build and the counters to the combos like ice shower or gravity well felt fairly balanced. Each build had a counter in 1v1. Mage was slightly overtuned, but could also be dunked on by a decent archer so I felt the game was fun to play and pulling off my combo in combat was a blast and super satisfying. Come the first combat patch when they completely nerfed mage into the ground I stopped playing. I put up with all the dupes and brokenness because I am really just here for pvp.
Just reinstalled after hearing about the new faction gear. I have full faction pvp gear with great IG/Fire staff lvl 580+ with bis perks. Went into a few arenas, got absolutely stomped. Took a 7k shot from an archer across the map, got completely run down by greataxe users hitting me for like 4k per hit. Couldn’t output meaningful damage, and I couldn’t escape greataxe bloodlust builds who had a healer on their team. Fire dash doesnt work in gravity well now? Game does not feel good at all. Everyone is still spamming dodge like crazy with little concern for stamina. Gear seemed like the most important aspect of the game. Little counter-play present. No crowd control. No healing counter built into any of the weapon kits. I don’t see a pathway of increasing my odds of winning in arena besides farming PVE which is not fun in this game at all and is dependent on other players and groups which I do not have because my friends stopped playing.
I agree with the OP and would like to thank you @Zelme for bringing this to the attention of the devs. A quick fix would be to enable power scaling in arenas.
Part of my own hopes for the game is to normalize stats/level and access to all for arenas.
Guild Wars 2 currently does this the best out there where all players are at 80 & slect a stat and rune combo.
Its a level playing feield other than simply class balance and arena concerns.
PvE SHOULDNT be the way to advance you in a competitive pvp arena mode, it should be skill, plain and simple. I had a very similar experience to yourself and whilst I was disheartened I have a hope for big improvements in the future.
Twitch Views and Youtube Views. You can directly correlate player interest to those numbers. MMORPGs go hand in hand with content that is getting produced.
Oh you can equalize Arena thats fine. Aslong as Sieges and owPvP isnt getting touched im fine