While individual professions are, to be extremely modest, unbalanced, this isn't going to be about that directly. Instead I'm going to be addressing problems that are deeper rooted in PvP at the moment. The problems have been discussed by other people, and described better than I could. The first problem is the condi problem and while sometimes professions get balancing, condi mitigation is something you need at all times and not having it means you're obsolete, yet somehow this hasn't been a problem since launch and is more recent. The other problem is the 250 problem, which has to do with the design of conquest and the maps. Lastly is the problem with soloq in ranked and its inherent lack of communcation.

Condi Damage

I could probably talk for hours about condi issues but lets look at how their done in Gw2. To quote the developers from the AMA "Power is intended to be more spike damage-centric. Condi more ramping sustained damage." This was in the context of PvE, but condi-damage still exists in PvP and balanced the same. I don't think you could say that "Condi doesn't do spike damage" and not get laughed at. How else do you explain burn-guardian or the more recent Mirage/Scourge? The main difference between PvE and PvP is that player health pools are significantly smaller than PvE enemy health pools for obvious reasons. So if you have 15 stacks of burning on you and no cleanse for 4s, you're effectively dead, where as if a PvE enemy has 30 stacks on them for 8s then they could easily still be alive. PvE enemies also don't dodge, players can which isn't so much as a plus for condi damage but a minus for power damage, since you still take condi damage while dodging. Most skills in the game are designed around the balance of "power is better than condi". Look at Plague Signet, which transfers condis and breaks stuns with no cast time and look at Hundred Blades that roots you in place and takes 3s to cast. Plague Signet cannot be dodged since it's instant yet if you're in a necro duel, that skill alone wins the fight. Hundred Blades is basically only good for cleave damage, and if you see a warrior casting it, you can easily just blast em. The way I see it, is that power damage is your main form of damage, and condi damage is bonus, and in PvE that _is _the case. In PvP, it's often the opposite. There are exceptions but if any build that does hybrid damage, they do more from condis than from power damage. Some classes depend on condi damage so straight up nerfing all of it would ruin them. It's not totally just "condis deal less damage."

To get a background for where my solution comes from, it's to look at when condi damage became significantly stronger than power. That would be when all conditions were changed to stack and traits became specializations. At that point, condi-spikes were made not only possible, but deadly. The only viable condi builds before this point belonged to necromancer and engineer but after that point guardian, warrior, ele and eventually mesmer all became better as condi. The main two changes were burning and poison. Poison isn't as big of a deal because it's side effect of lowering healing was it's draw and making it stack in damage rather than duration lowered it's effectiveness at reducing healing. Burn however, changed the game. Burn damage went from 800 damage a second to 317 dmg a second but it can be stacked infinitely. Builds that capitalize(d) off burn damage have been mostly meta until they were nerfed in someway. The change to specializations also encouraged the increase of condi damage, since some trait lines at their max buffed condi damage but didn't in the lesser, for example Radiance or Illusions. Before you could just grab one or two traits from a line, but after you needed to take the whole thing and for trait lines like Illusions, you would be wasting damage by not going condi, since the adept trait makes confusion better. It was a massive turning point and while it took some time with the help of HoT, condi went from annoying to frustrating.

So as I see it, lowering the effectiveness of condi damage is needed and it needs to be done in two ways.

• Make it harder to land condi spike skills, like plague signet, cry of frustration, or any number of Scourge skills.
• Remove adept traits that benefit condi damage and lower certain condition durations in PvP only.

I do get why the problem exists because DoTs/conditions in action oriented RPGs need to be handled carefully (like Dark Souls), but less so in more turn-based RPGs (like pokemon), and GW2, while action oriented, is still very RPG oriented.

First to 250 wins

I highly recommend reading the post on 250 being the winning factor. The tl;dr of it is "86% of games are determined by the first team to reach 250... if they're more than 50 points ahead or depending on the map." This is a huge issue, not just because your games are dictated by half of your play time but because it shows that there are no ways to come back from defeat, and that's where maps come into play. The map that statistically has the highest reverse odds isn't Temple, but Forest. It may seem odd but won't soon. That said there's only data on ESL games. Here's how each maps mechanic works:

• Khylo - siege tower, gets kills easier, in theory. Seriously, when was the last time you heard "kill the treb" since they updated it? Lowest reversal odds at 6%, unsurprisingly.
• Eternal Coliseum - artifacts, get kills easier, in theory. No statistics on it, but I'd assume low based off experience.
• Forest - Beasts x2. Spawn every 3 min, give 25 point each and a buff, making it 0.14 points per second each and in sum 0.28 points/s, which is worth a little over half a node. 22% reversal odds. The buffs likely increase the reversal odds and the potential instantaneous 50.
• Foefire - Lord, worth 150 points. 17% reversal odds. Lord is fairly rare, since it can only be done in your favour within a 100 point difference.
• Capricorn - Bell tower appears every ~3 min, worth compounding points for each time your team gets it. If you get it every 3min, its worth 0.35 points per second, which would likely give it a higher reversal rate and/or lower difference rates. Out of experience Capricorn can be very close matches, when one side isn't getting stomped.
• Skyhammer - Hammer, resets enemy points every 3 minutes. Its worth 0-10 points each by lowering your enemies points/time for 10s minimum. I'd expect it to have a decent reversal rate, since it forces the enemy team to adapt.
• Spiritwatch - Orb, worth 15 points+decap(-5 points for the enemy team) or 30 points if you have the point. Orb spawns 10s after capture, capturing takes at least a minute. If I assume 1min per and on own point, its 0.5 points/min or exactly 1 point. This map has absurd reversal rates from experience, and isn't in competitive.
• Temple - Buffs, stillness and tranquilty which double points and give your team all the nodes. Predefined times, stillness is every 3 minutes, and tranq is every 6. Stillness is worth 0-75 points, and tranq is worth a guaranteed 15 and up to 500 points. Getting both simultaneously is a guaranteed 30. Stillness is worth 0-0.42 points/s and tranq is kind of impossible to determine but its a guaranteed 0.05. It has a 19% reversal rate.

So what does this all lead to? Maps with more higher reversal rates are typically higher on maps with stronger secondary mechanics. What else can be said is that if a secondary mechanic is too strong, it's not worthy of competitive, such as Spiritwatch. Secondary mechanics typically can be done by a single player, but the stronger the mechanic the more players feel it necessary to do. Spiritwatch becomes a mess when the orb comes out, especially at lower ranks (and even more so before the lowering of the points given). If it's too strong, it's worth zerging over it, which both limits the effectiveness of teamwork and strategy, which make it bad. The same can be said about Khylo though, because it makes it better to zerg and take points as you go. There has to be a balance between capturing nodes and the secondary mechanic. Otherwise there's going to be constant snowballing and zerging. With that said, here are my suggestions:

• Khylo - siege tower hits are worth points (1 each, the treb takes ~5s to fire so if you hit all 5 of the enemy team, thats 1 point a second maximum if they're grouped up too heavily)
• Eternal Coliseum - getting kills with sword are worth 10 points, getting revives with the shield are worth 5 points each. The artifacts already provide a combat advantage so if your team gets them and wins team fights with them, you can narrow the gap further.
• Forest - Add a bonus that gives teams that kill both beasts an additional 25 points, which would match it with Stillness, at 75 maximum. (Not compounding so if you kill Svanir and Chief you get the free 25 but your next beast will still only be worth 25).
• Foefire - Add point earned by killing the guardians, ie the casters and soldier. Each will be worth 10 making lord rushes worth 190 if complete. 25 if the impact is too minimal (boosting it all the way to a potential 250).
• Capricorn - I'm not certain but I think it's fine. If reversal odds are low, I would remove the compounding factor or increase the bells frequency by 30s to make it match stillness.
• Skyhammer - this ones more complicated because the first team to the lost points gets them and the team that loses the hammer has that advantage. To change that, the portal sickness mechanic needs a fine tuning. Specifically, increasing the duration of it to 15s (matching a death) and reapplying it to all members of the losing team (for 10 more seconds).
• Spiritwatch - decrease frequency of the orb. Its unranked though so i don't really care.
• Temple - I like Temple, I don't know if anything is needed. Maybe increasing the duration of stillness by 10s max.

As an aside note, how many games have you played where you ignored treb, noticed artifacts have been up for the whole game, ignored beasts and on the opposite end, did a lord rush because it's the only way to win? That and playing games that are determined entirely by the capture points get dull.

Solo-Queue in Ranked

This is a team game that discourages teamwork right out of the gate. I understand it's done to give all players equal odds, but again, it's a team game. I like queuing with as many friends as I can, and to do that I need to play non-competitively? It's upping the toxicity in the game because it feels like you're playing with 4 bots sometimes, regardless of how bad you're doing yourself. I just don't understand the logic behind not letting players queue up together in ranked, nor having a voice communication system if the mode is designed around teamwork.

TLDR: Condis are really easy to apply and they shouldn't be and on top of that players shouldn't be shoehorned into running condi builds. Games are decided half way through almost always, and shouldnt be. There needs to be better teamwork in soloq, and a system in place to promote that.