@OP
Hmm, I'm not too sure. After hearing that a patch was imminent I downloaded the game yesterday and actually gave multiplayer a little try. A kind of mini farewell to the bad old days I suppose.
In the couple of hours I played what was immediately obvious was that the zombie win ratio wasn't actually as overwhelming as some people were making out so in a lot of resects that came as a complete surprise. But in all honesty character balancing for me hasn't been the big issue that most people are making out because people tend to forget that whenever they submit their "nerf this, buff that" observations they are only assessing experiences based on abilities of themselves and the person/s they are playing against - and not actually the character itself. A poor player will always feel aggrieved that opposing characters seemingly overwhelm them every single time but never really take into consideration the fact that the person controlling that character might be a better player. And likewise, a poor player won't immediately become a vanquish master if he's given better tools than everyone else.
A couple of things I noticed during gameplay were as follows:
Granted, I spent an awful lot of time getting one shot killed / special effect immobilised (and then killed) by various zombies but what surprised me was when the screen was displayed, the personal duel scores weren't 0-3, 0-4 or 0-5's; they were considerably more balanced - on many occasions my humble peashooter having the positive duel score over my rival. Getting killed over and over again in exactly the same way probably does give the impression that something is wrong with the balancing but the greater picture sometimes says otherwise.
And finally to prove a point that characters are only as good as the players using them. Without blowing my own trumpet I carried forward a standard peashooter k/d ratio of 5.03 (17,300 kills) and a foot soldier k/d ratio of 1.39 (mainly because I play the game correctly and recognise the fact that the foot soldier is one of the better zombies to garden capture due to it's smokescreen) from GW1 and use exactly the same two characters in GW2. So, considering the relative weakness of the standard peashooter over quite a lot of characters in the game, how is it remotely possible for me to sit on the podium as the person with the highest number of vanquishes within a game ? It happened - on more than one occasion.....
Like I said, on most occasions it's not the character itself - it's the person controlling it that makes the greater difference. In my brief experience with GW2 I've noticed that very few players possess the skills to utilise these seemingly overpowered characters so in a lot of respects I can live with the one shot kills and the stupid special abilities of certain characters because no matter how you look at it, it's only making these players slightly less poorer than they actually are.
