OP, is there such a thing?

What makes a class/spec over powered (OP) ? A warlocks ability to easily dispatch mages, or a rogues ability to easily dispatch warlocks? These are class counters, and in many cases spec Dependant.

Examples of this is that a Subtlety rogue would suffer greatly against a Arms or fury, hell any to most warriors with half the brain power they should have, but a combat or mutilate rogue could go toe to toe a lot longer with more success. So does this mean that Warriors are overpowered because they killed that sub rogue with ease? Nope, does it mean warlocks are overpowered because a Chaos bolt critted for 15K+, surely not. A frost mage can kite a kill alot of melee classes but other casters, warlocks with felpuppy's and even other mages, or even a priest, can knock that mage down.

So OP, what does this really mean, and when can it be used? Well in the case of the Retadin, it can, Blizzard has themselves stated that Retadins are not where they should be damage wise. While a rogue is a glass cannon that can kill you quickly or control you quite well, they are a cooldown Dependant class, everyone can admit that there main abilities are on arguably long timers. So a rogue one shots half your health, a chaos bolt takes you to the grave, a divine storm messes up your hair, each class has a way to deal significant damage, just because it happened does not make them OP.....well not always... There is so many factors as it stands such as dodge, resilience, Health, block, crit, spell/attack power, expertise, hit, etc etc that if someone has enough of each and you lack in one, you could be facing a dire end.

PVP is all about that balance, you want to kill fast, but you risk the result of your EPIC PWN's to be a lack of survivability. So we stack, stamina, spell power, enchant for the flavor and so on to try to achieve enough damage to kill without it becoming a maim, and take a big enough hit to still have time to activate that fight or flight spell we all have. So balance it up we do, in arena this is more important, and also more varying than in BG's. In a BG you can get away with damage orientated stat stacks, where as arena you need to mix it up based on group composition, which will again change in 2's,3's and 5's and you may be there just to rain damage on a healer, or to survive and distract there damage dealer.

So back to the original Question, is there such thing as OP in PVP, there certainly is, some classes and specs are designed to over power some classes and spec compositions, where as others as is the Retadin, are really just a jack of all trades. Head over to WOW.com and have a look at there take on fighting a Retadin, there is also some blue posts about the Retadin and it's need to be beaten with the Nerf bat.

In PVE the OP situation thickens, as there is some fights like in ICC that are not friendly to all DPS, and as such people geared for ICC25 still struggle to get over 4-4.5k DPS on some bosses, casters mostly. However this can be spec Dependant as I have seen warlocks with over 5.5k GS (if you follow that) of different specs (destro and affliction) pull numbers that are 2-3k apart. So, in ICC affliction looks to be better for warlocks due to movement, or is Destro in need of buffs?

More later....