Blizzard has received a lot of flak over changes made in the two hemispheres of World of Warcraft. These hemispheres are, of course, the Player vs. Player and Player vs. Environment hemispheres. Let's not get these confused with how realms are denoted (Kel'thuzad being a PvP realm and Aerie Peak being a PvE realm) but rather how the game is played.
Blizzard has 10 classes with 30 specs. These 30 specs are meant to be unique from one-another while comparable in value. The way they are valued is how effectively they can do their respective jobs. That means that all 30 specs need to be competitive at the same time as comparable. A Raid Leader or a Battleground Leader should, when forced to make a decision, pick a player rather than a class.
This means that Blizzard has one god-damned-fucking-difficult job. 30 unique specs, covering 4 roles, all doing similar jobs without beating each other out? Sounds difficult.
Now, multiply that difficulty by two. As every class should be able to pick any spec for either hemisphere; a warrior should be able to PvP and PvE as Fury and not feel handicapped in anyway.
So, we reach an inevitable conclusion: One (Potentially two or even three) spec is not "balanced." Balance can't PvP because it lacks the on-command burst of a mage or warlock. Beastmaster can't PvE because it lacks the sustained DPS. And the list goes on and on, essentially for every spec.
Blizzard has done, as far as I'm concerned, a superb job of maintaining best-possible balance. You still see minorities of certain specs in both PvP and PvE environments. This may or may not have anything to do with gross undertuning or overtuning of specs; more likely than not, the specs have never been closer for effectiveness. Instead, there is a slight difference that is over-exaggerated; If one person tells you that Destruction is 5% better than Affliction, and you tell the next person, and they tell the next person, eventually nobody is specced Affliction because Destruction is 100% better and a million others agree with that false-conception.
The big issue for me and many others is gear. If you didn't know, Blizzard has not released the 2200 rating weapons. This isn't for lack of desire to release the gear. It's just that PvE players are not currently mowing down raid content. Blizzard has delayed the release of the 2200 rating weapons to prevent a swarm of raiders from rushing Arena and Rated battlegrounds to get, what would be, the Best in Slot weapons for both PvE and PvP at the same time.
The reverse of this happened in Wrath of the Lich King. With the release of the expansion, guilds powered down the entry level raids. 226 weapons were available to drop from Kel'thuzad and 213 items were attainable across the board throughout 25 man raids. PvP, on the other hand, was behind by an entire tier and users were forced to achieve high ratings just to get top quality PvP gear.
So, in the balancing Tug-O-War, PvE beat PvP in WotLK. And in Cataclysm, they tried harder to balance it. No weapons for PvE nerds, I suppose.
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