Class imbalance and chaos theory

Everyone who has played this game more than one week knows that a major problem is the class imbalance, as it mainly ruins PvP.

Balancing the classes is the greatest challenge for any MMORPG, and usually it takes years before perfection is reached (im not a fanboi of Funcom, bear with me). For example, a class in WAR was so overpowered in the beta (i forgot witch one, Chaos Knight?) that they simply removed it instead of balancing it out.

Class balance is much like chaos theory, as if you change one small coefficient for one class, it usually impacts the entire game (as chaos theory states that picking up a flower on one side of the world, could mean the end of a species on the other side of the world. Like the movie Butterfly Effect).
Lets say for instance, that FC would nerf Necromancers frost-damage, from 100% to 80%. That would affect all classes differently, as some classes has cold-resist buffs and so on. FC would then have to tweak the cold reststance of some classes, while some classes would have their cold-resistance reduced. This would of course cause a ton of other problems that will affect even more classes and the wheel imbalance is in motion.

Let's take WoW for example. In the dawn of the WoW-era, class imbalancing was of course a problem. But as WoW managed to have their playerbase more or less intact during this development period (whioch of course had much to do with that fact that there wasn't many MMO's around when WoW started up), they managed to pull it off well and today it's the worlds largest MMO/computer game.

So to sum it up, class balancing is indeed complicated, but once perfected it's a major success-factor for a MMORPG.