At release, the destro classes were much better as a whole. Order had several classes that were completely worthless until like the second round of buffs. Shadow warrior, engineer, that dwarf priest one, archmage... frankly the only two order classes that weren't average or worse at launch were bright wizard and ironbreaker. The former was slightly better than its counterpart (sorceress) while the latter had no counterpart class at launch, it came out a few months later. Aside from those, basically every destruction class was significantly better than its order mirror.
It caused almost every server to start out completely dominated by destruction because their classes were simply so much better that they won most of the PvP. Out of the worst six classes at release, all were order except for squig herder. Destro had insanely broken shit like witch-elf instakills, unkillable black orcs, DoK which beat literally every class 1v1, and that magnet pull thing the magus could do which the engineer couldn't do until later on. The few cool things available to order classes were extremely situational, like the ironbreaker knockbacks which were good in one specific scenario because it had lava. Destro classes had all the group PvP synergies and the mechanics that worked well in the zergfest environment that was WAR PvP, such as the fact that the marauder pull was just basically death grip - instant and unavoidable - while the white lion pull required your pet to be alive and make it to the enemy lines which was nearly impossible because there were six layers of AoE plastered everywhere on the field, and then the skill missed like 30% of the time because it was a pet. The destro classes were just so much more complete.
This changed after a while, but the damage was done by then and there were like two servers where order weren't basically non-existent. Almost every EU server was 80% destro after the first month. This is why they overbuffed the order classes. My entire alliance disbanded because nearly every player who hadn't quit the game instead rerolled destro. Everyone who was remotely serious about PvP either started or rerolled as destruction, half the order classes were utterly worthless and the races also looked like shit and had useless racial abilities. The high elf ones were terrible for every high elf class.
Even the destro gear was better because the resists it gave were actually effective against the stronger order classes while the order gear gave resists against the weakest destro classes, like a piece being plastered with elemental resist which for order only worked against magus which was about as offensive a caster as Everquest's enchanter, while the equivalent destro piece was vastly better because order's elemental-based class was the bright wizard, its main nuker. Each side's gear sets had an emphasis on two resist types and the order gear often had half of its item budget wasted on the resist type that protected against the destro healers while the destro gear had resists against the classes you'd actually want it for. A lot of the order sets had spirit resist as the main stat which none of the destro offensive classes had as their main damage type while the destro sets had elemental resist which was crucial against the strongest order class. Order also had no dual-wielding class at release while destro had two. Witch hunter could use a sword and a pistol but couldn't attack with both at the same time, and shadow warrior could just use a one-handed sword and literally had no off-hand slot which was a huge loss of stats and DPS. There were so many little details like that which favored the destruction side.
