Not really, not entirely. There are demonstrable psychological effect you can induce with a game that will lead your players to either keep playing or stop.
Either of could be called good/bad/toxic depending of your outlook but that’s not what I’m trying to say here.
Lets push the idea to the extreme.
Games that pit players against other players are inherently hard to manage.
Each win comes at the hand of another player defeat.
Something “fun” for someone can rapidly become something very unpleasant for the person receiving it.
Successful PVP games are the ones that are able to manage this.
Shooter are notoriously easier to manage because although there are sometimes different classes, they often have access to exactly the same offensive/defensive power in the form of guns and armor. It therefor comes down to skills and accuracy.
The epitome of toxicity in PVP game is to loose without the chance to interact or input any actions or regardless of them. You want your players to have a chance to REACT, in other words a “fair” amount of time to take actions.
So the closer to instant death you get with mechanics or design, the more unfair it seems and frustrating it gets.
For example lets say you have exactly 2 players playing a game, they enter a match and one player can kill the other in 2 or 3 sec at the start because its a burst class. It might feel good for him but if it happens to often, the second player might just stop playing because there is nothing to do about it.
Not a successful game, player 1 now has no one to play against.
Now let’s say they both use the same class, they are trading off wins now but matches are still going for 2-3 seconds. Might as well coin flip each time. What’s the point? There’s no outplay to be done you always just press the same 3-4 buttons each time to kill the other one first.
Not a successful game either, both players will tire of it pretty soon.
And we can deescalate this situation further and further until we get to a satisfactory middle ground between insta death match and immortal champions that can survive anything for eternity.
Anything that get to close to those 2 extremes can be objectively defines as bad/toxic design for PVP since the very idea behind them WILL drive player out of it by its sheer lack of interactivity and KILL the game.
Now obviously WoW is not there as a whole, far from it.
But this doesn’t mean that the philosophy behind burst is any less frustrating when it occurs in a game, and that you shouldn’t base a character around it unless you consciously create gaping weaknesses to offset it that makes it feel just as bad to play with than to be on the receiving end of the burst.
Even if this is just possible through a short telegraphed window, the core idea remains generally a bad one to keep if you’re gonna pit players against players.
EDIT: to be pedantic, actually comes from Warcraft 3 custom mode game
Dota is an interesting choice for an example, I don’t feel like they have the same relation to balance as other PVP game.
They seem to very much embrace imbalance in their characters as to give a sense that each champion is broken in it’s own way.
While the more conservative and widespread approach is a bit different.
I would personally compare Ret damage profile with champions like Master Yi or Tryndamere in League of Legend.
While true that they can absolutely steamroll games you’ll rarely see them, if ever, in any high level competition because, as you elegantly point out for Ret…
…those champions, like Ret, are noobstompers. And they’ll never be anything else unless they shed that damage profile.
Because, as your comment implies, any competent PVP player will correctly exploit the glaring weakness the “burst” identity come with and prevent the class from seeing much play in competitive events and gamemode unless the damage is such that it trumps the counterplay available.