They are looking at the Shaman now

[Kevin]

I don't know what kind of raid guild you are in, but Shamans are there to HEAL, not take unnecessary damage by being in melee range or wasting mana throwing shocks around. If the raid has too many healers, you bring less healers and more DPS; you don't add gimp DPS by having healing classes start whacking things.

Um you don't need nearly the healing on Trash mobs as you do on bosses. Not even close, not even if you are fighting several at once (we do triple firelord pulls at times to speed things up too, we also fight a two giants and a dog or two at the same time) So in my opinion a smart group would do well to bring shaman and paladins and druids that can heal on the bosses where you need more of the healing and do DPS on the trash or the weaker bosses to make things go faster. Of course as gearing gets better you need even less healing. But I love taking my druid to MC. She is cat form the on the trash sitting in front of all but the rogues the top geared DPS warriors, and some of the warlocks, but top 10 in damage is not hard on the way to Luci and Mags. But on Luci I change to caster to help remove curse and throw a few heals out. On Mags I put on my feral high mana set so I can pop into cat do some damage, pop out and heal the rogues or others who are the back and then do more damage. Sure you could replace me with a priest who will not need to heal and do much less DPS on the trash. Or you could replace me with a rogue and not have enough healing or decursing on Mags. But as a feral druid I get to give boosts to DPS and do pretty good DPS, and I can and do heal when we need the extra healing, that you dont' always need.

Unless you are changing teh group that is doing the trash and change the group that is doing each and every boss (and you'll waste time on the summoning), hybrid classes, playing as hybrids are fantastic because not every encounter takes as much healing. You need more healing on domo than you do on Gehennas. I've seen similar situations in ZG, AQ20 and BWL. Druids and paladins doind DPS in phase one to get rid of mages faster and then healing in phase two because even in that fight you need different amounts of healing.

Any guild that wants to actually take down the bosses quickly and easily aren't going to force folks into one spec.

I chuckled at that. Are you joking or trying to make a point about morale? Either way, I'm not talking about if people are having fun at what they are doing, I'm talking about raid effectiveness. My guild doesn't force specs - but feral druids and shadow priests sure aren't getting raid invites unless we're desparate(or doing MC). Every single shaman in our guild is at LEAST 32 in restoration (I'm currently 37, have been as high as 45). If someone wants to be a DPS class in a raid, what do they do? They roll a DPS class. The half-assed DPS fram a healing class in healing gear is detrimental to any raid (or the halfassed healing from a healing class that used all of their DKP on damage gear, for that matter.)

As pointed out, you can be more effective with the hybrids if you use them. You can build gear sets that make you middle road on both or you can change gear. My warrior changes what gear he uses for firelords and what gear he uses for surgers and what gear he uses for Razorgore and what gear he uses for Vael. My druid changes gear out all the time in MC and well we are glad to have druids around with improved thorns because it makes aggro that much better for the tanks and does just that much more damage on the lead AoE mages (and the tanks, improved thorns can be 10% of the MT's damage, which means it's just that much faster that much more aggro and you should care about that if you want to be optimized like you are talking, you should want someone with that skill and a warrior with imp battle shout in with the rogues and even a leader of the pack in with a DPS group to make the DPS that much better I can mathcraft what 3% more crit for 3 rogues and a DPS warrior can mean and then if you give that DPS to the druid that is providing that aura you are probably doing more damage than having another hunter, or rogue or DPS warrior on the raid).

Like I said, if a druid or shaman gives up innervate or mana tide, that person probably gives up his spot in the raid. We raid to kill bosses, not to see all our healers run out of mana when Chromaggus is at 30%.
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That is way too bad. If all your healers are running out of mana at that point then you need to fix your strat or bring more healers are make sure that your hybrids are doing the right job on that too. I'm not convinced that pigeonholing the hybrids makes you better. I'm not convinced it makes you worse either. Specs for most classes make them different enough that it's pretty safe to say there are 24 classes for each faction, not 8. Learn to use those classes best.

I'm not just talking about people having fun and morale either. I'm talking about the benefits each person and spec can provide. Sure it might still be that only one shaman is best and that shaman should be resto, but maybe that isn't the case. I'm just about positive that you do better with at least one moonkin and one leader of the pack and might do better without a single resto druid. We keep losing resto druids because innervate becomes less and less important and priests are better healers and paladins are damn good healers and feral or moonkin druids tend to bring more to the table (Keep in mind a feral druid has a 20% bigger mana pool than a resto druid).

And yes I agree that looking at the endgame shaman and paladins have less options as hybrids than druids. Paladins weren't really fixed on this issue with their revamp. I think shaman can be and I hope they are.