Do Shamans have a place in end game content?

[Kevin]

Man, you are really reaching on this one GG.

Standard player not the class blah blah. Unless you are really on the cutting edge, having a ret isn't going to kill you.

But as far as going out of your way to get one? First off, your hypothetical group is short a real tank (3 warriors + 1 druid). That would automagically make prot > ret.

Or if you didn't want to do that, a far superior solution would be to get a holy pally, and make one of the druids feral. The utility of trees drops off very fast after the first one, but unless the druid is a complete waste he should be able to out dps a ret, as well as pick up some of the tanking.

Another option would be to convert a priest to shadow. Not only would a mediocre shadow dominate a ret on the meters by himself, he would also fuel a bunch of damage in your 2nd caster group.

Ret is just really impossible to justify on its merits as a spec for raiding. You might be able to justify it based on a players particular merits. Ret probably needs a couple of things - a third judgment that is about as useful as wisdom, and crusader strike to reliably refresh them.

I know I'm reaching. Because I'm confused as to why I see people asking for them. I was also thinking 4 tanks was all you needed, not 5 that changes the balance as well. But yeah, making a druid go feral or even OOMkin over the pally being ret is still gonna do better for you on the DPS side. So I fail there, yeah.

The only other trick they bring is stacking them with a tree druid on the tanks and having them run sanctity aura to up the healing by another 6% so it's at 31% as opposed to just 25%. But even that only requires 23 points in ret and that would still let you go prot and get all the best tanking talents anyway. And that would put the 2 pallies in the tank group. What would that be? Tree, Tank, Pally for devo, Pally for sanctity, and I'm not sure. I don't see that as worth it.

You get 3% more crit for the whole raid (it affects spells too and it's not just the party, it's from the judgement of crusader, even still I'm not sure this makes up for the rest), 6% more healing for the tank, and you can make them use the Nightfall to up the spell damage more without hurting DPS more since their DPS sucks already? Is that what they are looking at doing? Making them the Nightfall bitch? I'm not sure they could keep the buff up well enough even if it can proc off SoC. And yeah I don't really count the other layer of buffing they add to the raid since you get that with any pally.

Again, yeah I'm stretching.