GC says replenishment nerf INC!

Q u o t e:
As long as players are expecting raid slots because of their amazing utility then utility is probably too amazing.

Nerf healing, because healers get spots in raids because they can heal.

As you well know, assuming you read the thread, this was a case of a class or spec wanting a unique buff to guarantee them a raid spot. It wasn't enough to bring *a* buff. They wanted a unique buff such that their guild would say, for example, "We have to take a Retribution paladin or we'll be really behind."

In BC, you "had" to have warlocks to bring Curse of Shadows (never mind that it mostly helped the warlocks) and you had to have a 2 or more Shadow Priests as a mana battery. The list of who you had to bring was so inflexible that doubling up (and in some cases even finding room for one player) was prohibitive. Ret is actually a great example. Their dps was fine, if they were in the right group and had all of the right buffs to prop up their damage. Problem was by the time you put those other 4 characters together, the Ret was the only person benefiting from those buffs and your dps would generally be higher with a rogue in that spot instead. Since the Ret dps in the caster group would be bad, there just wasn't much reason to bring the Ret at all. (Now there are exceptions and clearly Ret paladins did get to raid some of the time, but most Sunwell-level guilds know exactly what I am talking about.)

Rather than just nerfing buffs to such a degree that you don't actually notice a power increase from being in a group, we spread all of the buffs around to multiple characters. Because there are no (or very few) unique buffs, you shouldn't have much problem finding someone to bring a necessary buff, even Replenishment, and honestly unless you are doing hard modes, you can probably do without a few of those buffs anyway.