WTB AP debuff so I can do my job

Q u o t e:
Building a group with the appropriate buffs/debuffs is part of the game.

Yes. We made it much, much easier to get those buffs and debuffs than ever before. But you still can't say make a raid of 10 rogues (or even a tank, a healer and 8 rogues) and then say "bring the player, not the class" should let you be as competitive as a raid comp that maximizes buff / debuff potential.

There are very few mandatory buffs, and we made it even easier to get those that affect tank survivability, such as Fort, Gift and Kings.

You don't need an AP debuff to be successful, and if you really want one, there are plenty of ways to get it.

Q u o t e:
Heroic 25 Anub'arak adds without a Demo Shout effect kill all tanks, including full 102.4% shield block warriors. Thorim would 1-shot tanks with unbalancing strike without a demo shout effect, including early 10 man. Almost all of grand-crusader bosses have a 50% damage 20% HP modifier which a demo effect has additional damage reduction modifiers upon.

The original concern was for a 10-player group. We don't assume an AP debuff for a 10-player raid, though it is certainly nice to have. We assume you have it in a 25-player raid. We make some assumptions about the most important buffs and debuffs for larger raids, particularly those trying the heroic / hard mode content. Those include things like Replenishment, Fort, Kings, Gift, Bloodlust / Heroism, CoE, the AP debuff, Sunder Armor, the attack speed debuff, and maybe Scorch and a few others. Even in those cases you don't need every buff / debuff the game offers and even if you're missing one of the big ones, you can overcome that with enough skill (or gear). The bosses don't do an instant berserk if they detect you are missing Demo Shout. Yes, it will be harder without. Hard modes are for guilds capable of doing hard modes. Normal modes are for almost everyone.

Fortunately, Demo Shout isn't hard to get. No, you can't just randomly assemble any 10 characters and have a strong raid comp. But you certainly have a lot more flexibility in how you assemble your groups than in the BC content, and the proof of that is in the enormous diversity of raids that are beating the encounters.

Some of these posters believe that all tanks must have certain abilities or Things Aren't Fair. That's not a design goal of ours, but I understand that it's subjective and your opinion might differ. We want to make sure all four tanking classes can tank every encounter within a reasonable degree of each other, and for the most part we've met that goal. We don't want to give every tank the same tools or abilities. You can joke about flavor if you want, but it's important to us, and one of the things that we think has helped keep WoW fresh even after nearly five years.

Q u o t e:
"Bring the player, not the class" is a nice idea. It's just too bad that it got to be too much work before they gave up on it.

It is apparently a very supple mantra whose meaning can be turned around into supporting various arguments. From my POV (which should carry some weight, since it's my sound bite), it does not mean "raid comp does not matter." It means that if you want to take a great player of a class you already have versus a terrible player who brings a really, really important buff (what we now call Replenishment and CoE were two of the most problematic in Sunwell) that you are probably better off with the first player and you usually have other ways to get the buff offered by the second. Sunwell raids were infamously inflexible, and we don't want to go back to that. We haven't.