What Specs are your raid teams benching?

When I'm being outhealed by a factor of two by any Joe Schmoe paladin or monk who happens to wander into a raid...I'm sorry, but skill is simply not going to overcome that.

I don't even want to think about what a good paladin could do. At least not until I have one.

But be realistic. Do you think Blizzard will let such a disparity last into Live and if so, for any real determinate amount of time? Even during "Your class brings utility, shut it" era of TBC the numbers never went for that big of a spread.

It's probably not possible to overcome that much of a difference. Fortunately, you don't have to, because paladins and monks both had some egregious bugs that inflated their healing. We actually hotfixed those bugs but then a new build broke them again. Until you get a new build or we hotfix the issues again, you are probably better off comparing druid, priest and shaman healing. I apologize for any inconvenience.

Overall, I would recommend not deciding who you're going to bench based on beta testing until we are very close to ship. It's not a great strategy to try to get your character buffed either. :)

there being no Spirit whatsoever on the Legendary Sha weapons

Well, the weapons themselves aren't legendary, but the Intellect mace is supposed to have Spirit on it. That's a bug.

Also one thing to consider is that benching and stacking of classes in the top guilds has less to do with SimCraft numbers and more of certain mechanics being very powerful on certain fights.

Case in point: Paragon's 11 Druids on their first Heroic Nefarian kill.

Agreed. Remember guilds in those world first situations are doing content very undergeared compared to what we expect because they are skipping the weeks of farming. In those situations players have to resort to some unusual strategies to make up the difference. In general (though not always depending on what they feel like they have to do) those type of machinations are fun for the guilds in questions and very few players are affected overall.

When we see widespread stacking, that crosses the line. In retrospect, the dependence on quick burst for a fight like Spine might cross the line. Overall, we didn't see a ton of stacking or sitting for the Cataclysm raids and we'll try to do even better for the new content.

For the reccord, I believe there is evidence the PW: Solace thread that druids are outpacing priests and shaman as well, but not nearly as much, the major issue seems to be the longevity.

That is possible. As I have said repeatedly, if every priest is taking Solace, we'll continue to nerf it until the perception is that it is on par with the other talents. We don't want Solace to be a required talent.

I believe we have the paladin and monk fixed and we have some more raid testing ongoing so we'll be able to get some better data.

We're in a situation again where we have made several changes to a variety of class mechanics but haven't been able to get a build up with fresh data.