Ranged versus Melee in MoP Raiding

[Darielle]

Every raid tier is the most melee unfriendly raid tier anyone can think of.

Seriously though, well-played melee are just as good as well-played range (barring the fights where dot-based classes are allowed to shine). You might have issues if you run 3 or more melee in a 10-man, or 10+ melee in a 25-man, but if they're generally losing significant dps or making things harder, they're either doing it wrong or the strat being employed is missing key elements.

[Ra3L]

Stone guards - They are bad for tanks since you end up having crap all over the floor around tanking points and lose dps to deal with chains. In addition they can't activate crystals (heroic) and dps, which means they have to decide between dps on the boss and getting the high fast.

This is not entirely applicable.
We play SG with 2 Tanks 3 Healers and 5 DPS.
Due to the fact that dealing damage w/o energized tiles is wasted our melees also go and energize the tiles.
This MAY give them a slight disadvantage because they cannot always do dps at the same time, but the tiles are applied way faster.

We managed to down SG on our second ever try in 4:44m.
Would have been first try if the healers wouldn't run into shiny traps all the time *sigh*

Summing up,
my take on this is the fact that DPS isn't as valuable as raidsupport.
more people energizing the tile = less time running around to get them energized
=> more damage overall

might be a dps loss for the melee but dps gain for the raid!
and loots also shine if you aren't #1 in DPS-meters