So I'm one of the people who make decisions for my raid group (10 man, fairly casual, only 9/12), and I made a comment after the last patch that i could now go ret if we needed it, and the response I got was "lol, no". I never gave it much thought up until that point, but there seems to be no benifit of bringing melee to a raid. Now correct me if I am overlooking something huge here, but the basic benifits of each are:
Ranged: Can dps during most air phases, Can aoe away from their characters (as in, at ranged), have a lot more room to spread out in fights that need it
melee: can interupt more reliably, can dps on the run
Now I have gone over all the fights in my head (on reg at least), and all i can ever seem to justify bringing is an enh shaman for interupts to 2 fights, and really an ele shaman could do the same job, while bringing more things to the table. The lack of air phase dps for nef and atramedes; the lack of usable aoe on cho gall and conclave; the extra damage taken (or chance of extra damage) in council, Chimeron, conclave, and omnitron.
Really the only fights where i can justify some melee (and i mean some, can't really have fulll melee comps) are halfus, val and ther, magmaw, and maloriak. But all those would really be just as easy with a full ranged comp. I cannot think of a single encounter where melee is prefferable to ranged, and really dont like the looks of that, because I dont want to be healing for the entire xpac >.>
1 final clarification i think may be needed, when I say "justify bringing", I mean in terms of optimization. The group we have has an enh and a rogue, and we really only have an 11 man roster, so rotations seem to come down to who shows up more then who is most optimal. This is just something that I was pondering, a kind of "perfect comp" type deal.