Part of the problem is that I think he misrepresents Guardian Spirit.

The huge thing with Guardian Spirit is the Ardent Defender-like proc. The tank gets one free death.

Two types of cooldowns:
Keep the Tank Alive CDs:
There are any number of fights where we've established rotations along these lines:
"Priest X uses cooldown first, then Paladin Y, then Priest Z, then Paladin N*
Halfus Wyrmbreaker leaps to mind in current content. Early Lich King 25 also leaps to mind. As well as Sarth 3d. You weren't going to "pop tree of life" on a breath. You were going to use Guadian Spirit, Pain suppression, or a paladin ability. We chose our healers in some attempts based very clearly off those cooldowns.

None of a druid's cooldowns are comparable to these.

We need as much Healing as Possible CDs:
Shamans are especially hit hard because, does anything compete with Divine Hymn/Raid Wall/PW:Barrier/Tranquility for a shaman? Although here I think mana tide is at least relevant because it lets people use very mana-inefficient, high-througput spells more. [With more mana, my HPS goes up, that's true of most classes under the current design. There's a direct correlation. Tree of life can also be strong here.

While they don't strictly speaking have good burst healing cooldowns, priests also have the ability to spam poh, and our efficient raid heals mean we can conserve mana for flash heal type spam - which makes up for our lack of druid like, low-cd burst healing. Similarly, paladins have more mana control than druids and shamans, so they can make conscious burst-healing mana-based decisions in how they heal the whole fight.

On the other hand, during those aforementioned halfus/LK/Sarth 3d moments, there's nothing at all a shaman or druid could do, even with a full mana bar.

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