For 95% of raid groups, guardian is probably a better choice for the group than the raid leader probably realizes. For guilds like qT, DnT, KING, etc., substituting the defensive utility for more DPS makes sense. However, everyone likes to think that their group is as good as the best, which is why defensive utility tends to be underestimated.
It’s actually rather amusing how often group leaders will make decisions with the goal of speed, which actually cause things to take longer. With dungeons, groups will wait forever to get that perfect ascended zerker of a specific profession before blazing through a 5-10 minute dungeon, even if just grabbing someone a bit more noobish instantly only slows down the actual dungeon by a minute or two.
The same thing happens in raids. People will stack glass eles, even if it’s from someone who rerolled to ele just to be ‘meta’ and then suffer wipes to mechanics even when having that same person stick with the guard, necro, etc. that they were familiar with would actually increase the chance of a kill at the expense of a slightly longer fight time.
But to get back to the original question, if you’re with a group led by a wise raid leader, you’ll likely see at least 1 spot wanted for a guard unless that group is at such a high skill level that boss mechanics have become relatively trivial to everyone. And even when a guard isn’t specifically asked for, there’s usually not much reason to not take one unless you just really need something else (PS, chrono, druid, etc.) for the last spots in the group.
