Wrong on pally healing.
It's Priest/Pally then druids easily. Druids can't spam heals but they have excellent HoTs. Trust me I've been the number 1 healer in 3/8 prophecy and benediction, by busting my rear and having the lowest overheal by a close to 10% margin. Now my last guild leader has I think 2-3 accounts with a 8/8 + bene NE priest, a fully loaded(sorry not a pally) holy pally, and a 60 rogue. He is crazy on his pally. One time he played his pally while someone else played his 8/8proph priest. He easily eclipsed us both in sheer healing numbers. Blessings + Auras in plate is huge for pve. PvP on the other side now, Pallys are a huge nuisance to kill. Now when he bested me in heals, he had more overheals but it still showed that Pallys can easily be the number one healer if played right. I'm talking with me hitting 1.4million in heals with <15% overheals. He did use mods that targeted people based on HP, which I thought was cheap but they fixed that a few patches back.
As for fire being slow? Sure it would be...if you don't go arcane. I'm only 52 on my mage now, but at 51 I punked a 60 frost mage that ganked my 30 hunter. He was protecting a 27 that I killed, so I figured I might as well get back at the 27 and try to kill the 60 mage. I was running up for the stonetalon mountain and caught the 60 coming down. He dropped off his mount and frost nova'd. I blinked the other way getting out of range, Improved counterspelled two sheeps as the first was resisted. He managed to sheep me at the same time. My trinket was up so I broke out, ice warded >fireball>fireball(got hit by a single frostbolt)>PoM pyro>fireblast(crit) and he was down to 1% HP and running away. A 60 hunter hit him with an autoshot as he ran. Arcane gives a mage good burst. Which I actually prefer over a reactive measure like iceblock. Which is no doubt amazing in group pvp, because you buy yourself 10-20 secs with coldsnap up. Though in 1vs1, its only ok to clear a few status effects, or live through a beastial wrath.
Fire also gives you an edge on rogues that have vanish up. That dot gives them less room to work with. Add in a PoM Pyro and you can do serious damage. I used the free respec, to go 31 Arcane and 12 fire right now. Which gives me a ton of -agro -res +res. Regular fireballs for me are doing around 650ish, but with AP I'm hitting 820ish. If a fireball crits or a pom pyro crits I'm looking at upwards of 1100-1200 damage from an instant, and another 40% of that in DoTs, and the base spell DoTs. Improved counterspell gives you room to work a caster, and AP and PoM give you serious burst. Frost spec is definately more anti-melee based, but honestly I think mages have that pretty much down with base abilities. The only problem I had with rogues was they could CS or Ambush then vanish, or vanish from a nova. I would then have to use cold snap to resnare. With fire the added dots give me time to blink away. Sure I lose the ability to iceblock from a blind, but if that's not up or I can manage to stay out of range long enough... I can even PoM a sheep if needs be.
edit: Also a correction on shaman...they are not dps machines. They are burst DPS machines. I have yet to see a shaman get to about half of my DPS when doing instances, their mana pool isn't large enough to drop totems and DPS. Most times it just auto attack, a shock here and there, and occasionally a shaman that drops a totem. Two handed wars with WF totems can keep up with single target dps, but once we reach AoE areas, I can outdistance them easily. Rogues get close, but it's still a crapshoot once AoE is factored in. I actually was getting a bit irritated at a 2H warrior, being the "tank" and just trying to DPS. Every fight he would post the meters, and see he was getting close to my damage. I told him if he wanted to top the meters I would stop casting spells. I would toss 1 fireball, and get agro when he had DPS'd something down to 85%. He just used HS and autoattack... That's the time I wished I was stil frost spec, as you can iceblock agro back to the "tank". Yet another reason I like druid tanks, they don't care about the meters. Some warriors seem obsessed with it.
edit2:
Originally posted by: NeoV
not sure what the rogues are crying out..if warriors had feign, then they could cry...but not sure what the problem is
Because while a warrior specced for damage is still wearing plate and has much higher HP. My last guild didn't want anyone healed other than the warriors. The rogues had to back out and bandage up... Which I'm sure is great for DPS. Leather and getting hit by boss AoE is no joke. If you get the attention of a boss you better pray vanish is up. Hunters, and I don't think anyone questions it, have it the easiest in raids. Not to mention the cheapest.