best all around healers

[lolthomes]

my guild is in a big confo on this most ppl are split. i say you could prob just roll with 6 druids and be fine. so i would say druids

[zizimonster]

Overall I think it'd be resto druid and I have a level 80 holy pally, a 80 resto druid (my main of course), a 80 resto shammy and a level 70 priest lol so I've basically tried them all and I could honestly say in terms of play style and versatility the druid wins. Holy priest comes close though. I found holy pally to be the most boring x-x bleh.

[zcks]

Overall Id have to say priests are the best overall, depending on how they spec they can be among the best raid healers or main tank healers. There is also the fact they have far more healing spells with a far more varied range of effects than any other class, take the holy paladin for example who only has 3 actual healing spells all of which are single target & 1 has to be bought with talents + they cant multi target heal worth a damn without going all the way into the tree.

[mrmagoo]

I think one thing that you are leaving out but your separation of disc and holy priests is that they are still both priests. I know lots of serious pve raiders that are dual specced holy and disc. I think the simple fact that priests have the ability to choose 2 unique healing specs based on what is best for the raid comp or fight makes priests the best all around healers.
Outside of that priests do by far have the most choices as to what heal (or shields) to use out of all the healers. Paladins are very limited in the choices of what heals they can use as are shamans they are both good healers at what they do but they do not have anywhere near the number of choices in any given situation. As for druids they are amazing healers but again they lose out to the fact of control ie once a hot is on a target it does the work for the druid. wild growth vs coh, rejuv vs renew. Here is also another thing to consider, granted a very specific fight but anub in phase 3 heals based off the amount of damage done from leeching swarm, best healer for this fight hands down is a disc priest. My guild wiped over 15 times on this fight in 10 man hard mode, doing it with 2 healers (druid, shaman) and an extra dps to avoid having 2 burrow phases. Our druid, with is legendary mace was top healing on every attempt but the amount of healing going to anub was ridiculous. he would hot everyone up but could not control how much healing they were really receiving. We switched him to boomkin and our shadow priest (disc main spec) over to healing and 1 shot him, pwos spam on raid keeping them all alive and below 35%, complete control. Meters showed anub having less then 300k healing received in phase 3 vs over 1 mil on previous attempts. Granted only 1 fight but its still an interesting concept for that fight. Healing is not always bout how much you can heal but often controlled healing to achieve success.

[Fbl]

first of all let me tell you that dividing priest in holy and disc isn't best of ideas... imho it should be just priest simply because he can chose what he wants to before any pull... for me it's like diving druids on Revitalize druids / Celestial focus / something else but nvm... my vote went to holy priest

paladin - no aoe heals available

shaman - he's good at everything but he's not fast enough... if i can say it like that... good priests and druids can heal raid faster...

so it's druid vs priest for me
i prefer regular heals over hots anytime... it's just my play style nothing personal... (btw i play resto shaman, feral/resto druid, holy priest and prot paladin... so i did try all classes) if you're 100% sure that your target will survive long enough with hots that hots might be better choice... but being a healer made me sceptical... i just cant be calm using just hots...