Which role do you expect to be most in-demand (ie less active than needed) in Classic? I’m currently torn between rolling Warrior and Paladin and, as a casual player with inconsistent play times, I expect I will have to rely on PUGs for most of my dungeons/raiding.
What do you think? More likely a group/raid is in Trade looking for a Healer, Tank or DPS?
For dungeons, tanks. But note that the opposite is true for raids. You will have a really hard time finding a raid spot as a tank.
For raids, I’d say healers. Good healers, specifically. Healers will also not have a problem finding dungeon groups, but aren’t quiiite as in demand as tanks.
In end-game pve? Healers
I don’t know… I keep seeing a lot of holy paladins in the stress tests.
I think a lot of people are going in as Warrior or Priest with the intent of tanking and healing, and at least in the case of Grobb Hunters (based only on the server roles) seem underplayed, I think a lot of those utility classes (tranq shot) might be needed for many raids, but the sheer # of healers you need end game means there can never be enough.
healer is your best bet. If you want to heal people will want you at 60 for raiding.
If demographic poles are any indication… There will be more slots for rogues than anything else, proportional to raid slots. If you are Alliance that is.
The reason being Paladins are the best single target healer. Even beating priest. Priest has amazing single target healing, but paladin will main heal MT OT with a off healer priest, who also is assigned a group to AOE heal.
Healing will be the highest demand/shortest supply this go round.
Why? I’m glad you asked. All those hybrid players in vanilla originally rolled hybrid because they wanted variety. What they got was being pigeonholed into healbotting. Now, they’re burned out on healbotting and realize that warrior was they only vanilla class to offer play style variety with any viability. So there will be more tanks and fewer healbots available now than then.
Since my friends are going Horde I’m playing shaman.
It’s specifically why I play a hybrid
The one that shows up to raid night every time, early, flasked, and ready at the entrance.
Organizing 40 people is hard, there is no LFG to fill in slots. No shows kill raids.
Paladins are hands down the best healers in the game. Absolutely no contest. Anyone who says otherwise doesn’t know how classic talents work for paladins. They literally never run out of mana and can spam cast a high healing 1 second heal, and if it crits (which they have talents for + gear for) it will refund 100% of the mana. So you are just crit healing all raid and have 0 mana issues. Very cheap, consume wise, to go paladin. Although you are locked into healing for raids. Ret paladins are pretty good in pvp too.
Tank for 5 mans (warrior or druid)
Healer for raid (paladin, priest or shaman) No I didnt forget druid.
Dps will never be “needed” there is always more than enough.
True, but for dungeons some dps are needed less than others. dps warriors are probably at the bottom of the list.
I got into Molten Core at level 57 with my guild because there wasn’t enough DPS to fill out the 40 man raid. 
The bank alt.
Raids can be all over the place as you’ll want all classes covered for drops and probably at least one person per class who can benefit from drops (they aren’t geared much). As some have stated Tanks won’t be needed as much for raids as theres few spots for them - fortunately warriors are great DPSers as well. DPSers/Healers are likely both going to be the needed roles.
5mans will likely suffer from a lack of tanks/healers at launch. As people level alts it should balance out, but I’m not expecting to see an overabundance of tanks/healers at launch. Alliance Paladins can tank 5mans so its possible Alliance will have less issues with tanks (but lets be honest its unlikely that many pallies will go prot in classic).
UBRS (10man) will likely be the same as the 5mans with some groups wanting an even spread of classes to help their chances of getting gear. I still remember a warrior from Vanilla running UBRS for his 53rd time and still not getting his set piece.