How to run 5 man or 10 man raids with melee DPS

I am keen to get rolling with a pally healer and 4x DK for DPS. I am interested in both PVP and PVE and figured this combination would let me do that.

Until I am well geared, I can use dual spec and let the DKs go as Blood tanks, but I would rather try to run all 4 as Frost and use the Pally to heal them.

Question is how do you do 5 man runs and heroics without a real tank? Don't the bosses cleave and destroy those in the melee range?

Secondly, would a pally or druid be a better healer for Pve? I thought with all the HOT of a druid, they might be able to keep the 4 DPS all up and running easier than a pally. What experiences do you other boxers have?

It depends on what level content you're talking about. From my experience, melee works just dandy for the most part up until Cata dungeons. Then you start getting a lot of AOE damage, proximity damage {IE "you must be this far away from any other characters"} and other annoying stuff that makes melee boxing a nightmare. And I run with a dedicated tank/healer setup.

Heroics, well, unless you really, really outgear the place and/or have insane burst damage and cooldowns, I don't know that going without a proper tank is part of the gameplan anymore. I've seen 5mages pull off some sweet stuff, but that's about it for non-tank groups. Someone was doing hunters+heals, but I don't know how far they've gotten.

Raids, I don't think it matters much unless you plan to fill all 10 roles yourself.

You can always give it a shot. You can gear up pretty quick with the LFR now, so you can probably outgear dungeon issues. And if it's not working out for you, you can always spec a tank or bring up another group. But Cata was annoying enough for my team that I've now canceled my subs for the second time in one expansion.

Wow thanks Khatovar. That is insightful. I was not aware that Cata dungeons were not really doable by melee grounds. Are the Cata doable if you go with DK tank, Pally healer and 3 Shammy DPS?

This would clearly mean I need a separate team for PVE content compared to PVP content.

People seem to have a lot more success with ranged DPS in Cata than melee across the board. Not that there's not places where melee is awesome - Asssad in VP for example. I can jump all day to avoid the Static Cling debuff because as melee, it's not going to interrupt anything. But like I said, there's a lot of things that are just incredibly painful or tedious to deal with as melee that aren't even much of a concern for ranged.

Granted, that's always been the case for the most part, but in Wrath there wasn't much I couldn't overcome as melee with practice and planning {I played caster teams in BC}. I'm sure there's other melee teams that have had more success, but I'd definitely advise going the caster route if you want to save yourself a lot of headaches. Me, I'm a sucker for my melee team and just don't want to give them up because I'm stubborn and sick to death of leveling, so I'll hold out hope that with the monk class being a big draw for the MoP expansion that Blizz will stop abusing melee and I can come back to them then.