Gnome warriors and class balance

Passing through Tanaris with my troll warrior, I saw a gnome warrior in Gadgetzan. And I have to admit without jealousy: plate armor loots a lot better on a gnome than on a troll. But gnome warriors are relatively rare, a bit of an oddity, and that made me wonder how Blizzard designed the possible class / race combinations.

Every single race in World of Warcraft can be a warrior. Even races which in other games are more likely to be spell casters than warriors, like gnomes. The blood elves from the expansion set, whose lore clearly makes them a magical race, will be able to become warriors. Furthermore in WoW your race has very little influence on how good you can play a certain class. A gnome warrior is pretty much identical in strength and stamina to a tauren warrior of the same level, although the body mass would suggest otherwise. The difference in stats is tiny, and just gets lost in the stat bonuses from equipment. From the racial abilities I would prefer a troll (berzerking, regeneration) to a gnome (escape artist) warrior, but even that just makes a small difference.

The other extreme in classes is the druid, only one race from each faction can become druid, tauren and night elves. Again that seems arbitrary, why should for example a human druid not be possible? In between warriors and druids, the other classes can be played by from 3 to 7 of the 8 races. The distribution between Horde and Alliance isn't always even, for example the Alliance has more classes able to play priests than Horde, but Horde has more hunter-enabled races than Alliance.

Unsurprisingly the number of races that can play a certain class has a big effect on the number of players playing that class. PlayOn shows that warriors are the most played class for both Horde and Alliance, while druids are least played Horde class, and second-least for Alliance. The data are old, and they probably vary a bit from server to server, but if you browse through Warcraftrealms or WoWCensus, you pretty much get the same picture: lots of warriors, few druids.

The expansion will add two more warrior races and no new druid race, so the gap between those two classes will increase. The only good thing is that both new races will be able to play priests, so that hopefully will increase the number of available priests. But frankly, I would have preferred the new races to be not able to become warriors, and to be able to become druids instead. You can justify a blood elf druid as easy as a blood elf warrior, and it would be a lot better for class balance.