Healer needed!

How often have you read "healer needed" in the looking for group channel? How often have you participated in groups or raids which started late, because they were waiting for more healers? Fact is there are not enough priests and druids in World of Warcraft. You would have thought that this was a problem that solved itself, with players realizing that more priests and druids are needed, and then making new characters of those classes. But unfortunately very few players do that. While the percentage of priests on a server tends to slightly go up with time, it doesn't reach sufficient numbers even after the server is over a year old.

The reason for the lack of druids is bad game design coupled with simple statistics. There is only one race in each faction that can become a druid, the night elves for the Alliance and the tauren for the Horde. This is one of the unfortunate cases where artifical game lore gets into the way of playability. Druids aren't such a bad class for soloing, and more people would play them if they were available for more races. But often a player decides that he already played a night elf hunter for example, and wants his next Alliance character to be of a different race, to start in a different zone. Or he doesn't like to hear constant cow jokes, and doesn't want to play a tauren. If for any reason you decide to play another race, you can't play a druid, and that is a pity. If in the expansion blood elves can become paladins, and dranaei can become shamans, I don't see why they couldn't have become druids as well. That would have given a good boost to the druid population.

The lack of priests is due to their perceived lack in soloability. People tend to flock to classes which are perceived to be good in soloing, like hunter or dps warrior, in spite of the well-known problems of getting accepted into a group or guild later. What Blizzard would need to do to increase the number of priests would be to make another class review, in which their healing power remains unchanged, but priests get some new, cool, obvious soloing powers, for example making their bubble damage the attacker with holy damage, or making their smite do double damage against undeads and elementals.

Now somebody is going to cry out that priests are already powerful enough, and that making them stronger would break the game balance. But what *is* game balance? If a population of players is given free choice among 8 classes (per faction, soon to be 9), and less than one eights of them choose a particular class, I would define that class as being underpowered. Classes would be perfectly balanced if players would choose them in equal numbers. Making priests even better healers wouldn't change anything, as that is obviously not the criterion of choice. Only by making priests a bit more active, and more powerful in soloing, can that class be balanced against the other classes.