Snax, your mistake is focusing on druids as healers and finding them lacking. Druids have always been inferior at healing compared to clerics, and because shamans were designed to be on par with clerics, druids are naturally inferior to them as well. If anything, healing cloud makes druids far better at it than they should be.
Even taking into account the proliferation of certain game info that have made it a bit easier to get certain high end mage spells, druids can load some very good area spells much more easily than mages. Top mage spells are arguably better (were better, we'll see how the nerf went this wipe) than top druid offensive spells, but thanks to being wis based (and imo having easier access to +slot eq), druids usually have more raw damage memorized at a given moment, and just need a bit more time to spit it all out.
