Cleric is strong, enough time to buff they can out melee the warrior classes. With core cure light wound wands they do not have to be primarily healers with their spells, but can use their spells for other and more direct effects.
This is kinda specific for the topic, but this reminds of one thing. The CLW Wand was important because it dealt with out-of-combat healing. In combat, heals always felt kinda weak. A Cleric (or a Fighter buffed by the Cleric) and NPCs could dish out a lot of damage per round, it was often better to deal more damage, buff defenses or crowd control (save or suck) than spend your action on healing. But without Wand of CLWs, you still would have needed those spells to recover after the battle, and with the wands, you could pull all you focus into in-battle-magic.
I played a lot of 3E and 3.5, and we mastered it pretty well. I disliked what it required me to do (or what I thought I needed to do) on the DM side to manage the PCs.
The math felt kinda broken, with how little iterative attacks did, how bad your weak saves were compared to monsters, the gap between the haves and have-nots expanding with BAB, saves, skills all the time. Stuff like iterative attacks becoming fodder only for spammable maneuver attacks (it was mostly Trip, penalties for prone or standing up from prone were serious, and most monsters could be tripped, only few could be disarmed, and Grapples meant giving up your weapons and larger enemies had serious advantages). Managing matrixes of armor, deflection and natural armor to figure out your AC without gear, with gear, when denied your dexterity bonus to AC, with buff spells, in antimagic-fields ,and something similar for attacks.
But we also had a lot of fun, even if it meant doing hours of homework to work out your character optimization. (It often felt like a significant part of the game was played at home with your calculator or on graph paper. As DM, making the NPC stats if you were building your own NPCs, even if you just used monsters, once the yhad a spell list and could cast spells like sorceror or whatever, it got ugly, and definitely for players that tweaked their characters (and we all did, some better than others ,obviously. Though we weren't just looking for best stats, we also tried interesting concepts, be it Paladin-Hospitaler-Fighters or Druid/Shifters or whatever.)
1d6chan.miraheze.org
In looking up the power again in the srd I missed that last line. It has been a while for me. The last time I was DMing a druid in 3.5 the game was getting up there in levels, we ended at level 17. 
