Circle of Spores minor buff

ZenBear · Jun 14, 2019

I have a new player in my group that has decided to play a CoS Druid, and in the interest of making her experience as much fun as possible, I’ve done a little research into the class and come up with some minor tweaks.

I’m thinking that in order to compensate for the inherent weakness of the poison damage type, all spore effects will do two-type damage, poison and necrotic. This overcomes several monsters’ Immunities, though most higher level undead have Immunity and/or Resistance to one or both, and all ethereal type undead are fully immune. It strikes me as odd that a subclass that has explicit motivation to kill high level undead is so incapable of doing so...

I also want to make Symbiotic Entity activate with a bonus action so they can still attack on that turn, and have its damage bonus to melee attacks do two-type damage and scale with level on par with cantrips (1d6 @ 2, 2d6 @ 5, etc).

Thoughts? Will this be too strong, or not make much difference? I want melee to be a viable option for her in the late game, if we ever get there.

MonkeezOnFire · Jun 14, 2019

Changing the damage type to necrotic is fine if you as the DM know that the game will heavily feature monsters that are flat out immune to poison damage. Having two damage types might be confusing as it's not really a thing in the game so personally I'd just port it over fully to necrotic. Some enemies will still be troublesome, but that's okay. Just about every build has monsters that they struggle against. And the druid is flexible enough to fall back on support spells to contribute. As an alternative could be allowing the Elemental Adept feat to apply to class features as well as spells.

Bonus action wild shaping is one of the benefits of the moon druid so it's not totally out of line. You just have to ask yourself if you're okay with stepping on it's toes as it fully focuses on transforming while the spore druid still does get some bonus spells.

Hawk Diesel · Jun 15, 2019

Instead of both damage types, the Spore Druid can choose which damage type the spores deal when the ability is activated. Less confusing that way.

I have no opinion about the bonus action for Symbiotic Entity.

EDIT: Read over the ability for Symbiotic Entity. Since unlike normal wildshape, you still have all your normal spellcasting abilities, I would say leaving it as an action to activate is appropriate. However, I would change the duration to 1 hour rather than 10 minutes, and delete the part about it ending early if you lose those temporary hit points.

Kobold Stew · Jun 15, 2019

ZenBear said:
I’m thinking that in order to compensate for the inherent weakness of the poison damage type, all spore effects will do two-type damage, poison and necrotic. This overcomes several monsters’ Immunities, though most higher level undead have Immunity and/or Resistance to one or both, and all ethereal type undead are fully immune. It strikes me as odd that a subclass that has explicit motivation to kill high level undead is so incapable of doing so...

Halo of spores already does necrotic damage, doesn't it? I would leave it like that.

I also want to make Symbiotic Entity activate with a bonus action so they can still attack on that turn,

The effect lasts ten minutes (100 turns); I really think using an action to activate it is fine -- most of the time, players will activate it before combat starts, so really you are talking about re-activating it, and surprise situations.

and have its damage bonus to melee attacks do two-type damage and scale with level on par with cantrips (1d6 @ 2, 2d6 @ 5, etc).

I would not suggest this. Symbiotic entity adds necro damage to Circle of Spores on a reaction, and adds poison damage to a weapon on a hit.
So: at level 11, save vs CON or 2d8 necrotic damage, plus damage from an action which can be an attack (let's say shillelagh 1d8+1d6 poison, using Wis as an attack stat, so Single Attribute Dependency), or 3d12 with poison spray (or 3d8 with thorn whip), or just cast a level 5 summon Elemental. Really, I don't think your melee druid will be suffering here, with a wide range of damage types already available.

Thoughts? Will this be too strong, or not make much difference? I want melee to be a viable option for her in the late game, if we ever get there.

As written, I think the circle of spores is fine for a melee combatant, however built.

ZenBear · Jun 15, 2019

Alright, comments noted, thanks for the feedback! I don’t feel compelled to adjust the damage type so much, but I do still want to fix melee. I’ll adjust the wording so that you have to take the attack action in order to gain the bonus damage so there’s no chance for Booming Blade cheese, though to be honest she’s brand new to D&D so I doubt she’d even know how or care to try, but I still want to add scaling dice. I don’t want Chill Touch to out damage her melee or she should just be casting instead. So at 11th and 17th levels she gets an extra damage die. I suppose I’ll leave Symbiotic Entity as a standard action to activate.

Circle of Spores minor buff

ZenBear

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MonkeezOnFire

Adventurer

Hawk Diesel

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Kobold Stew

Last Guy in the Airlock

ZenBear

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