Druid: exchange wild shape for turning?

The Shaman

First Post
I'm not wild (pun intended) about druids anymore.

Druid was once my favorite class, but now I find them a bit trite and too rigidly defined by their class abilities.

I'm contemplating exchanging wild shape for turning spirits instead - spirits would be undead, elementals, and other creates with the [spirit] classification. Since I'm considering a world with few monsters but many spirits, this is a pretty good ability.

Your thoughts?
 

log in or register to remove this ad

Shouldn't you post this in House Rules?

You could use the Shugenja from CD.
 


Jdvn1 said:
Shouldn't you post this in House Rules?
Didn't think of that - I wasn't sure where to post it, but that's a good idea.
Jdvn1 said:
You could use the Shugenja from CD.
I want the campaign to use core books only, with a few modifications to the existing classes (druid turning, paladin of any extreme alignment - LE, CE, LG, CG) instead of new classes. Thank you for the idea, though.
 

Pick up complete divine and see if the Spirit Shaman is more your style. If you're the DM, you could just say that you plan on using that instead of standard druids.
 

You most definitely want the spirit shaman, which is a wis-charisma caster that spontaneously casts druid spells.

Instead of getting wild shape abilities, it gets Chastise Spirits, which causes damage instead of regular turning. The damage is similar to that of an uncapped fireball. At higher levels, it can trade in some of the damage to strip away abilities and defenses (DR or SR) of spirits.

Additionally, it gets cool goodies like the ability to shadow jump 1/day, the ability to use Last Breath 1/week, the ability to turn incorporeal, and having its gear affected as by ghost touch.

The Shaman said:
I'm not wild (pun intended) about druids anymore.

Druid was once my favorite class, but now I find them a bit trite and too rigidly defined by their class abilities.

I'm contemplating exchanging wild shape for turning spirits instead - spirits would be undead, elementals, and other creates with the [spirit] classification. Since I'm considering a world with few monsters but many spirits, this is a pretty good ability.

Your thoughts?
 

Normal turning would be a particularly poor trade ; monsters of appropriate CR generally have far more HD than players do thus causing turning on all but trivial encounters to be ineffective. Which is why you see so many clerics/paladins just burning all their turn attempts on divine feats. In comparison wildshape is probably the main draw of the druid class and the reason why their spell list is so vastly overshadowed by a cleric's.
 

Pets & Sidekicks

Remove ads

Top