Druids - Likes and Dislikes?

[Nonlethal Force]

Dislike: Wildshaping.

I wish there was an option to having to wildshape beyond the PHB II variety which is still wildshaping. I like the spirit shaman concept flavor-wise at least as a replacement druid.

 

[Barendd Nobeard]

What I dislike about 3.5 druids:

Players who don't prep and waste 1/2 the session looking up animals and applying changes to them (Augment Summoning, etc.). And they don't have their animal companion statted out either, so they're figuring all of its options on the fly as well.....

I play a druid. I have a character sheet for my animal companion, and I have a word document with all the Summon Nature's Ally animals, regular and Augmented, printed out & kept with my character sheet.

 

[Machiavelli]

Likes: So many options and abilities that can be ignored or used in a simplified manner without nerfing the class.

Dislikes: Being overwhelmed by the staggering wall of mechanics when attempting to use the class the way it seems to be intended.


For instance: I like the idea of using the Druidic Avenger variant to drop the animal companion and pick up some barbarian abilities, then burn your Wild Shape abilities using Wild feats, which are by and large much weaker than the Wild Shape ability. You pick up some very cool capabilities like Lion's Pounce without the complicated mechanics of turning into a new creature. You can have a melee-competant, "nature warrior" character, employing a less common application of the druid class mechanics.
Because the druid is a rather powerful class, this non-optimal use of its abilities does not render it obsolete.

 

[helium3]

Druids rock. I'm playing a 17th level Druid in my game.

Wild-shaping can be broken, but that's generally not the case if you stick to the first MM. Like all the other splat-books, the DM needs to pay attention when a player starts to go outside the core books. There's definitely a book-keeping issue, but it can be countered by taking some extra time between games to stay prepared. Don't play a druid if you aren't willing to produce extra sheets of material to cover your summoned creatures and character in wild-shape form.

I think it's a mistake that Druids are being given more direct damage dealing spells. Druids do well as battle-field control characters with a more limited ability to do direct damage. It gives them an interesting roll to play that other classes are usually too busy doing other things to fill.

I also think a house rule that a character can't have more than one instance of a summoning spell in effect at one time is a good idea.

 

[Li Shenron]

Pardon me for bringing up an old thread, but a number of people have issues with the Wildshape ability.

How could Wildshape be improved?

`Le

I think my main problems with Wildshape (and Polymoprh) at least are:

- the potentially unlimited amount of creatures available
- the bookkeeping
- how WotC keeps changing the rules once a year

To improve?

1) agree with your players on a limited number of forms available (e.g. 1 specific creature per level)

2) stop trying to fix the rules, and stick with ONE version (I go with the one in Masters of the Wild)

 

[Wolfwood2]

Pardon me for bringing up an old thread, but a number of people have issues with the Wildshape ability.

How could Wildshape be improved?

`Le

Rather than "any animal" or "any plant" subject to hitdice limitations, I would make a druid pick and commit to a small list of specific forms, each of which would be balanced with the others.

So a druid would typically have:

one bird form
one one water form
one medium land animal form
one large land animal form

etc, etc, learning more forms at a very slow pace as he levels up. This by the way gives all kinds of splatbook options to add extra animals to the list of acceptable picks and/or provide feats like "Extra Shape" and such. Doing it this way would also allow you to fix obvious silliness like a druid as a dog not getting scent or a dolphin-form druid who doesn't have sonar without opening up the door for potentially broken abilities from monsters published later.

Probably the elemental forms are okay as is.

 

[TheLe]

Not to hijack the thread, but any of you interested in playtesting a new Druid class for me? My regular playtesters are m.i.a.

`Le

 

[satori01]

I like the Druid overall as a class. As a 30 something DM with 30 something players, having a Druid in the party, means that if some people can not make it, between the Animal Companion and Summon Animals, meatshields are handy.

Spell Compendium makes Druids handier, since the class can not only fulfill a limited blaster role now, it can do a curse thrower role, (Druids have the best abillity damage spells in the game), and have healing spells.

Wildshape seems really powerfull, but is not all of that. It is great for scouting, it is great for when the Druid is grappled, but the AC of the animals are way too low, and frankly at higher levels the damage output of even a Dire Bear is not going to out class the party's warriors. Dinosaurs are the best option for Wildshape, with higher AC and Damage output, and even Dinosaurs are not that great. Wildshape hits it's stride in the mid levels, and then is useful for escapes, until you hit Elemental form.

Animal Companions suffer the same problems at higher level, they just die way too easy. Role playing wise, the Druid in my campaign just does not want to risk her Dire Lion. Sure she can resummon it in 24 hours, but would you want to kill a pet, over and over again? Pretty cruel thing to do.

 

[GreatLemur]

Dislikes
"Nature" as a concept did not exist before the Englightenment. Rather than making druids ass-kicking, magic using 20th century hippies, why not make them a little more like rural pagan religious leaders. Druids should gain Know (Religion) as a class skill and should be required to choose a god. They are, fundamentally, a kind of priest and should be treated as such.

I'm deeply uninterested in the whole "I am the Lorax; I speak for the trees" character concept, personally, but wouldn't they overlap strongly with the Cleric if they became another priest class?

Actually, I think they already overlap a bit too much already. Do we really need two prepared divine spellcasters with moderate combat capability? Maybe we'd be better off scrapping the Druid, and letting nature-focused Clerics take Wildshape in place of Turn Undead.

Alternatively, Druids could become spontaneous casters with less focus on combat and more focus on the things that make them unique: Wildshape, critter summoning, and lots of nature-manipulation spells. I'd drop the animal companion, too, since the ability to summon up animals makes that seem a little redundant (and this would let animal companions be unique to Rangers).

Can anybody make a case for the scimitar? I can understand sickles, sort of, since they're agricultural tools (and thus rural in flavor), but I don't get why Druids use scimitars.

EDIT: For that matter, can anyone defend the alignment restriction? I mean, you can only be a Druid if you're strongly dedicated to one moral or ethical pole . . . or none at all. What? Honestly, the old "True Neutral only" rule made more sense than this.

 

[Vanye]

Animal Companions suffer the same problems at higher level, they just die way too easy. Role playing wise, the Druid in my campaign just does not want to risk her Dire Lion. Sure she can resummon it in 24 hours, but would you want to kill a pet, over and over again? Pretty cruel thing to do.

:-| That's the first time I've ever seen anyone refer to this as summoning the same creature over and over again. The way I've played it (and everyone I've ever known has done it the same way) is that you perform a ritual of some sort that brings a compatible , REAL, creature to you, which then bonds to you mystically, getting all the benefits of an animal companion, but when it's dead, it's *dead*. It's not a Poke-mount, or a Figurine of Wondrous Power, or a summoned outsider, but a real living creature.

Does anyone else play the way Satori01 does? It's an interesting take on it, but it's not one I think is suppored in the way the game is written...