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Message: <blockquote data-quote="TwoSix" data-source="post: 7380975" data-attributes="member: 205">Just to preface, I played a moon druid from 3rd to 8th, so these are simply anecdotal points.  I agree with the bulk of your thesis, druids are wildly underappreciated from a power standpoint, specifically at lower levels.  Anecdotally, benefiting from both wild shape and spells can be difficult, depending on the encounter.  The campaign I played in had a lot of underground sections, so I did a lot of scouting in giant spider form.  That meant I opened a lot of fights in spider form instead of opening with a faerie fire or an entangle.  I could have dropped spider form to be a caster, but that would have meant I lost a lot of buffer hit points and the spider's entangle ability and better than cantrip damage.  This gets more painful if you're down to your last wild shape use, since you lose the ability to get an emergency buffer of hit points when things go south.  You do have both, of course, but there's a lot of opportunity costs in maximizing uses of wild shape compared to getting optimal spell use.  Man, I wish I had access to that race when I played a druid.  I almost took a level of warlock just to get telepathy, but I couldn't justify it.  Well, that kind of depends on the encounter, again.  I spent a lot of time in scout form, for one, so I opened a fair amount of combats as a spider.  And if I shifted into a combat form, I usually stayed in it if I didn't lose all my HP during the combat.  Why lose the HP buffer just to talk?  Wild shape does last an hour per 2 levels, so spending the majority of your time in wild shape form certainly isn't impossible.Sure, moon druids kick some ass with wild shape at low levels.  But the CR2 beasts available don't scale really great, and CR3 is a wasteland of options (I think there's only one, although I haven't checked Volo's).  Elemental shape is cool, I imagine, but I didn't get there.Yea, wild shape is like warlock spells.  You have to think about it, but if you screw it up and waste a use, you have pretty solid fallback options.  And conjure animals is fantastic, no question.   One of the other underappreciated aspects of moon druids, especially, is that they support some unorthodox build choices.  They have almost no stat dependence, since their combat forms are stat replacements and most of their best spells aren't save or attack roll dependent.  You can easily get away with a 14 Wis, and use your stat adjustments on some utility feats, like Ritual Caster or Healer.  It's the fact that they multiclass so poorly, and their at-will damage doesn't scale so well,  that really keeps them from being discussed as a power choice more, I think.</blockquote>

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