Newbie Druid

[MidgetMarine]

Title pretty much says it all. I'm rolling up my first druid, A goliath. And was wondering what the PLayground could offer along the lines of helping me get the most out of it. So, Good wildforms, play styles, etc.

[Dusk Eclipse]

1 Choose to play Druid
3 Entangle everything between levels 1-5 and let you pet kill stuff
4 Select Natural Spell at level 6
5?????
6Profit.

[Darrin]

The key to pwning with druids is spell selection. My general advice (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?p=12183941) on that topic.

For a Golaith druid, you might also want to take a look at the Stone Form feat in Races of Stone. In particular, note the lack of duration...

[Cespenar]

Just the pouncing feline shapes alone would probably win you the day, with a couple of buffs to help you along the way.

Also, there's Entangle.

[Malak'ai]

Briars Web... Entangle + Damage.

[Mnemnosyne]

The first step to playing a solid druid is figuring out which of the druid's strengths you're going to focus on. Even after this, you will still be competent in the druid's other fields, it's just that you will have one particular strength which you will focus feats and equipment toward. The other abilities a druid has will be your backup, essentially.

A druid can be a great summoner. There are numerous feats that can make druids into some of the best summoners there are. Prestige classes can improve this, but it will be at significant cost (generally, giving up wildshape and animal companion progression).

A druid can be a great spellcaster. They have a wide variety of spells of healing, battlefield control, buff, and damage varieties, and if they focus their efforts on being primary casters, they can do excellently at it.

A druid can be a great melee character through wildshape. By selecting the right forms, the right buff spells to back them up, and making sure to equip properly, a druid can do a lot of damage and soak a lot of damage as a wildshaped melee. But a druid should not be overconfident in wildshape, as without proper optimization, wildshape forms often have glaring weaknesses that can be exploited.

You will be able to do all of these things at once. You can even do them all competently at once. But you will be best if you specialize in one, consider the other your secondary talent, and make the third a backup in case the others fail. Luckily, as a Druid, at any given time, you are a simple bit of retraining or a psychic reformation away from switching your primary focus. Don't like the primary focus you've chosen? Get a psyref and change your feats to focus on something different. As long as you haven't PrC'd out of your base class, all options are still open to you. And as a druid, there are very few PrC's worth taking.

A couple important notes:
Versatile Spellcaster. Technically, you qualify for it because you can spontaneously cast spells. See if your DM agrees, and exactly how it would work for you, if he does.
Enhance Wild Shape. This spell improves your wildshapes in various ways, the most significant of which is it can allow you access to all the extraordinary abilities of your wild shape. Especially when combined with wild shape feats such as Aberration Wildshape.
Greenbound Summoning. Tremendously powerful, and perhaps overpowering. If it's allowed, you should take it even if you're not a primary summoner. Makes all your animal summons far stronger. Figure out with your DM whether you need to cast speak with plants in order to direct your summons to use their spell-like abilities, or if you can use Handle Animal checks on them. If it's a low level campaign, try not to abuse this too much (especially the 5th level wall of thorns spell that each of your summons can cast).
Aberration Wildshape. This is a useful wildshape feat to take even if your primary focus is caster, because it gives you access to the will o' wisp form, which has spell immunity, constant natural invisibility, and a very high deflection armor class. It is an excellent platform from which to hover invisibly, casting all your spells from. Hell, if you're subtle, the enemies might never even know you're there, they'll only have your minions or your party to deal with, while you subtly influence things in their favor.
Acorn of Far Travel. This spell allows some very interesting tricks, and since you're a druid, you can cast it yourself. Take Sanctum Spell and declare the oak tree you cast your Acorn spell on as your Sanctum, and you're always in your Sanctum, so you cast all spells at +1 spell level. There are all sorts of even more interesting tricks you can pull off with this spell, and it remains a valuable tool all the way up into epic levels, at which point you craft a mythal around your chosen oak tree, and are always inside your own personal mythal.