How do i make a good druid 3.5 rules?

[Drake2009]

Ok so were adding a druid to my team and I want to know a good way to help her with it cause she has never played one. At the moment she will be level 6 and NO prestige class because shes new. Any ideas on feats and stuff?

[wayfare]

Ok so were adding a druid to my team and I want to know a good way to help her with it cause she has never played one. At the moment she will be level 6 and NO prestige class because shes new. Any ideas on feats and stuff?

Unless its a hi-Op party, she pretty much cant go wrong as long as she has a decent wisdom and ok stats otherwise. Avoid weapon focus feats, unless she really wants to do melee, and even then its not really needed.

Augment Summoning feat is a nice little boost. Keep in mind that she can spontaneously summon, so never prepare that stuff. Instead, prep utility spells, heals, and buffs to keep the party happy.

Druid is very hard to do wrong -- wild shape + animal companion + summoning means that you are always capable of adapting to situations and adding extra actions to the party.

[Drake2009]

Also so you know this is the party all level 6: Wizard (me) Rogue,Gunslinger,Barbarian and Cleric.

[Preaplanes]

You want to make a good druid? Go Neutral Good, then, druids can't be LG or CG :smallbiggrin:

[ksbsnowowl]

Ok so were adding a druid to my team and I want to know a good way to help her with it cause she has never played one. At the moment she will be level 6 and NO prestige class because shes new. Any ideas on feats and stuff?

Human Druid 6.

What sources are available (for feats and the like)?

Here's a decent start:

H - spell focus (conjuration)
1 - augment summoning
3 - fiery burst (Complete Mage)
6 - natural spell

[Kalaska'Agathas]

The Druid Handbook (http://www.minmaxboards.com/index.php?topic=940) is an excellent resource for those running a Druid. ksbsnowowl's got it about right, as far as the first six levels go. We'd be able to give you more if we knew what sources were available, how to determine stats, and such.

More important even than that information, however, is what she wants to be able to do with her character. Druids are incredibly versatile, and they can swap out their choices for their biggest three abilities in 25 hours and six seconds (that'd be 24 hours to get a new Animal Companion, 1 hour to prepare new spells, and six seconds to Wildshape) which I'm pretty sure only Psions (via Psychic Reformation) can match. Now, with that in mind, we don't really need to worry about those abilities, as they are so easily changed.

What does the player envision for her character? Does she want to turn into a tiger and pounce unsuspecting enemies? Does she want to summon giant eagles and throw fiery pine cones at her enemies? Does she want to ride into battle atop her bear while summoning more bears? Druids can cover just about any role, so knowing if she wants to be an extraordinary summoner means taking Augment Summoning and Greenbound Summoning, but if she wants to be up in the enemies face, tearing them to pieces with her bear paws, she'll want Bestial Charge and maybe Improved Natural Attack.

So, what more information can you get us?

[NOhara24]

Ok so were adding a druid to my team and I want to know a good way to help her with it cause she has never played one. At the moment she will be level 6 and NO prestige class because shes new. Any ideas on feats and stuff?

Most of the Druid prestige classes are pretty bad. She can go all the way up to Druid 20 and be more than okay.

As far as feats go, as long as she doesn't pick anything that isn't relevant to playing a Druid, she will be absolutely fine. It's a bit silly how versatile and powerful Player's Handbook Druids are right out of the box. She can take Natural Spell as her first feat, and then various feats making her able to weave a basket in adverse conditions and still be completely overshadowing the rest of your party.

TL;DR

Have Natural Spell, will be the most overpowered member of the party until level 10.

[lord_khaine]

Have Natural Spell, will be the most overpowered member of the party until level 10.

No, try and look at the natural stats of a bear or something simular, then compare it to a level 6 cleric or barbarian.
Druids are actualy a pretty complicated class, and i find it highly unlikely that a new player will manage to do anything besides getting herself killed with Natural spell.

[eggynack]

No, try and look at the natural stats of a bear or something simular, then compare it to a level 6 cleric or barbarian.
Druids are actualy a pretty complicated class, and i find it highly unlikely that a new player will manage to do anything besides getting herself killed with Natural spell.
This is only partway true. As noted above, a druid takes only a day or so to change every ability he has. Feats, outside of natural spell, aren't that important. There are some great ones out there that really boost the druid's power, but as long as a druid has natural spell, they'll be pretty close to as optimized they can be. Gear is also largely irrelevant, though like feats, often helpful if you know what to look for. The point of the common natural spell cliche is that as long as a druid has natural spell, in the right hands that druid will be up to approximately maximum druid capacity.

What makes the real difference is the day to day stuff the druid picks, and the tactics they use. This comes down to understanding all of the crazy facets of a druid. First, there's regular spell casting, which is wonderful. There are some great spells for them at just about every level, especially the early ones. The second is summoning, which is an always important subset of casting. Spontaneous summoning conversion means that at any point, a druid can transform whatever specialized solution they've come up with for a problem into a pile of bears. Bears (hippogriffs, wolves, whatever animals are best at their level) aren't always the best solution to a problem, but they are almost always a solution to a problem. This makes daily spell selection, one of the great differentiating factors between an alright druid and an amazing druid, far less important.

Third is wildshape. At early levels, wildshape tends to be best used for utility purposes, like flight and swimming. Once large shapes come into the mix, a druid is a more reliable combatant, and get even better at just flying away from the problem and hurling lightning at them. Wildshape isn't the most powerful druid ability, but with its duration it can practically always be on, and it's highly versatile. It can also be used to shore up low strength and dex.

Last and probably least is the animal companion. Depending on opinion, a good animal companion is either better than a fighter, or a bit worse than one, but either way it's pretty nifty. Selecting all of these things can be tricky for a new player, but unless they die, experience and system knowledge can basically just replace any low-op choices with high-op ones. This is more true for a druid than for practically any other class. For specifics, I'd second the idea of looking into the druid handbook. It's not as good as the wizard ones, but it's pretty good sometimes.

[ArcturusV]

Well, if you want a new player to have a more idiot proof approach to Wild Shape, Summoning, etc. Tell them to focus on sort of a non-combat, utility toolbox type. So pick forms to shift into that grant you capabilities you normally don't have. Flight, swim speeds, extra senses, etc.

It's still REALLY useful to have that sort of stuff. Plus it's kinda newbie proof. Even a newbie can understand the value of shapeshifting into a dog and being able to track by scent, or turn into a marlin and get a swim speed when your DM decides to destroy the boat you're on, etc.

And the Druid Spell list has plenty of non-combat utility in it. Stack up on those utility spells, and some healing spells. With spontaneous summoning you can make sure that you do have some combat power if you need it. And you'll help out the party between fights.

It's a lot easier to manage than trying to figure out Combat Beast mechanics when you're new.

[wayfare]

A few notes:

Wildshape can be a pretty powerful ability, but it is more useful to use it as a utility power at low levels. So instead of turning into a bear and kicking some butt, you'll get more use out of turning into a house cat for the stealth boost, or turning into an Eagle for the spot boost + the ability to fly.

Natural Spell is not a must, and a lot of DMs ban it because it makes the druid even deadlier. I can see how it would be helpful for a new player, though -- without it you have to be very careful about how you use Wildshape and set up your spells.

[Killer Angel]

A few notes:

Wildshape can be a pretty powerful ability, but it is more useful to use it as a utility power at low levels. So instead of turning into a bear and kicking some butt, you'll get more use out of turning into a house cat for the stealth boost, or turning into an Eagle for the spot boost + the ability to fly.

Indeed. To turn into a bear and tearing faces, while your summoned bear and your bear companion do the same, can work, but it can also kill you. fighting in melee in wildshape, generally works if it's supported by buff spells, otherwise it can be risky.
At the beginning, is better to fly away as an eagle, and summon bears to tear up faces...

[NOhara24]

No, try and look at the natural stats of a bear or something simular, then compare it to a level 6 cleric or barbarian.
Druids are actualy a pretty complicated class, and i find it highly unlikely that a new player will manage to do anything besides getting herself killed with Natural spell.

Okay, comparing a CR4 monster to a level 6 player character doesn't really prove much, especially because wildshape doesn't allow a level 6 druid to transform into a large animal.

But regardless, using your example, that bear can still cast Call Lightning at will.

Druids are not a hard class to play or optimize, and they are excessively lethal at the low to mid levels. This is a fact.

[eggynack]

Druids are not a hard class to play or optimize, and they are excessively lethal at the low to mid levels. This is a fact.
This is a true thing, and deserves some kind of elaboration. Druids are not hard to play or optimize, but they still have an inherent difficulty. This issue lies in book keeping. Wizards are difficult to keep track of, due to the sheer number of completely different spells that exist. Druids don't have as many spells, but the access to these spells is unlimited, and defined by how many books you're using at any given time.
In terms of summoning, it's definitely possible to stick to only a couple of versatile summons per level, but even then that's a lot of creatures to keep track of that can have any number of possible buffs. These range from the simple, like augment summoning and ashbound summoning, to the complex, like greenbound or rashemi elemental summoning. On their own, these buffs are pretty easy to apply, but taken as a whole it's handy to build up a good well of character sheets.
For wildshape, you need about one or two forms of each major type of animal, like flight, evasion, grappling, and so forth. The difficulty to this lies in knowing what stays the same in wildshape, and augmenting the base monster stats with this information. It's not excessively complex, but the difference between the base creature and your wildshape form means that relying on the base stat sheet can get problematic.
Animal companions are pretty easy, but it's still nice to have a friendly sheet for them. They change and grow as time goes on, and tracking those changes helps. When I ran a druid, I used mythweavers to build up a veritable pile of character sheets for most potential situations and it helped a lot. Either way, if she wants to do the druid justice, it'll take a bit of out of game work.

[Drake2009]

WOAH Went to sleep and look at this! Thanks for the feedback oh and I think she wants to wildshape into a bear and such

[eggynack]

WOAH Went to sleep and look at this! Thanks for the feedback oh and I think she wants to wildshape into a bear and such
Bears are pretty great. Just remind her that medium bears aren't as beefy as their large cousins, and that she should probably not hurl herself bodily into combat until large wildshape as a result. That's really more of a play decision than a build decision though. If SpC is allowed then the "bite of the x" spells are pretty great for a direct combat role. Other neat ones are luminous armor, and maybe greater magic fang. I'm a big fan of mass snake's swiftness on a separate note. Extra attacks for all is great for making folks like how awesome you are.

edit: also generally awesome spell. Heart of Water. Water breathing all day, and one shot freedom of movement is just great all the time. You generally aren't gonna need more freedom of movement than that, and swimming stuff is also situationally good.

[wayfare]

WOAH Went to sleep and look at this! Thanks for the feedback oh and I think she wants to wildshape into a bear and such

At her level, its going to be hard to be as effective as a Cleric in combat, even in wildshape. But, if she does just want to turn into things and leave the magic book keeping aside, the Master of Many Forms PrC is tailor made for her. No spellcasting, but you get some really awesome shapeshifting, capping out with the ability to turn into a dragon, i think.

[Threadnaught]

Wisdom and Constitution are her most important stats. Wisdom for spellcasting, DCs and bonus spells, Constitution for HP, you keep your HPwhen you Wildshape.
Spell Focus (Conjuration), Augment Summoning and Natural Spell are the go to feats at early level.
If you're using MM3, the Fleshraker is supposed to be the best Animal Companion in the game, broken with Venomfire. If you're using Sandstorme, the Dire Tortoise is a pain to squeeze into a dungeon, but it's awesome AC, decent saves and Lightning Strike should be very impressive if she gets one at level 10.

To keep the game running she'll have to keep at least three character sheets, one for the Druid's base form, one for the Animal Companion and one for each Wildshape form.

As far as Magic Items go, she doesn't really need any, but it wouldn't hurt to have an Ioun Stone. Magic Item Compendium introduces the Wilding Clasp for all sorts of Wildshape based shenanigans.

[mcv]

It is practically impossible to mess up a druid biuld. Even a suboptimal druid will regularly outshine the rest of the party around level 8 and beyond.

The hard part isn't how to make one, but how to play one. You've got a ton of ridiculously powerful abilities, and they all require you to know lots of stuff. You automatically know every spell from your excellent and diverse spelllist, you can summon a ton of different creatures (make sure you've got their stats ready, adjusted for Augmented Sumoning), you've got an animal companion that's a great combatant at low levels, and you can change into a ton of different creatures.

The rules for animal companions and wild shaping are really horrible.

[Drake2009]

K now she's gonna be level 7. She will be well buffed I am the wizard and have been reading up on good buffs.

[eggynack]

K now she's gonna be level 7. She will be well buffed I am the wizard and have been reading up on good buffs.
Fancy. Soon she will enter the true attack bear levels, but for now she must content herself with 4th level spells (which are probably better, despite their lack of bear emphasis). My favorite spells at that level come mostly from outside of core, and I have no idea if that's an issue or not. Either way, bite of the wereboar, boreal wind, flame strike, greater luminous armor and heart of earth are all neat for various reasons. For summoning, that's the level of ultimate grappling, with both giant crocodiles and brown bears. That level also has unicorns which have great bang for their buck in terms of healing. Also, I forgot to mention this before for some reason, but the spell primal instinct from dragon magic is amazing. 24 straight hours of +5 to initiative. You're effectively trading a third level spell slot for something often better than a well loved feat. It also, like the heart of x series, gets extra benefits if you have either two or four of the spells up. In this case, those benefits are uncanny dodge and improved uncanny dodge respectively. It's not a bad set of things to just have.

[Spuddles]

This is only partway true. As noted above, a druid takes only a day or so to change every ability he has. Feats, outside of natural spell, aren't that important. There are some great ones out there that really boost the druid's power, but as long as a druid has natural spell, they'll be pretty close to as optimized they can be. Gear is also largely irrelevant, though like feats, often helpful if you know what to look for. The point of the common natural spell cliche is that as long as a druid has natural spell, in the right hands that druid will be up to approximately maximum druid capacity.

What makes the real difference is the day to day stuff the druid picks, and the tactics they use. This comes down to understanding all of the crazy facets of a druid. First, there's regular spell casting, which is wonderful. There are some great spells for them at just about every level, especially the early ones. The second is summoning, which is an always important subset of casting. Spontaneous summoning conversion means that at any point, a druid can transform whatever specialized solution they've come up with for a problem into a pile of bears. Bears (hippogriffs, wolves, whatever animals are best at their level) aren't always the best solution to a problem, but they are almost always a solution to a problem. This makes daily spell selection, one of the great differentiating factors between an alright druid and an amazing druid, far less important.

Third is wildshape. At early levels, wildshape tends to be best used for utility purposes, like flight and swimming. Once large shapes come into the mix, a druid is a more reliable combatant, and get even better at just flying away from the problem and hurling lightning at them. Wildshape isn't the most powerful druid ability, but with its duration it can practically always be on, and it's highly versatile. It can also be used to shore up low strength and dex.

Last and probably least is the animal companion. Depending on opinion, a good animal companion is either better than a fighter, or a bit worse than one, but either way it's pretty nifty. Selecting all of these things can be tricky for a new player, but unless they die, experience and system knowledge can basically just replace any low-op choices with high-op ones. This is more true for a druid than for practically any other class. For specifics, I'd second the idea of looking into the druid handbook. It's not as good as the wizard ones, but it's pretty good sometimes.

You didn't actually go look up the stats of a bear.

Go look at the stats of a bear. Then come back.

Druid is much more complicated than "turn into bear. win."

[eggynack]

You didn't actually go look up the stats of a bear.

Go look at the stats of a bear. Then come back.

Druid is much more complicated than "turn into bear. win."
I know bear stats, and I know that there's more to the actual use of a druid than just becoming a bear. My point, which I was pretty clear about, was that build choices are unimportant. She could build the druid however she wanted and it largely wouldn't matter because most druid abilities are able to be changed quickly. I could take her theoretically bad druid, with all bad feats and a terrible animal companion, and as long as it had natural spell I could play it about as well as any druid. I didn't even say anything about bear attacks at her level. I said that at her level, utility would be the abilities biggest benefit. At level 8 however, large size and high strength makes for a reasonably powerful combatant. They have low dex, and are thus a bit fragile, but that's easy enough to fix with a good spell.

Finally, I didn't even mention her turning into a bear and ravaging her enemies at any point in that post. Thus, I'm inclined to think that you never actually read what I wrote, and just filled in the gaps with your brain. My response was largely saying that build skill on a druid is irrelevant, and day to day choices are the important thing.

[Talya]

She wants wildshape combat?

Constitution. Then get more constitution.

Heck, it's not a horrible idea to equalize it with wisdom.

Use druid buffs with natural spell and wildshape, you can be quite the terror.

Use animal shapes with pounce instead of the bear. Right now, at level 7, deinonychus is a good choice. (Or of course, the dreaded fleshraker raptor, if allowed.)

[molten_dragon]

Ok so were adding a druid to my team and I want to know a good way to help her with it cause she has never played one. At the moment she will be level 6 and NO prestige class because shes new. Any ideas on feats and stuff?

It's really, really hard to screw up a druid. In fact it's almost impossible. Honestly if all she did was turn into an animal and melee stuff, she'd be at least as useful as the party fighter.

As far as feats go, I'd say go with natural spell (pretty much a requirement), spell focus conjuration, and augment summoning. There are better feats out there than augment summoning, but it's simple. If she's human and gets a 4th feat, maybe go with extend spell. Or extra wild shape if she likes changing forms a lot.

[Ashtagon]

A well-played druid never enters melee.

The best use for wildshape is with natural spell. Then wildshape into something that can fly (so melee can't hit you) or innocuous (so they won't think you are worth attacking) or maybe even unnoticeable. That's just about the best place to be when casting spells.

The enemy may know a caster is summoning bears everywhere, but they won't know you are the target, or won't be able to reach you even if they know it.

Best defence, as always, is not being attacked.