The urge to slay: Request for Duel Preperation Help

[FleshrakerAbuse]

Recently, I challenged a friend to a D&D duel, and he accepted with remarks of using "artificers" and "wand metamagic". Now, my terms and settings were:
3 matches. 1 with one day in-game prep, 1 with 2 rounds prep, and 1 with the two characters just meeting.

Now, my favorite class is the druid, but they aren't exactly the best duelist, so I decided to turn to the forums for advice. How should I build the druid to fight his build? Should I use a different one?

Level 10, average hp and WBL. No optional rules.

[Oscredwin]

What books?

[kreenlover]

by duelist do you mean no summoning? because, go with the summon chain.
Improved summoning, ashbound, green bound summoning, and so on and so forth.

Use your first few rounds to fill the battlefield with crazy tough summons, and your buffed up animal companion, then wildshape, and tear him a new one.

Also, natural spell is a must have

[Spuddles]

This thread seems like cheating, or at least poor sportsmanship.

Check out the aforementioned greenbound summoning, as well as rashemi elemental summoning.

[FleshrakerAbuse]

Spuddles, what do you mean by cheating?

All books.

And I just want to find out if a druid is a good one v one fighter. Summoning works, I guess.

[Jack_Simth]

Spuddles, what do you mean by cheating?
Well, unless your opponent is stopping and getting significant amounts of help from elsewhere, you're at a decided advantage, are you not?

[Morcleon]

Well, unless your opponent is stopping and getting significant amounts of help from elsewhere, you're at a decided advantage, are you not?

"Anything worth fighting for is worth fighting dirty for." :smallwink:

@OP: Just go check out the many druid handbooks out there. :smallbiggrin:

[eggynack]

In a duel scenario, you can't just summon monsters. You have to summon monsters fast. That means picking up golden desert honey from complete mage, and a belt of battle from MIC. How does the fight work with all day buffs? If you'd have the spells on when just meeting the enemy, can you still have some good stuff up? If you can, I'd mostly stick to all day buffs. My usual list goes (greater) luminous armor (BoED), primal instinct (Dragon Magic), heart of water (CM), any other heart of X spells you have room for, the wild shape form desmodu hunting bat, and enhance wild shape to pick up 120 foot blind sight. That's just the standard set up, and can be modified in a couple of ways. The most important factors are the crazy high initiative (+7 bat+ +5 primal instinct+ +2 belt=+14), the reasonably high AC (especially if you have a monk's belt on top of the greater luminous armor), and the blind sight (which should let you find anything, short of a character specifically optimized not to be found).

After that, I'd advise having animal growth prepared. If you pick up a grappling animal companion, one plan might be to just toss animal growth on him, set the animal on this caster, and test whether he has freedom of movement too. Another test for his defenses is rashemi blasting. You can set two large orglashes on him, theoretically even in the surprise round, and that gets you 16d6 ice damage for three consecutive rounds. More importantly, they add to your body count, and make it more difficult for him to shoot you to death. If you can establish a safe spot, and make it stick, killing him shouldn't be too hard. It sounds like he's pushing some crazy blast attack, so taking cover behind a giant crocodile could do the trick, all on its own. That set of stuff is likely the plan I'd use, anyway.