Druid or Spirit Shaman?

[ChaosStar]

Hey I have another question for you guys about the adventuring party I'm making that I mentioned in my last post. I'm making the Merg (Bastards and Bloodlines pgs. 42-44.) and I'm not sure weather he should be a Druid or a Spirit Shaman. The only other characters in the party that can heal are the Paladin and the Ranger. I've already got the class for the last character lined up, so the party kind of needs a little bit more Divine power. (It could also use some more Arcane power due to the Arcane users being a Sorcerer and a Hexblade, but I like the group to have seven characters.)

[Mr Adventurer]

Druids are much better.

[Endarire]

I had a similar consideration. Druid all the way because it's better!

[Albions_Angel]

With a druid you will blow the rest of the party out the water. You trying to have fun or beat the campaign? You can do both, but if you go druid, you may have to hamstring yourself to be on the same powerlevel. i am sure you have tons of experience with doing just that, but its still something to consider.

In all honesty, I would go with Spirit Shaman. They are so flavorful and are a pretty versatile "Druid-Lite".

[ChaosStar]

With a druid you will blow the rest of the party out the water. You trying to have fun or beat the campaign? You can do both, but if you go druid, you may have to hamstring yourself to be on the same powerlevel. i am sure you have tons of experience with doing just that, but its still something to consider.

In all honesty, I would go with Spirit Shaman. They are so flavorful and are a pretty versatile "Druid-Lite".
The thing is, I don't know which character I'll be playing. I'm making the characters cause I thought the idea of an adventuring group made up of halfbreeds would be awesome and was planning to look for other players and a DM later. If you're wondering about party balance the group contains a Paladin, a Scout(archery focus), a Sorceress, a Ranger(two-handed fighting focus), a Hexblade, This character that I'm trying to determine the class of, and a Swashbuckler.

[Troacctid]

Spirit shaman is essentially a weaker version of a druid. You get the same spells, but without the animal companion, wild shape, or splatbook support. In return, you get the ability to detect spirits. That's not a remotely fair trade.

[Zaq]

As stated, a Druid is pretty much strictly superior to a Spirit Shaman. You do get a little bit more round-by-round flexibility because of the way their respective casting mechanics are set up, but since a Spirit Shaman still picks spells to retrieve every day, you don't have the day-by-day ease that most spontaneous casters do (by which I mean that it's easier on the player, though not usually mechanically stronger, to just have a list of locked-in spells that you don't have to reselect every day than to have to prepare spells every day—yes, you can in practice just stick to a semi-solid list of spells that you don't deviate from much, but sometimes that extra layer of choice can feel stressful to our irrational human brains). So the main benefit that spontaneous casters get over prepared casters (ease of play, which comes at the cost of mechanical flexibility) isn't as much of a benefit in this specific case (compared to, say, a Cleric and a Favored Soul, or a Wizard and a Sorcerer).

That said, a Spirit Shaman is still going to be less work to actually play, just because a Spirit Shaman has less stuff to keep track of than a Druid does. You've got to have a passing familiarity with the spell list (and ideally a greater-than-passing familiarity with the spells you use the most), but you don't also have to keep track of good Wild Shape forms, useful summons of every level, the capabilities of your animal companion, and so on. Again, this is a mechanical weakness (the Druid has to keep track of these things because they're all strong assets that the Druid wants to use and use well), but if the player doesn't want to deal with all the minutiae that come with playing a Druid properly, then a Spirit Shaman still has a lot of similar flavor—and while there's no argument that Druids are stronger, Spirit Shamans are still full casters with access to a great list, so they're by no means weak characters.

I generally don't like going all-out for power (especially if you're trying to not overshadow the weaker characters in the party, and you mentioned a Hexblade!), so I feel like Spirit Shaman might be a little bit "friendlier" overall, but I'm in no way arguing that Druids aren't stronger. Druids are absolutely stronger. So if you want to crank up the power full tilt, then Druid all the way. But that isn't always a good idea.

[Fizban]

The Spirit Shaman has spontaneous casting from a list than changes every day, which should be the most powerful type of casting. What makes it not be that is how extremely limited your retrieved spells are, your effective "spells known" each day is far worse than that of a Sorcerer (which is as it should be, how about that attempt at actual class balance?). This means that in practice you're not so much doing spontaneous druid blasting/control with all their cool spells, instead it's more you pick a few specific tricks you can do each day and spam them with all your slots. At higher levels you'll have up to 3 spells retrieved on your lower tiers, which is almost enough to feel like you have options, and you can take Spontaneous Healer/Spontaneous Summoner to get a bit more.

Of course that's ignoring the split casting, which was applied to Favored Soul and Spirit Shaman and. . . Shadowcasters maybe? The three weakest "full" casters even before that.

I personally don't find the Spirit Shaman class abilities all that interesting, but they are useful. Always having something to smash incorporeal undead, one of the most dangerous things to find yourself unprepared for, is good, and mind protection/exorcism isn't something most people have built in. Free concentration applies to almost no druid spells, but there are a couple. Bottom line, it's basically like everyone else has already said: if you don't want to steal the show, Spirit Shaman will let you play with Druid spells with little chance of that happening unless you try extra hard.

[J-H]

And if you run into anything that qualifies as a Spirit (ghosts, ALL FEY), you have a pretty good AOE smash of 1d6/level. At level 3-4 it's an encounter-ending power.

I'm running a Spirit Shaman 4 right now and enjoying it. He talks to an invisible spirit badger.

[eggynack]

Spirit shaman feels weirdly asynergistic to me. The druid list is partially about having all these creatures to work with, including yourself. Spells like animal growth and mass snake's swiftness rely on that big pool of allies. Bite of the wereX likes a companion to target, or at least your own beary self. Your BFC's need some pressure to be really useful. And then there's enhance wild shape. It all produces this awkwardness, one not helped on the build end by the loss of cool druid build options. That's my main non-power input, anyway. The biggest factor has to be the mentioned power differential.