druid or spirit shaman?

[Falcii]

so i realized that there is a whole bunch of stuff in the character im building that i dont plan on using because it is outside of my comfort zone research wise and it would bump to a powerlevel that my group really doesnt need. So my question is this. If i never use my animal companion, or shapeshifting for anything combat related, is it worth while to take druid over spirit shaman?

[barakaka]

It's mostly up to taste for spontaneous vs prepared casting.

If you go the druid route and have Eberron books open, I suggest taking Shifter as your race and using the Shifter alternate class features for druid found in Races of Eberron. Super cool flavour of having a spirit guide that boosts a physical ability score of your choosing and gives you other cool abilities. Some of it is summoning focused if you're into that.

It is just cool and gives you a bunch of options, which I kinda like. If you're doing too well in one area, switch it up and try something else. Battlefield control too strong? Try summoning. If summoning is too strong, try using druid spells to buff yourself and wade into melee combat.

[ryu]

I mean... While using druid you have scads of options to trade those things away for something else. I don't know them all off the back of my head like Eggy does, but unless you're trying to hold back as much as possible isn't it better to trade for something rather than nothing?

[eggynack]

Yeah, sure. The ACF thing is obviously important, but the simple answer is that druid casting is quite a lot better, because shaman is so limited in terms of spell variety, especially when you account for the loss of summoning. Just look at how long it takes to get a second top level spell retrieved, and that's to say nothing of two score casting. Casting is the best thing, so as cool as spirit shaman abilities are, you're probably ahead of that class even if druid is otherwise a blank class.

But, as Ryu notes, druid isn't otherwise blank. My handbook has all kinds ACF's in it, and while wild shape ones are basically all crap, most other features, companion included, can be traded for good value. Breaking it down the other way, assuming you trade the companion and wild shape, I wouldn't be surprised if druid non-casting were still better than shaman non-casting.

So, even under these conditions, the druid is essentially beating the shaman twice over, first with better casting than shaman's casting and features combined, and second with those possibly superior features.

Edit: Also, what do you mean by combat related shapeshifting? Because if you're still allowing yourself to be a desmodu hunting bat or something full time, with natural spell taken at some point, that alone is enough for wild shape to be great. If you just don't want to figure out a lot of attacking stuff, you really don't need to.