Druid Wild Shape

[Staige]

Alright, so the questions
First of all as far as the Wildshape rule of "The new form's Hit Dice can't exceed the character's druid level" does this mean the druid can't take the form at all, or that the hit dice of the former are reduced down to the druids max health, and if so are other stats affected?

And if the Wildshape is limited by this, is there any feats, or other ways to increase the druids level for use of wildshape into higher hit dice things. Like Natural Bond does for animal companion.

[Inevitability]

The druid can't take it at all: especially because the HD reduction as described by you wouldn't do anything.

[Togo]

Agree with the previous post.

There aren't many ways of getting a higher wildshape level apart from simply getting more levels in classes that grant wildshape. The wildshape amulet is the best (magic of Faerun), but it's 3.0 rather than 3.5. There is also the Mantle of the Beast, ring of the Beast, armour of the Beast magic item set from Complete Champion, which gives you a small boost when all three items are worn. However the items aren't necessarily that good...

[Ualaa]

If you're playing Pathfinder, or maybe 3.x has an equivalent, there's a feat called 'Shaping Focus'.
This makes your druid level count as four higher, for the purpose of Wild Shaping.
But even then, that caps at your actual character level.

So a Druid (Total Levels - 4) with Shaping Focus, has a benefit from a wild shape perspective.
But that character would still be four caster levels back.
Or maybe two, if they took Magical Knack for their Druid class.

The game seems to balance around your total character level as a hard cap.
Note, your Knowledge Nature is literally what you know of animals... so what you can envision wildshaping into; that (and your skill for Elementals) could be regarded as the softer cap.

[eggynack]

There is also the Mantle of the Beast, ring of the Beast, armour of the Beast magic item set from Complete Champion, which gives you a small boost when all three items are worn. However the items aren't necessarily that good...
Well, the ring is clearly great, if you have the intention to do any summoning whatsoever. Practically doubles the strength of all your summoning below the top level, and it's relatively cheap. The mantle is quite good, offering a good amount of versatility, especially if you're running dragon forms, and the simple ability to swap from a more defensive form into an attack form and then attack in the same round shouldn't be understated. Not a must have like the ring, but I think it's definitely on the list of stuff to buy when you got time to do so. The armor is basically two kinda crappy druid items, wild armor and druid's vestments, stapled together, and the combination is bad enough and expensive enough to frequently make the +1 not worth seeking. If you just really need druid items, then it's a thing that exists, but I just don't think this is where you wanna be.

Anyways, on the general problem of wild shape level, perhaps the best item for it is the skin of kaletor, from dragon 324, page 75. It offers a +4, like the wild shape amulet, but does so for 12k GP and without the cap, albeit with the downside of crappy charisma and wild empathy checks. If you have dragon access, that's probably the first thing you want along these lines.