Good elemental forms for Druid's?

[Tainted_Scholar]

After re-reading the rules for Wild Shape I noticed that the druid can turn into an Elemental Weird at level 16. It got me wondering if there were any other really good elemental forms. I mostly just see people talk about the Druid's animal forms.

[DrMotives]

I think just because there aren't very many elementals compared to most other creature types. Oozes are pretty sparse pickings too, but I'm unaware of an ooze-shape ACF, so that doesn't matter. But there are probably more animals in the MM1 alone than all elementals put together in official sources.

[Bronk]

Ice and magma paraelementals are pretty cool...

[eggynack]

The struggle here is that it's not all that clear you can become anything of the elemental type. The essential underlying argument against is the use of the term, "air, earth, fire, or water," as a descriptor for what elementals you can become. We must ask then, are these terms meant to refer to subtype, or name, and, if we're in name territory, is the term elemental referring to name or to those four main elementals from the book, air elemental, earth elemental, fire elemental, and water elemental? There's a bunch of evidence for the more narrow interpretation. For one thing, those four elementals are rather uniquely given this big "elementals" header, a sort of descriptor that rarely sees use elsewhere in the game as a whole. Like, there's a whole chapter thing about animals, but that contains all but a few specified groups of animals, rather than three creatures with animal in their name and nothing else. The elemental type listing in the monster manual literally says "belker, elementals, invisible stalker...". An interesting feature of this claim is that the text of the ability refers to both size and subtype features, but both of those things are specifically mentioned in the names of these elementals.

There's also a really neat way to extend this argument out to summoning, which enables us to make use of arguments specific to that ability. In particular, if the description in wild shape refers to elementals as a type, then we must expect, say, SNA IV, which allows the summoning of "Elemental, Medium (any)", to go by type as well. Why would we interpret these differently? But then we can note that interpreting summoning that way produces some absurdities. For example, SNA VII allows the summoning of an invisible stalker, a fancy fellow if I do say so myself. However, the invisible stalker is a large air elemental, which means that we should naturally be able to summon one with SNA V, using "Elemental, Large (any)". What sense does that make? Moreover, while the lower level modes are consistent with a type based interpretation, how are we to take it when SNA VII lets us summon greater elementals, especially when greater elementals are huge, meaning we could summon one with SNA VI? What does it mean when MM III introduces storm elementals, creatures that satisfy all requirements of this reading, and that still require a higher level spell? I don't think this gets defeated by specific versus general either, first because this is all information that's on pretty much the same level of generality (it's all just the one table), and second because it's not like the presence of this capability higher up necessarily deletes the capability lower down. A fourth level spell is allowed to be strictly worse than fireball if it wants to be.

At the very least, the entries for greater and elder elementals in SNA raise the idea that elemental as a term could refer to something besides type, and with no context besides that which already exists for the other entries. Thus, I would contend that what wild shape refers to is at least ambiguous, and that the reading most parsimonious with the rest of the text is one that stops you from using the vast majority of creatures of the elemental type, in favor of a reading reliant on the section's header, or maybe on the name of the elemental in question. It's the reading I heavily tend towards. All this to say, this might be the reason you don't see much talk of elemental forms. It's at least the reason I don't talk about them.