Circle of Breath 1.1- A shape focused Druid subclass

[Magic Myrmidon]

Hi, everyone,

I posted this a while back, but I've tweaked it after getting some feedback from some friends. Might be a bit better balanced now, but I'd like to hear what people here think before trying to make it more official or something.

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Gentle Exhalation
At 2nd level, you can coax Gaia into creating minor changes in you, your allies, and your enemies. By expending a use of your wildshape, you can shift the form of a number of creatures equal to 2+your Wisdom modifier within 30 ft. Your abilities allow you to apply any one of the following options:

Give the creature a 30 ft Swim Speed
Give the creature a Climb Speed of 20 ft
Give the creature a bonus or penalty of 10 ft to their move speed
Give the creature a claw attack with a d6 damage die
Add or remove Scent

You choose an effect for each individual creature. These changes last for a number of hours equal to half your druid level (rounded down). Unwilling creatures are allowed a Constitution save with a DC equal to your spell save DC to resist the effects.

Stable Form
At 6th level, Gaia’s Breath provides shelter against effects that would shift you from your natural physical state.
You have advantage on saves against spells that would alter your physical form such as polymorph, as well as effects that would result in being blinded, deafened, or petrified.

Steady Expiration
At 6th level, your experience with Gaia’s breath allows you to further change a creature’s capabilities.
You gain the following options when you use your Gentle Exhalation feature:
Add or Remove Darkvision
Give the creature Water Breathing
Inflict the blinded condition
Inflict the deafened condition


Accelerated Evolution
At 10th level, using Gaia’s Breath to change a creature’s form has become routine.
Polymorph is always considered prepared without counting against your number of spells you can prepare each day. You can choose to target either Constitution or Wisdom with this spell. Furthermore, you can cast Polymorph once per short rest without using a spell slot.

Warping Gale
At 14th level, you have formed a close bond with Gaia, and become a conduit for her to exert her will. When you use your Gentle Exhalation feature, you can choose two effects for each creature. Any movement speed additions or adjustments from Gentle Exhalation are doubled.
Furthermore, the following effects are now available to choose from when you use Gentle Exhalation:

A flight speed of 30 ft.
Burrow Speed of 30 ft.
Tremorsense of 60 ft.
Blindsight of 30 ft.
Add or remove a damage resistance
Give advantage or disadvantage on ability checks for any single attribute.

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[sleepyhead]

Gentle Exhalation
At 2nd level, you can coax Gaia into creating minor changes in you, your allies, and your enemies. By expending a use of your wildshape, you can shift the form of a number of creatures equal to 2+your Wisdom modifier within 30 ft. Your abilities allow you to apply any one of the following options:

Give the creature a 30 ft Swim Speed
Give the creature a Climb Speed of 20 ft
Give the creature a bonus or penalty of 10 ft to their move speed
Give the creature a claw attack with a d6 damage die
Add or remove Scent

You choose an effect for each individual creature. These changes last for a number of hours equal to half your druid level (rounded down). Unwilling creatures are allowed a Constitution save with a DC equal to your spell save DC to resist the effects.

While this is a useful feature it is very limited. The most useful thing is the 30ft of swim speed. Land Druids can cast spider climb, wizards can cast haste, and 1d6+str isn't very strong. Still a neat feature just rather insufficient compared to the use of moon/land druids.

Stable Form
At 6th level, Gaia’s Breath provides shelter against effects that would shift you from your natural physical state.
You have advantage on saves against spells that would alter your physical form such as polymorph, as well as effects that would result in being blinded, deafened, or petrified.

Situational but useful.

Steady Expiration
At 6th level, your experience with Gaia’s breath allows you to further change a creature’s capabilities.
You gain the following options when you use your Gentle Exhalation feature:
Add or Remove Darkvision
Give the creature Water Breathing
Inflict the blinded condition
Inflict the deafened condition


Alrighty better. Why would you want to remove someones darkvision if you could just blind them? Water breathing is good but it also is just a 3rd level spell. Deafness is good but not as good as blinded.

Accelerated Evolution
At 10th level, using Gaia’s Breath to change a creature’s form has become routine.
Polymorph is always considered prepared without counting against your number of spells you can prepare each day. You can choose to target either Constitution or Wisdom with this spell. Furthermore, you can cast Polymorph once per short rest without using a spell slot.


Might get annoying being able to turn into a t-rex every short rest for the GM. Other wise this is decent. What are you going to do to them after you polymorph them?

Warping Gale
At 14th level, you have formed a close bond with Gaia, and become a conduit for her to exert her will. When you use your Gentle Exhalation feature, you can choose two effects for each creature. Any movement speed additions or adjustments from Gentle Exhalation are doubled.
Furthermore, the following effects are now available to choose from when you use Gentle Exhalation:

A flight speed of 30 ft.
Burrow Speed of 30 ft.
Tremorsense of 60 ft.
Blindsight of 30 ft.
Add or remove a damage resistance
Give advantage or disadvantage on ability checks for any single attribute.

Might be the first overpowered ability. Other 14th level capstones (land and moon) allow for minor transformations (like your 2nd and 6th levels) or some sort of protection. This allows your entire party to fly, dig, and see invisible things, have resistance to any damage, and have advantage on checks (all at separate times of course). So yeah that;s pretty strong.

Overview
Pretty cool concept, focusing on buff/debuff your whoevers. But weaker then most subclasses early on and stronger then others at later levels

[JNAProductions]

What's the duration on these? As written, they last forever.

[sleepyhead]

What's the duration on these? As written, they last forever.


These changes last for a number of hours equal to half your druid level (rounded down).
second sentence of the 3rd paragraph it says.

[JNAProductions]

second sentence of the 3rd paragraph it says.

I did indeed miss that.

Considering you can Blind creatures at level 6... That's really too powerful. It's basically one save or you're neutered-how badly depends on what you are, but outside of a rare few creatures, Blinded is a HUGE condition. (And some of them, such as Grimlocks, you can achieve the same thing via Deafening them.)

[sleepyhead]

Considering you can Blind creatures at level 6... That's really too powerful. It's basically one save or you're neutered-how badly depends on what you are, but outside of a rare few creatures, Blinded is a HUGE condition. (And some of them, such as Grimlocks, you can achieve the same thing via Deafening them.)

Felt like I should mention that blindness/deafness is a 2nd level spell. But I guess they still get a save at the end of each turn with the spell.

[MagneticKitty]

I did indeed miss that.

Considering you can Blind creatures at level 6... That's really too powerful. It's basically one save or you're neutered-how badly depends on what you are, but outside of a rare few creatures, Blinded is a HUGE condition. (And some of them, such as Grimlocks, you can achieve the same thing via Deafening them.)

Anything with blindsight or truesight or tremmor sense is immune (they don't need their eyes to see) so i think its ok. Your dm can balance

[JNAProductions]

Anything with blindsight or truesight or tremmor sense is immune (they don't need their eyes to see) so i think its ok. Your dm can balance

If a DM has to balance around one specific ability over others, it’s not a balanced ability.

[Magic Myrmidon]

Oh wow, I'm so sorry that I missed the feedback on this! It's super helpful.

I tried to err on the side of caution for the most part, so I'm glad most of it is more under- than overpowered. I think the idea of a "capstone" kinda led me to just go wild, since it's like "Hey, this is the last one, better make it good!"



Level 2: I was thinking that the (extremely long) duration would kinda balance the lower power level of the early effects. Spells that have minor effects, but don't require concentration are often rated pretty decently. Transmutation wizards, for example, can boost their speed by 10, and it only effects them. I originally had a few more effects at level 2, but others I've asked pointed out that waterbreathing and darkvision were 3rd level spells, and level 2 was a bit early to give them out. So I moved 'em to level 6.

Level 6: Speaking of, excellent point regarding darkvision and blindness. I think there might be a solution that solves both this issue and the issue that a several hour, one-save blindness is really strong: Give the blindness and deafness effect a save at the end of each round. Then, removing darkvision has the niche effect of having no per-round save, but blindness will be more generally useful.

Level 10: Maybe short rest is a biiiit too frequent. But I definitely want it to be a signature move. Also, if the earlier levels are slightly on the weak side, I've read in WoTC's homebrewing tips that having slightly powerful abilities later on can be an OK tradeoff. Not ideal, but might be enough to justify it.

Level 14: Gaaah. You're probably right. Whole-party flight isn't even a high level spell, from what I can tell. But most of those abilities are so flavorful, dang. I doubt reducing the duration for those abilities to "rounds/half druid level" wouldn't necessarily solve that, huh? I should probably lay out that the damage resistances would be for one specific element or damage type, too.
Alternatively, maybe I could make those effects require a single target as the use of the ability? I feel like that would make the ability super versatile, but it's power is definitely culled quite a bit at that point.



Thanks again, this sparked a lot of ideas! More than happy to have more feedback, if anyone has any to give.