Running a Shephard Druid

[ZenBear]

One of my players wants to go Circle of the Shephard. She's brand new to D&D so I expect she's going to have a hard enough time keeping track of all her spells as a baseline Druid, but I don't want to disallow a character option without at least giving her a chance at it. We also have 6 players in this party, so combat is already going to be a bit bloated and adding in a bunch of summoned creatures will only make it more of a slog. So, I'd like some advice on how best to handle this situation.

I've done a bit of research already. I've google searched guides, most of which are player optimization guides which doesn't really help a ton. I've watched YouTube videos, the most useful of which was "How to use conjure animals fast! - D&D 5E Basic guide to Conjure animals" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FKcQOlUimIY) by Pack Tactics which I sent along to the player. I'm wondering if there's some homebrew out there that modifies Conjure Animals to only ever summon a single beast with different circumstantial specialties that scales on spell slot level or something along those lines?

Any advice will do, but please don't harp on the "tell her no" option. I know it's there and if/when this choice becomes a problem I'll have that conversation with her then. The goal here is to make the subclass work.

[5eNeedsDarksun]

One of my players wants to go Circle of the Shephard. She's brand new to D&D so I expect she's going to have a hard enough time keeping track of all her spells as a baseline Druid, but I don't want to disallow a character option without at least giving her a chance at it. We also have 6 players in this party, so combat is already going to be a bit bloated and adding in a bunch of summoned creatures will only make it more of a slog. So, I'd like some advice on how best to handle this situation.

I've done a bit of research already. I've google searched guides, most of which are player optimization guides which doesn't really help a ton. I've watched YouTube videos, the most useful of which was "How to use conjure animals fast! - D&D 5E Basic guide to Conjure animals" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FKcQOlUimIY) by Pack Tactics which I sent along to the player. I'm wondering if there's some homebrew out there that modifies Conjure Animals to only ever summon a single beast with different circumstantial specialties that scales on spell slot level or something along those lines?

Any advice will do, but please don't harp on the "tell her no" option. I know it's there and if/when this choice becomes a problem I'll have that conversation with her then. The goal here is to make the subclass work.

I've DMed one Shepherd from levels 1 to 13 and it was easily the most powerful character I've ever had to deal with for almost all levels. The (maybe) good news is that part of the power comes from the temp hp to buff other characters, so that helps not totally outshine the party. So everyone is stronger, and my experience also included a Cleric that liked to have a bunch of animated undead following him around. Many battles were more like moderate military engagements and I had to roughly double foes in the published mod we were playing (DiA). By mid tier 2 our Shepherd was responsible for over 1000 temp hp some days.

That said, yes limiting the number of summoned is a good place to start both to limit the power and simplify things. If I ever allowed this again there's no way I'd let conjure animals summon more than 4 creatures... and maybe less.

[x3n0n]

If I ever allowed this again there's no way I'd let conjure animals summon more than 4 creatures... and maybe less.

FWIW, I like the house rule that says all of the 1/2/4/8 Conjure plural spells actually conjure 1/2/3/4.

The spells are still PLENTY strong enough (even without Bear Totem or Mighty Summoner). The 1/2/3/4 version just makes it a real decision (vs "always go Wolf").

[Dualight]

The various "Summon" spells in Tasha's Cauldron, which only ever summon 1 creature, should help enable a summoner without bloating the number of creatures on the field too much. Even better, Druids get a lot of them, and start getting them at the same time as the Conjure spells begin to come online, as Summon Beast is a 2nd level spell.

If the player cannot be persuaded to go with a character with less bookkeeping, making her aware of the Summon spells as a simpler alternative to Conjure spells might be a good intermediary.

[Hael]

Most VTTs will simplify summons considerably. Especially if you give them an option of what to preprogram into their macros.

With enough experience a shepherds turn won’t be any longer than anyone elses.

Where it gets really slow, is if you pick a random, unfamiliar statblock and the player has to manually roll everything.

The big houserule that I strongly encourage is to set an initiative heurestic. Like all summons after the casters turn, or at the end of the order. What matters is consistency and the fact that you dont have to track everything.

[Miele]

I play at a real table, not online, so my trick is using a dice app to roll, possibly during the other players turns when I'm not going first. DM trusts me (HAHAHA the fool! :smallbiggrin:) so I write down all my rolls or rolls with advantage if needed and basically pre-roll my beasts' turn. I have to add that each die roll at our table is a gigantic waste of time, for the mockery (vicious), scaramantic rituals, and so on, but we have a ton of fun.

If pre-rolls are not an option, split creatures among other willing players that will help you roll quickly.

If you upcast to 16 beasts, roll for pairs to speed up. Always use average damage. If you use Wolves be ready to tell your DM to roll X times a Strength ST vs. DC 11 or be knocked prone, where X is the number of succesful attacks.

Use tokens with numbers: you can print round tokens or just cut 8 pieces of paper or light cardboard and number them 1 to 8 (or to 32 if you are a high level player willing to destroy your DM patience). When you write down your dice rolls, do it in order from 1 to 8, it helps with speed and to do things correctly. Since you can split your forces on the battlefield, you may end up with a few dead animals in your ranks, hence some of the rolls you pre-rolled will have to be discarded, make sure you remove the right ones.

Things you shouldn't do:

- Name each beast individually ("oh nooooo! that horrible mage killed Jack, Pluto, Bobby and Lea!").
- Roll 2d20 on the table, have them fall on the floor, repeat the roll because it bumped... no, that's only for your main character actions, minions should be treated as such. Have trouble sleeping because you sent to their death your marvelous fey friends.
- Take longer than 2-3 minutes to complete your turn. Especially right at the very first session. Come prepared and train yourself at home. If you work quickly and smoothly on your first session, eventual hiccups will be forgiven much more easily in the future.
- Start looking for stats in the MM at the moment of the casting, just don't, ever: pick 3 to 5 options that in your opinion could be covering most of your needs: Wolves, Elks, Cows (yeah!), etc and write them down on a cheat sheet or use an app on your phone. I have a very useful app that helps with Wildshapes and Summons, not sure if I can promote it here, just look it up.

One thing I consider essential: don't optimize at every possible moment, Shepherd is a powerhouse of control and support. Nerf yourself from time to time: summon something thematically appropriate, don't steal the spotlight from your party members, try to summon less than 8 sometimes, 2 CR 1 beasts such as Dire Wolves can be very useful: large beasts, 37 hp (or 47 if you are level 6+ or 57 if you add a bear totem), that can prone and grapple can sometimes be good or better in tight spaces rather than 8 something. Admittely 8 dodging cows (large) can make a wall of furry frustration for your enemies if you just want to buy time to flee.

The really difficult part in playing Shepherd will be (for me) when I can Conjure Woodland Beings: summoning spellcasting creatures can offer a ton of options, but being really quick is going to be much harder.

[NecessaryWeevil]

"Nhym's Guide to Fuzzy Fury" has some good advice on creature management.
Two other ideas:
1) If it's the animal-centric nature (heh) of the class that appeals, and not the idea of being a tactical mastermind with her own little army, consider designing her summons as Swarms rather than many individual critters.
2) Have a few one-on-one practice combat with her so she's not trying to learn with six other people watching and tapping their fingers.

[da newt]

I played at a table where conjure animals got you a swarm, or 2 cr 1s, or 1 cr 2 - the player picked from a small list of DM pre-approved beasts and it worked out well.

The swarms were a bit of home brew that approximated the power of the 8 cr 1/4s, but acted as a single creature (pool of hp, 1 or 2 attacks that ~ equal output of 8/16 attacks).

The list of approved conjures allowed the player to have everything prepped and a decent option for every environment (one flyer, one swimmer, one control, one DPR, one meat shield, ...) and greatly reduced decision making time.

Also, always use average damage for the conjures/summons and print out sheets of prerolled D20 attacks - cross them out as they are used. (the DM took care of all the to-hits w/ prerolled D20 sheets, and it went quickly).

[sithlordnergal]

First things first, DO NOT NERF CONJURE ANIMALS!

A lot of people here are going to suggest nerfing Conjure Animals to where it only summons half of what it normally gets, or turn them into swarms. Don't do it. Sheppard Druid is a class who is defined by their summoning spells, and Conjure Animals is the premier spell. Heck, their level 14 ability is literally a non-Concentration Conjure Animals at 9th level.

With that out of the way, there are a few ways to prevent it from being a slog:

1) Her summons all go on the same initiative. So if she summons two things, they act at the same time

2) Have her roll all attacks at once. If you're on a VTT, just roll all the dice at once with a single command, and add the attack bonus manually

3) Tell the players the target AC. I get that some DMs like to keep that info hidden, by making it known to all players it makes rolling attacks so much easier.

4) If she and the other players are willing, split up control of multiple summons


Now, I'm gonna be honest, Sheppard Druid is the best minionmancer in the game, bar none. Mostly because their summons get extra attack. Another thing to note is that with a lot of the Conjure X spells, you decide what's summoned. Some DMs will leave this in the hands of the payers to make it faster, but given she's new you should choose. I'd also have statblocks on hand so she can reference them. The Summon X spells from Tasha are, in my personal opinion, garbage, but they can sort of replace summoning spells. If you want to go that route, make the material components widely available, and give the summons hit dice so they actually benefit from the 6th level ability.

Finally, Sheppard Druid is probably one of the strongest Druid subclasses in the game, and it is the strongest Druid Subclass when it comes to providing support. So be prepared for that.

[Eldariel]

First things first, DO NOT NERF CONJURE ANIMALS!

A lot of people here are going to suggest nerfing Conjure Animals to where it only summons half of what it normally gets, or turn them into swarms. Don't do it. Sheppard Druid is a class who is defined by their summoning spells, and Conjure Animals is the premier spell. Heck, their level 14 ability is literally a non-Concentration Conjure Animals at 9th level.

This is wrong. Do nerf Conjure Animals. The spell is just absurdly out of whack. Like summon a bunch of Elks; they hit for 90 damage on level 5. That's just stupid. 45/round is more than enough from a level 3 slot. AOE isn't even enough to make up for this. A level 6 Shepherd Druid has a solid shot at 1v1ing a CR 13 Narzugon, which does have AOE. That's how insane the spell is. No other level 6 character comes even close.

Even if you halve the number of creatures, it's still the best level 3 spell in the game and Shepherd is still among the best subclasses in the game. That's how broken it is by RAW. Obviously do the same to Animate Dead too, and Animate Objects and Conjure Woodland Beings and even Summon Lesser Demons (though that one doesn't matter as much). What all of these have in common is that the smallest options are broken because they have close to the same damage as the higher CR options on an individual basis, but picking the smallest you get multiples of each. So it's a no-brainer to pick the smallest option available and just double or quadruple your damage, while making it very hard for enemies to efficiently decrease the amounts of damage since the damage sources are spread out so far and wide (and Shepherd gives each individual creature extra HP so the more creatures, the more extra HP too).

[Miele]

I agree with Eldariel.

It's okay if you play in superbly optimized party and the DM turns up the difficulty a few notches, which basically means adding more enemies to balance the action economy. Small amount of monsters doesn't work because CA shifts the action economy massively in favour of the players and on top of that some available summons can really do decent damage or achieve other effects (prone, grapple, etc.).

In normal gameplay, nerf it somehow or ask the player to keep it in line with the party needs (the self-nerf I mentioned in a previous reply).

If it were for me, I'd completely redesign the spell, to be fun, useful, powerful even, but not broken as it is now.

[Eldariel]

I agree with Eldariel.

It's okay if you play in superbly optimized party and the DM turns up the difficulty a few notches, which basically means adding more enemies to balance the action economy. Small amount of monsters doesn't work because CA shifts the action economy massively in favour of the players and on top of that some available summons can really do decent damage or achieve other effects (prone, grapple, etc.).

In normal gameplay, nerf it somehow or ask the player to keep it in line with the party needs (the self-nerf I mentioned in a previous reply).

If it were for me, I'd completely redesign the spell, to be fun, useful, powerful even, but not broken as it is now.

Yeah, the spell has plenty of internal issues. CR2 is basically never right, CR1/2 is just almost strictly worse than CR1/4 and CR1 is very rarely correct too. Fact is, in a bounded accuracy system, 2xlow CR >> 1xhigh CR. That's where the fundamental design issue lies. CR 1/4 is a bit weaker than CR 1/2 but two CR 1/4 creatures are effortlessly crushing a CR 1/2 creature and the more you get, the more brutal the difference gets. Furthermore, many CR 1/4 creatures are actually such that if you can choose their position (as you can with the spell), they'll punch way above their weight class. Being able to autoproc Charge is insane for instance. In general, being able to position the creatures actually enables you to sidestep most of their weaknesses and play up their strengths, which makes them stronger than they are on paper. And the fact that you have 8 means that you don't care about their AC or such; enemy simply lacks the actions to kill them (and if they take the actions to kill your summons, you're preventing to the order of over 100 damage to the party while still dealing tons of damage which is pretty ridiculous for a level 3 spell as well).

And yeah, even if you're pushing the envelope, halve all the summons (two per Animate Dead, four per Conjure Animals, etc.) and the same minionmancers are still top picks for a Tier 2 party. For a hyperoptimized party, unless you're just testing how strong you can get by RAW, nerffing all the minionmancy spells and making them more consistent and logical is likely to enhance the experience. For example the clause about DM picking the creature is really, really clumsy (also one of the worst "balancing" mechanisms of all time) as is the creatures rolling their own Initiative; DM having to have stats for all the beasts they might provide for any given environment, and the DM having to run 8 extra creatures is way too much extra work for basically no gain and an extra set of creatures in the initiative order is just an unnecessary extra step.


Fixing the spell so that it's an efficient spell to play:
- Get 4 CR 1/4, 3 CR 1/2, 2 CR 1 or 1 CR 2 - this way all the options are actually reasonable (though CR 2 is still kinda suboptimal; 2xCR 1 is generally just way, way better than 1xCR2 for the same reasons as earlier but the only real solution is to add 1 to each like 5xCR 1/4, 4xCR 1/2, 3xCR 1, 2xCR 2 which would again make the spell problematically strong)
- Creatures act after PC in Initiative
- Player is responsible for having sheets ready for whatever they may want to summon and they get to pick what they get - discuss a list with about 4-5 options with the DM beforehand (optionally enforce the locale restriction too)
- Pick one location and all the creatures appear around that location as opposed to wherever in a 60' area. This is both quicker and less powerful, and retains AOE as a potential answer to the spells.

This is basically what I run.

[Dante]

A level 6 Shepherd Druid has a solid shot at 1v1ing a CR 13 Narzugon, which does have AOE. That's how insane the spell is. No other level 6 character comes even close.

I'm very sympathetic to the view that Conjure Animals should be nerfed down to 1/2/3/4 (and I would still play a Shepherd Druid even if it were!). But I'm interested in this claim about Narzugons. Do you mean the AoE fear from Terrifying Command, or something else that I'm overlooking?

Even so, I don't anticipate a level 6 Shepherd Druid beating ~200 HP worth of AC 20 Narzugon when most of the summons are frightened most of the time. Am I missing something? (Maybe you're thinking of a kiting strategy with Giant Owls? I admit that works, but since Narzugons and Nightmares are normally associated aerial kiting feels a little bit cheap to me, like something that wouldn't happen in-game unless you've already dealt with the Nightmare.)


Even if you halve the number of creatures, it's still the best level 3 spell in the game and Shepherd is still among the best subclasses in the game.

Eh... Animate Dead is better in many ways. Specifically because it doesn't take concentration and therefore stacks with itself, and also because the output has missile weapons and therefore does focus fire better with less danger. It takes a 17th level caster with 9th level Conjure Animals to get 32 wolves (etc.) in play, and then they are somewhat vulnerable to AoEs from creatures like Oni, Flameskulls, Bheur hags, Venom Trolls, Black Puddings, etc., etc. And the Shepherd Druid has to invest in stuff like Resilient (Con) and/or Warcaster to avoid becoming a single point of failure. However, a 10th level Necromancer with two 5th and three 4th level spells can maintain 34 skeleton archers while still having a 5th level slot, a bunch of 1st-3rd level slots, and his concentration left over for e.g. Stinking Cloud, Fireball, and Summon Greater Demon (Chasme), as well as a pile of Invisibility and/or Shield spells to keep himself alive.

Tiny Servant isn't bad either (blindsight combos well with stuff like Fog Cloud, and temp HP from various sources).

I'm not opposed to nerfing Conjure Animals to 1/2/3/4 for the sake of the Shepherd Druid's own fun (to make other spells like Wrath of Nature more attractive), but IMO a more general solution is needed. As mentioned on another thread, you don't even need spells to accumulate 16 mastiffs, just 400 gp. A good solution will disincentivize players from relying on purchased mastiffs, hired mercenaries, Animate Dead, Tiny Servant, Planar Binding, and Conjure Animals, all at the same time.

[Pildion]

One of my players wants to go Circle of the Shephard. She's brand new to D&D so I expect she's going to have a hard enough time keeping track of all her spells as a baseline Druid, but I don't want to disallow a character option without at least giving her a chance at it. We also have 6 players in this party, so combat is already going to be a bit bloated and adding in a bunch of summoned creatures will only make it more of a slog. So, I'd like some advice on how best to handle this situation.

I've done a bit of research already. I've google searched guides, most of which are player optimization guides which doesn't really help a ton. I've watched YouTube videos, the most useful of which was "How to use conjure animals fast! - D&D 5E Basic guide to Conjure animals" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FKcQOlUimIY) by Pack Tactics which I sent along to the player. I'm wondering if there's some homebrew out there that modifies Conjure Animals to only ever summon a single beast with different circumstantial specialties that scales on spell slot level or something along those lines?

Any advice will do, but please don't harp on the "tell her no" option. I know it's there and if/when this choice becomes a problem I'll have that conversation with her then. The goal here is to make the subclass work.

I normally turn them into swarms for ease of play. But also allow my players to chose what they summon, as its a nerf to the spell already to "swarm" them.

[Eldariel]

I'm very sympathetic to the view that Conjure Animals should be nerfed down to 1/2/3/4 (and I would still play a Shepherd Druid even if it were!). But I'm interested in this claim about Narzugons. Do you mean the AoE fear from Terrifying Command, or something else that I'm overlooking?

Even so, I don't anticipate a level 6 Shepherd Druid beating ~200 HP worth of AC 20 Narzugon when most of the summons are frightened most of the time. Am I missing something? (Maybe you're thinking of a kiting strategy with Giant Owls? I admit that works, but since Narzugons and Nightmares are normally associated aerial kiting feels a little bit cheap to me, like something that wouldn't happen in-game unless you've already dealt with the Nightmare.)

The claim was contingent on being able to take down the Nightmare before it gets to act, which depended on surprise. This specifically came up in soloing DiA. The fight seemed to be about 50-50; not one you want to take but definitely winnable. Basically, if you can slaughter the Nightmare on R1 (to which your chances with e.g. Velociraptors, Elks, Cows or such are decent) you can tie down the Narzugon and just about punch through its 200 HP over the fight (it's very close; last I did the math using Constrictor Snakes to reduce the power of Terrifying Command, the Druid basically had to use all level 3 spells and level 2 spells on Spike Growth). This was the post on the matter (https://forums.giantitp.com/showsinglepost.php?p=25006033&postcount=37) - it's far from fully optimized but it seems reasonableish.


Eh... Animate Dead is better in many ways. Specifically because it doesn't take concentration and therefore stacks with itself, and also because the output has missile weapons and therefore does focus fire better with less danger. It takes a 17th level caster with 9th level Conjure Animals to get 32 wolves (etc.) in play, and then they are somewhat vulnerable to AoEs from creatures like Oni, Flameskulls, Bheur hags, Venom Trolls, Black Puddings, etc., etc. And the Shepherd Druid has to invest in stuff like Resilient (Con) and/or Warcaster to avoid becoming a single point of failure. However, a 10th level Necromancer with two 5th and three 4th level spells can maintain 34 skeleton archers while still having a 5th level slot, a bunch of 1st-3rd level slots, and his concentration left over for e.g. Stinking Cloud, Fireball, and Summon Greater Demon (Chasme), as well as a pile of Invisibility and/or Shield spells to keep himself alive.

Tiny Servant isn't bad either (blindsight combos well with stuff like Fog Cloud, and temp HP from various sources).

I'm not opposed to nerfing Conjure Animals to 1/2/3/4 for the sake of the Shepherd Druid's own fun (to make other spells like Wrath of Nature more attractive), but IMO a more general solution is needed. As mentioned on another thread, you don't even need spells to accumulate 16 mastiffs, just 400 gp. A good solution will disincentivize players from relying on purchased mastiffs, hired mercenaries, Animate Dead, Tiny Servant, Planar Binding, and Conjure Animals, all at the same time.

Okay, sure, Animate Dead is a similarly ridiculous spell; both have their ups and downs and AD is indeed probably stronger. Though it takes more effort to maintain, needing separate castings and bodies to replace lost skeletons while CA is kinda self-contained. I just lump them in the same boat - classes generally get one or the other and both are ridiculous on this level, so I rarely bother with a direct comparison.

[Dante]

The claim was contingent on being able to take down the Nightmare before it gets to act, which depended on surprise. This specifically came up in soloing DiA. The fight seemed to be about 50-50; not one you want to take but definitely winnable. Basically, if you can slaughter the Nightmare on R1 (to which your chances with e.g. Velociraptors, Elks, Cows or such are decent) you can tie down the Narzugon and just about punch through its 200 HP over the fight (it's very close; last I did the math using Constrictor Snakes to reduce the power of Terrifying Command, the Druid basically had to use all level 3 spells and level 2 spells on Spike Growth). This was the post on the matter (https://forums.giantitp.com/showsinglepost.php?p=25006033&postcount=37) - it's far from fully optimized but it seems reasonableish.

Ah, interesting! I get the impression from reading that post that you're assuming wolves so that the effect of frightened is to cancel out advantage instead of imposing disadvantage per se. To that I would say that the more impactful part of Frightened is making it impossible to voluntarily move towards the source of fear: effectively you wind up only fighting a few wolves at a time, slowly enough that the Narzugon can quickly kill them, and that cuts down on Pack Tactics so the wolves' opportunity attacks might actually have disadvantage.

I do agree that killing the Nightmare can indeed trivialize the Narzugon itself. E.g. a 6th level Eldritch Knight Sharpshooter who Action Surges the Nightmare to death can then basically just kite the Narzugon until it's dead. A Shepherd Druid with Longstrider and e.g. Frostbite (or a crossbow) could do the same thing over time, but that has little to do with him being a Shepherd Druid specifically and more to do with 5E's movement issues.

[sithlordnergal]

This is wrong. Do nerf Conjure Animals. The spell is just absurdly out of whack. Like summon a bunch of Elks; they hit for 90 damage on level 5. That's just stupid. 45/round is more than enough from a level 3 slot. AOE isn't even enough to make up for this. A level 6 Shepherd Druid has a solid shot at 1v1ing a CR 13 Narzugon, which does have AOE. That's how insane the spell is. No other level 6 character comes even close.

Even if you halve the number of creatures, it's still the best level 3 spell in the game and Shepherd is still among the best subclasses in the game. That's how broken it is by RAW. Obviously do the same to Animate Dead too, and Animate Objects and Conjure Woodland Beings and even Summon Lesser Demons (though that one doesn't matter as much). What all of these have in common is that the smallest options are broken because they have close to the same damage as the higher CR options on an individual basis, but picking the smallest you get multiples of each. So it's a no-brainer to pick the smallest option available and just double or quadruple your damage, while making it very hard for enemies to efficiently decrease the amounts of damage since the damage sources are spread out so far and wide (and Shepherd gives each individual creature extra HP so the more creatures, the more extra HP too).

I've played with a few Shepard Druids as a DM, I also played with a Wildfire Druid that liked to use Conjure Animals in conjunction with their Spirit. While I do fully agree that Conjure Animals is one of the strongest spell in the game, I don't feel its so broken that you need to nerf it. Its strong, but its not on the same level of Simulacrum, which is the only spell I've found that deserves a nerf. And even then, the only nerf it needs is a line to prevent Simulacrum chaining. You can bring it into line pretty easily with some decent DMing techniques:

1) Always remember that you choose what's summoned. If a player is constantly getting 8 Velociraptors or 8 Elk, that's on you, the DM. Give them a variety of creatures that forces the player to shake things up. You can't use 8 Giant Owls, Constrictor Snakes, or Giant Wolf Spiders the same way you'd use 8 Elk, Velociraptors, or Wolves. You should occasionally give the player those OP beasts, but you don't always need to give them to the player

2) Always have mooks. When you facing any sort of boss, there should always be mooks. Personally, this is just good encounter design even when you're not working with Conjure Animals. The only time I've ever seen single enemies do well in combat was when that one enemy was so powerful that they could basically down a player with 2 hits every round. You always want mooks, and make those mooks powerful.

3) Environment can be such a powerful thing. Now, sometimes being in an open field is fine, but you should usually make maps with hidden nooks and crannies. If there's no room for 8 to 16 beasts, then there's just no room for them.

4) AoE's, again your biggest bads should always have access to some sort of AoE. And again, this is in general, not just for Conjure Animals.

5) Break concentration. Your NPCs are stupid, they know what the Druid cast. Unless the Druid has done something cheeky to make it nearly impossible to reach, then they are going to be in range. Focus on them, break their Concentration, Animals are now gone


Keeping those rules in mind when you're DMing will naturally bring spells like Conjure Animals into line on its own. Even with their beefed up HP, its fairly easy to deal with in my experience. And don't be afraid to make some crazy dangerous environments too. To snag an example from an encounter I made recently:

The players were trying to reach the end of a well defended gate house controlled by undead. They had to kill a somewhat weaker Skull Lord. Basically I lowered his Legendary Actions, Legendary Resistance, Evasion, and removed a few spells to bring its CR down since the party was only level 9 or so. The skull Lord was at the end of a single 10ft wide hallway. I blocked the hallway with an Ogre Zombie wearing Plate Armor and wielding a Shield, and the only thing the Orge Zombie did was take the Dodge Action. So already we have a Large creature providing the Skull Lord with Half Cover, increasing the Skull Lord's AC to 20 against Ranged attacks. Due to its armor, the Ogre Zombie had 20 AC, attacks against it had Disadvantage, and since the Zombie never made any attacks it didn't have to worry about the disadvantage from not being proficient with that gear.

Next, there were a series of small holes along the inner wall of the hallway, just large enough to see through and allow auras to pass through. I put three Bodaks behind that wall. Due to the wall's construction, the three Bodaks could use their Aura of Annihilation to deal a passive 15 Necrotic damage to living creatures that ended their turn in the aura, and their Withering Gaze. There were also two rooms the party could use to shut a door and gain full cover against the Bodaks to avoid their auras.

This setup forced the players to fight creatively. Instead of just charging in and fighting, they began blocking the peep holes to block the Bodak's lines of sight and negate their aura, while another player shoved the Ogre Zombie out of the way. Even if the Sheppard Druid had utilized Conjure Animals, those animals wouldn't have lasted long because the Skull Lord passively heals all undead within 30ft of it, while the Bodaks passively murder things with no save to avoid it.

[strangebloke]

Tell her to bring lots of snacks so the other players have something to do as she stalls the game with decision paralysis.

I'm not joking. It will be that bad. You don't want to hear it but it's true. Rolling dice optimally is one thing. Making movement and attack decisions is another entirely. There's no way around it. Nine turns takes longer than one and new players can only accelerate things to a degree.

Best solution has already been mentioned. 1/2/3/4 is still super good, just not "make the rest of the party irrelevant" good, and five turns is less than nine.

Honestly though?

Control the beasts yourself. Its RAW how the spell works and as a DM you can optimize the speed of play easily. Druid gives a survive to the beasts, this carry it out. Ez pz

[KorvinStarmast]

I agree with Eldariel. Do not nerf Conjure Animals. Do Not. That is my position. My solution is:
Sit down with the player and work out two or three packages of summons outside of play time. That's what she gets, she calls on package 1, 2, 3, whathaveyou.
Vary it if need by with 'water encounter' 'forest encounter' 'mountain encounter' and so on.

Our shepherd druid had the two dire wolves or two bears package, the 1 giant constrictor snake package, and the two giant eagles package handy and he ran the critters. The two giant octopi for underwater were another package.

But if you let her summon 8 wolves, then...

Tell her to bring lots of snacks so the other players have something to do as she stalls the game ... due to dice rolling tedium.

An example I used a couple of years ago:
In a swamp, with 4 crocodiles (CR 1/2) summoned at level 6, you assign one croc to each PC (for four of your pcs) to run on their turn. That lets everyone play. :smallwink:

If she summons 16 wolves when she is level 9, make sure to have an AoE spell caster as an opponent. Problem solved.

When she gets summon woodland beings, You can make the first summons be 8 pixies and embrace the madness.
If it goes all and all PCs have fun, great.
If it doesn't go well, inform the druid that the arch fey is furious with her, and the pixies will not answer the call for seven more years. Then work out some fey packages as above with beasts ...

Pre fab packages solves about 80% of the problem.

[meandean]

Hopefully you don't take this as a non-answer to your question, but are you sure that the player is dead set on the Shepherd Druid? i.e., does she just want to be animal-themed; does she want an animal companion; or does she specifically want to be a powerful summoner of animals? If she's brand new to the game, she might not be aware of the Drakewarden or Beast Master Ranger (or may have heard that the latter is crappy, which it no longer is). She also may not appreciate that all Druids can use spells to communicate with animals, befriend them, and eventually Awaken them (and of course, all Druids can be summoners.)

If she does definitely want Shepherd, then you're entirely within your rights to use the "Summon" line of spells rather than the "Conjure" line. I feel like this is a better option than re-writing the Conjure spells. For a new player, it's nice to know that the spell does what the book says. (Not letting the player pick the animals helps address the power-level issue, but doesn't address the issue of how much table time it takes -- probably makes it worse, in fact.)

[KorvinStarmast]

If she does definitely want Shepherd, then you're entirely within your rights to use the "Summon" line of spells rather than the "Conjure" line. I feel like this is a better option than re-writing the Conjure spells. For a new player, it's nice to know that the spell does what the book says. (Not letting the player pick the animals helps address the power-level issue, but doesn't address the issue of how much table time it takes -- probably makes it worse, in fact.) Training wheels for a new player. Not a bad idea. :smallsmile:

[Dante]

Hopefully you don't take this as a non-answer to your question, but are you sure that the player is dead set on the Shepherd Druid? i.e., does she just want to be animal-themed; does she want an animal companion; or does she specifically want to be a powerful summoner of animals?

It's even possible that she wants to be a protector and cuddler of animals, which is what the Shepherd Druid claims to be about, even though it's actually about using animals as expendable heat-seeking munitions to destroy monsters.

[Eldariel]

Do not nerf Conjure Animals. Do Not.

Why do people insist on playing by clear design mistakes? Why is the RAW so holy that you can't fix the most obvious oversights? Why not make all the options relevant? Why not make the spell less glaringly overpowered? It seems to me like there's absolutely nothing to lose and a whole lot to gain by giving the spell an obvious once-over. It's not perfect but it's way better than written.

[Chaos Jackal]

This setup forced the players to fight creatively. Instead of just charging in and fighting, they began blocking the peep holes to block the Bodak's lines of sight and negate their aura, while another player shoved the Ogre Zombie out of the way. Even if the Sheppard Druid had utilized Conjure Animals, those animals wouldn't have lasted long because the Skull Lord passively heals all undead within 30ft of it, while the Bodaks passively murder things with no save to avoid it.

I'm not sure how your setup would have prevented a Shepherd druid from casting a 60ft-range spell behind your zombie, flooding the area with a bunch of souped-up animals, then throwing down a 60-ft range totem with a 30ft-radius of effect granting everything 10-15 hit points, before having the animals zerg rush the skull lord. And whatever lacked the space to rush the boss could've just shoved/tripped the zombie for people to jump over or something. Shoving with advantage too.

[5eNeedsDarksun]

I'm very sympathetic to the view that Conjure Animals should be nerfed down to 1/2/3/4 (and I would still play a Shepherd Druid even if it were!). But I'm interested in this claim about Narzugons. Do you mean the AoE fear from Terrifying Command, or something else that I'm overlooking?

Even so, I don't anticipate a level 6 Shepherd Druid beating ~200 HP worth of AC 20 Narzugon when most of the summons are frightened most of the time. Am I missing something? (Maybe you're thinking of a kiting strategy with Giant Owls? I admit that works, but since Narzugons and Nightmares are normally associated aerial kiting feels a little bit cheap to me, like something that wouldn't happen in-game unless you've already dealt with the Nightmare.)



Eh... Animate Dead is better in many ways. Specifically because it doesn't take concentration and therefore stacks with itself, and also because the output has missile weapons and therefore does focus fire better with less danger. It takes a 17th level caster with 9th level Conjure Animals to get 32 wolves (etc.) in play, and then they are somewhat vulnerable to AoEs from creatures like Oni, Flameskulls, Bheur hags, Venom Trolls, Black Puddings, etc., etc. And the Shepherd Druid has to invest in stuff like Resilient (Con) and/or Warcaster to avoid becoming a single point of failure. However, a 10th level Necromancer with two 5th and three 4th level spells can maintain 34 skeleton archers while still having a 5th level slot, a bunch of 1st-3rd level slots, and his concentration left over for e.g. Stinking Cloud, Fireball, and Summon Greater Demon (Chasme), as well as a pile of Invisibility and/or Shield spells to keep himself alive.

Tiny Servant isn't bad either (blindsight combos well with stuff like Fog Cloud, and temp HP from various sources).

I'm not opposed to nerfing Conjure Animals to 1/2/3/4 for the sake of the Shepherd Druid's own fun (to make other spells like Wrath of Nature more attractive), but IMO a more general solution is needed. As mentioned on another thread, you don't even need spells to accumulate 16 mastiffs, just 400 gp. A good solution will disincentivize players from relying on purchased mastiffs, hired mercenaries, Animate Dead, Tiny Servant, Planar Binding, and Conjure Animals, all at the same time.

Yes, Animate Dead has advantages, but when they die you can't simply start again with your full allotment. You need to find enough relatively complete corpses (possibly expired ones are no longer functional). Then you need to cast multiple spells over a mater of days to get back up to your full allotment, and all the while dragging around or coming across the flesh to do it with.

Having had a Shepherd and Death Cleric who used Animate Dead a lot in the same campaign (DiA) the comparison isn't even close. Though the Temp HP from the Shepherd did make the undead quite a bit tougher. I don't see in any campaign that's remotely challenging how a player leaning on AD could expect to have all those undead much of the time.

[KorvinStarmast]

Why do people insist on playing by clear design mistakes? Why is the RAW so holy that you can't fix the most obvious oversights? You are coming to the wrong place if you feel that I find RAW holy. The Play's The Thing. Conjure animals as written is fun (or can be).

I do not feel that your "one must think like a game designer with my wizard biases (which you have previously confessed to having)" line there is valid for the vast majority of tables.

And sometimes, a pack of wolves is just what you need to summon and a good DM can mitigate the mechanical annoyance in a variety of ways. :smallyuk: (There was a good suggestion on average damage, etc).

And last but not least, conjure animals is a Ranger spell that comes on line at level 9. Please leave the instinct to nerf it, and the never ending GiTP anti Ranger position, at the door. :smalltongue:

[strangebloke]

Conjure animals is overpowered if all the animals disappear after a single turn. Consider the elk. 3d6 + 3 with +5 to hit, eight times. That already makes something like scorching ready look like a bad, bad joke. And again, that's just round one. That's of they disappear into the aether at the end of the turn.

They don't. Instead, they last an hour. An hour.

The enemy can kill them, sure, but the combined HP of the summons will often be something like eighty or ninety, and the shepherd can add like 120 thp on top of that. Chewing through these things with melee attacks is going to be an encounter all to itself. It's likely that team PC will have more HP and bodies on the field than the enemy, and that's before considering class features. Any encounter that can handle this without aoe/thorns abilities will absolutely crush a party not using CA.

And yes. An enemy with fire ball *might* be able to clear out all the animals. If the animals are in a nice blob. And none make their saves. And he rolls well enough on damage.

But as mentioned, by the time you're fire balling these animals, CA has already gotten good value. So it's not a hard counter, it's more like "congrats, you had something that could deal with the OP thing, now you can have a real encounter."

Absurd spell, absolutely game breaking, and the fact that it's just also super time consuming and annoying is icing.

[KorvinStarmast]

They don't. Instead, they last an hour. An hour. If I conjure two giant eagles, CR 1, I'd like to fly on them for an hour. Ya mind?

The enemy can kill them, sure, but the combined HP of the summons will often be something like eighty or ninety, and the shepherd can add like 120 thp on top of that.
The problem (if there is one) is the shepherd druid, not conjure animals.

Your 5 minute, one-encounter-adventure-day complaint is noted, and not accepted.

[strangebloke]

If I conjure two giant eagles, CR 1, I'd like to fly on them for an hour. Ya mind?

The problem (if there is one) is the shepherd druid, not conjure animals.

It's overtuned to a ridiculous degree and we know this because of math. Shepherd's isn't game breaking without this spell.

If you want to ride giant eagles, the proposed nerf by x3non will still allow you to do so.

And I'm not specifying a 5 minute day. The spell lasts an hour, and your can cast it multiple times. Under normal conditions you can get a lot of encounters in within a single hour, and trivializing even one encounter is a really good use of a third level spell

[Eldariel]

You are coming to the wrong place if you feel that I find RAW holy. The Play's The Thing. Conjure animals as written is fun (or can be).

And Conjure Animals as fixed can be even more fun, while also not making a single character more powerful than the rest of the (non-minionmancing) party combined. That way you actually have an excuse to occasionally look into CR 1/2, 1 or 2 creatures without wasting a lot of potential. And 4xCR 1/4 is still really cool; basically anything but absolutely annihilating a creature that could be done with 8 can be done with 4. So...I don't see this being an issue at all.

EDIT: As for Ranger, it should be buffed by something other than a spell Druid gets 4 levels earlier (and can upcast for double effect by level 9) if that's what you're using it for. If that's how we envision Ranger, just give it "summon spells summon twice the number of animals as normal" ability on level 9 or something.

[sithlordnergal]

I'm not sure how your setup would prevent a Shepherd druid from casting a 60ft range spell behind your zombie, flooding the area with a bunch of souped-up animals, then throwing down a 60-ft range totem with a 30ft radius of effect granting everything 10-15 hit points, before having the animals zerg rush the skull lord. And whatever lacked the space to rush the boss could've just shoved/tripped the zombie and let people jump over it or something. Shoving with advantage too.

Pretty easy actually:

First, due to the limited space, they couldn't summon any Large creatures, that immediately cuts out most high HP creatures.

Next, they were in the desert. Given I like to choose summoned animals based on location and how useful they are in the encounter, unless the Druid has a gimmick*. Since the party was fighting Undead, that means nothing that relies on Poison to deal damage. Given their location, I'd have given them Giant Badgers or Giant Diseased Rats. I know Giant Badgers aren't really a desert creature, but at the same time its that or Giant Rats, I'm willing to throw the players a bone.

Now, it wouldn't have mattered this time, cause the Druid had already used their Spirit Totem, but lets say they do use it. Due to the improved summons, the Giant Badgers have 17 HP and 14 Temp HP due to level 9 Sheppard Druid, for a total of 31. Each Badger is Medium, has two attacks with +3 to hit, and their attacks are magical. Meanwhile the base AC of a Skull Lord is 18. Chances are not all of the Giant Badgers are gonna hit, and given they can't escape the Bodaks, they immediately take 15 Necrotic damage from Aura of Annihilation because its a 30ft Aura, and the Skull Lord's room was within it. Fun fact, Aura of Annihilation doesn't effect undead or fiends, so it doesn't actually harm the Skull Lord, and there's no save.

Because the players were taking cover, no-one can Counterspell the Skull Lord. Skull Lord proceeds to cast Cloudkill, it and its allies are immune to the Poison damage, the badgers and players are not, and Cloudkill deals an average damage of 22. Skull Lord's DC is 18, Giant Badgers have a +2 to Con saves, once again, there's a good chance most of those Badgers fail their Con save and they die. Even if they all make it, they still take half damage and will have less then 15 HP remaining, and they all die to the Bodak Aura.

Conjure Animals lasted 2 rounds at best, provided they go before the Skull Lord, and due to the Skull Lord's high AC they weren't really able to zerg rush. Only way they could is if the Druid starts casting Conjure Animals over and over again, but they also knew that this wasn't the final encounter for the night.


*Now, if the Druid does have a special summoning gimmick, I follow the gimmick. For example, I had one player decide to basically make Yugi. They made a deck of cards and drew from it to decide what they summoned when they cast Conjure Animals. It was pretty fun and funny

[stoutstien]

One of my players wants to go Circle of the Shephard. She's brand new to D&D so I expect she's going to have a hard enough time keeping track of all her spells as a baseline Druid, but I don't want to disallow a character option without at least giving her a chance at it. We also have 6 players in this party, so combat is already going to be a bit bloated and adding in a bunch of summoned creatures will only make it more of a slog. So, I'd like some advice on how best to handle this situation.

I've done a bit of research already. I've google searched guides, most of which are player optimization guides which doesn't really help a ton. I've watched YouTube videos, the most useful of which was "How to use conjure animals fast! - D&D 5E Basic guide to Conjure animals" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FKcQOlUimIY) by Pack Tactics which I sent along to the player. I'm wondering if there's some homebrew out there that modifies Conjure Animals to only ever summon a single beast with different circumstantial specialties that scales on spell slot level or something along those lines?

Any advice will do, but please don't harp on the "tell her no" option. I know it's there and if/when this choice becomes a problem I'll have that conversation with her then. The goal here is to make the subclass work.

I was in a similar position with a new player who picked shepherd as a subclass and in the in they didn't even prepare conjure X more than 3-5 times in 30 sessions. When they did they used it almost exclusively in social or exploration heavy settings.
I wouldn't worry about it until it actually has the potential to be an issue.

They summoned a fluffle of bunnies to entertain some lost half ogres, they uses a pack of hounds to track an invisible foe, they fly around on giant butterflies...

[Hael]

As others have pointed out, there is a minionmancy problem in 5e to begin with. Conjure animals + Shepherd druids are just simple manifestations of the problem. I would say maybe 75% of the really broken stuff you can do RAW in this game is some sort of minionmancy trick.

But its much more pervasive than that.. I mean its not hard to start start creating serious issues with tiny servants + weapons/magic stones/catapults or anything else you can create or fabricate. The action economy itself is what is fundamentally causing the issue.

The simple fix (which runs counter to the design goals of bounded accuracy) is to put hard damage cutoffs on everything. We have this already with immunity to non magic B/P/S damage. But that's kinda lame, b/c the npcs can readily get that, but its harder for pcs to attain and that kinda breaks the symmetry between the two. Its also not too hard to evade the constraints (by eg adding elemental damage for instance).

I think a better solution ultimately in 5.5 is to analyze the aforementioned core of the problem. Summons should simply take some amount of action or bonus action control to use (maybe you can control more than one at a time on a case by case basis). However geometrically expanding actions with things like standing orders is simply too powerful.

[5eNeedsDarksun]

As others have pointed out, there is a minionmancy problem in 5e to begin with. Conjure animals + Shepherd druids are just simple manifestations of the problem. I would say maybe 75% of the really broken stuff you can do RAW in this game is some sort of minionmancy trick.

But its much more pervasive than that.. I mean its not hard to start start creating serious issues with tiny servants + weapons/magic stones/catapults or anything else you can create or fabricate. The action economy itself is what is fundamentally causing the issue.

The simple fix (which runs counter to the design goals of bounded accuracy) is to put hard damage cutoffs on everything. We have this already with immunity to non magic B/P/S damage. But that's kinda lame, b/c the npcs can readily get that, but its harder for pcs to attain and that kinda breaks the symmetry between the two. Its also not too hard to evade the constraints (by eg adding elemental damage for instance).

I think a better solution ultimately in 5.5 is to analyze the aforementioned core of the problem. Summons should simply take some amount of action or bonus action control to use (maybe you can control more than one at a time on a case by case basis). However geometrically expanding actions with things like standing orders is simply too powerful.

The interaction between the 2 is for sure an issue. I hadn't had anyone lean into the summon spells before, but the extra hp + making the attacks magical were a huge boon. Magic attacks in the mod I was DMing (DiA with lots of resistant foes) effectively doubles the damage and the extra hp is roughly doing the same thing on the defense side for weaker summoned creatures depending on the Druid's level. On an already strong spell that seems rather OP.

[Eldariel]

Pretty easy actually:

First, due to the limited space, they couldn't summon any Large creatures, that immediately cuts out most high HP creatures.

Next, they were in the desert. Given I like to choose summoned animals based on location and how useful they are in the encounter, unless the Druid has a gimmick*. Since the party was fighting Undead, that means nothing that relies on Poison to deal damage. Given their location, I'd have given them Giant Badgers or Giant Diseased Rats. I know Giant Badgers aren't really a desert creature, but at the same time its that or Giant Rats, I'm willing to throw the players a bone.

Now, it wouldn't have mattered this time, cause the Druid had already used their Spirit Totem, but lets say they do use it. Due to the improved summons, the Giant Badgers have 17 HP and 14 Temp HP due to level 9 Sheppard Druid, for a total of 31. Each Badger is Medium, has two attacks with +3 to hit, and their attacks are magical. Meanwhile the base AC of a Skull Lord is 18. Chances are not all of the Giant Badgers are gonna hit, and given they can't escape the Bodaks, they immediately take 15 Necrotic damage from Aura of Annihilation because its a 30ft Aura, and the Skull Lord's room was within it. Fun fact, Aura of Annihilation doesn't effect undead or fiends, so it doesn't actually harm the Skull Lord, and there's no save.

Because the players were taking cover, no-one can Counterspell the Skull Lord. Skull Lord proceeds to cast Cloudkill, it and its allies are immune to the Poison damage, the badgers and players are not, and Cloudkill deals an average damage of 22. Skull Lord's DC is 18, Giant Badgers have a +2 to Con saves, once again, there's a good chance most of those Badgers fail their Con save and they die. Even if they all make it, they still take half damage and will have less then 15 HP remaining, and they all die to the Bodak Aura.

Conjure Animals lasted 2 rounds at best, provided they go before the Skull Lord, and due to the Skull Lord's high AC they weren't really able to zerg rush. Only way they could is if the Druid starts casting Conjure Animals over and over again, but they also knew that this wasn't the final encounter for the night.


*Now, if the Druid does have a special summoning gimmick, I follow the gimmick. For example, I had one player decide to basically make Yugi. They made a deck of cards and drew from it to decide what they summoned when they cast Conjure Animals. It was pretty fun and funny

In other words "design every encounter you don't want trounced to nerf the spell and make sure the party adventures in a location where you have an excuse to only give weaker creatures"? Because that seems like a far worse solution than just making the spell so that even if you give some of the decent or strong options, it's not breaking anything. Then you can focus on actually designing your adventure as it makes sense (maybe even giving PCs autonomy on locations and such) as opposed to building all the important parts around a single spell on a single PC.

[Chaos Jackal]

Pretty easy actually:

First, due to the limited space, they couldn't summon any Large creatures, that immediately cuts out most high HP creatures.
Not true. A 10ft-wide hallway can very much accommodate a large creature. HP isn't related to size anyway, especially in those very low CRs, but still. There exists space alright. Could've used a higher-CR, lower-number option for range issues. But smaller creatures would've probably been better anyway due to the still-existent size constraints; maybe not that many would've fit inside the boss room. So I won't push this.


Next, they were in the desert. Given I like to choose summoned animals based on location and how useful they are in the encounter, unless the Druid has a gimmick*. Since the party was fighting Undead, that means nothing that relies on Poison to deal damage. Given their location, I'd have given them Giant Badgers or Giant Diseased Rats. I know Giant Badgers aren't really a desert creature, but at the same time its that or Giant Rats, I'm willing to throw the players a bone.
Yeah, OK, so the suggested spell nerf. No wolves or elks, got it.


Now, it wouldn't have mattered this time, cause the Druid had already used their Spirit Totem, but lets say they do use it. Due to the improved summons, the Giant Badgers have 17 HP and 14 Temp HP due to level 9 Sheppard Druid, for a total of 31. Each Badger is Medium, has two attacks with +3 to hit, and their attacks are magical. Meanwhile the base AC of a Skull Lord is 18. Chances are not all of the Giant Badgers are gonna hit, and given they can't escape the Bodaks, they immediately take 15 Necrotic damage from Aura of Annihilation because its a 30ft Aura, and the Skull Lord's room was within it. Fun fact, Aura of Annihilation doesn't effect undead or fiends, so it doesn't actually harm the Skull Lord, and there's no save.
35hp. Mighty Summons. Could be important for the cloudkill next paragraph, in case a badger goes after the skull lord. But not very big for this scenario.
So, at a +3 to hit, that's 12.2 DPR from the 8 bite attacks and 16.4 from the claws. Not amazing, but not horrible.
Now, if the badgers had advantage (from some other spell or effect) that would be 21.1 bite DPR and 28.4 for the claws. Significantly better. That's nearly 50 DPR, or almost half of the skull lord's hit points.
But maybe you don't think it could've been easy for something else to have granted them advantage. Good thing they can try getting it themselves then. They can shove the skull lord and will be doing so with advantage thanks to the totem. If the first one succeeds, the 7 others will have 43 DPR. If the second one succeeds, the remaining 6 will have 37 DPR. If the third one succeeds, the remaining five will have 31 DPR.


Because the players were taking cover, no-one can Counterspell the Skull Lord. Skull Lord proceeds to cast Cloudkill, it and its allies are immune to the Poison damage, the badgers and players are not, and Cloudkill deals an average damage of 22. Skull Lord's DC is 18, Giant Badgers have a +2 to Con saves, once again, there's a good chance most of those Badgers fail their Con save and they die. Even if they all make it, they still take half damage and will have less then 15 HP remaining, and they all die to the Bodak Aura.
I get that the Withering Gaze isn't nice, but giving a spellcaster free reign to cast because of it doesn't seem particularly smart. Without the skull lord casting, the badgers can survive two turns of bodak auras. But let's go with this one. All or most of the badgers die to the gaze and cloudkill following their attacks.

Let's reiterate. In the one round they get, the badgers can deal 50 damage if they already have advantage from something else (like faerie fire or something). Even if they don't already have advantage, they can still get advantage for themselves through shoving and it's not unreasonable to expect 30+ damage from that.

How good is 30+ damage? Well, a fireball clocks at 28 average before the save. A scorching ray, upcast to 3rd-level, with +8 to hit against AC18, is 16.8 without advantage and a bit more than 25 with.

So, you've made the place small. You're not using the best animals. You pack a lot of area damage. Basically, you've set up everything against conjure animals. And it's still pretty damn likely to outdamage a scorching ray, a spell specifically intended for dealing single-target damage, at the same level.

You stack the odds against conjure animals and it still pulls ahead. Just imagine if the odds were a bit more even. Bigger area. Better summons. The utility offered by so many bodies. More rounds of attacks. Upcasting the spell to summon even more bodies for even more attacks. Combos with things like crusader's mantle.

The spell is just busted.

[x3n0n]

In other words "design every encounter you don't want trounced to nerf the spell and make sure the party adventures in a location where you have an excuse to only give weaker creatures"? Because that seems like a far worse solution than just making the spell so that even if you give some of the decent or strong options, it's not breaking anything. Then you can focus on actually designing your adventure as it makes sense (maybe even giving PCs autonomy on locations and such) as opposed to building all the important parts around a single spell on a single PC.

This. As both a DM and a player, I hope that pre-printed material that is "appropriately scaled" for a "typical" (say, fighter/rogue/cleric/arcanist) party of a given level will be appropriately scaled for almost any party of that level.

If a given character or party is unexpectedly weak, it's straightforward to provide situational buffs (the typical hack being "give the weak character a useful magic item").

If a given party is uniformly stronger than expected for its level, the party can typically be challenged by letting them choose to deal with harder challenges first, or by the DM making trivial scaling changes to the existing encounters (adding a small number of additional enemies or buffing the damage or HP of the existing enemies, preferably before the encounter actually happens).

If a single character within some party has a tactic that frequently "solves" the "level-appropriate" encounters without assistance from the other characters, that is harder to solve. Bonus demerits if that tactic consumes significant table time. In my experience as both player and DM, conjure animals (especially at party levels 5-8ish) is the worst offender, especially with Shepherd in play. (The other multi-minion-mancy spells are also problematic, but they have not been nearly as oppressive in my experience until a few levels later due to numerical limitations and weakness to AoE damage: things like animate dead, tiny servant, and animate objects.) Wholesale redesign of multiple encounters per day as a puzzle exercise for the DM holds little appeal for me, especially in purchased material.

Shepherd feels particularly pernicious. "Summon lots of friends to help and make them stronger" is a healthy thing for new players to want--and it's exceedingly unpleasant to play with at the table when run RAW by an inexperienced player, in my experience.

Reducing the scaling of conjure animals (and the other conjure 1/2/4/8 spells) to 1/2/3/4 is the simplest thing I've found that mitigates all of the problems at once: choosing the largest number of the smallest creatures is no longer always the slam-dunk most-effective choice; even if chosen, 4x summons are faster to run than 8x and plenty effective; the non-minionmancers (especially the martials!) don't have their contribution dwarfed by that of the summoned creatures.

(One of our departed contributors (who uses XP instead of milestone scaling) discovered a different technique to discourage using minions when they were unnecessary: each participant in an encounter earns XP proportional to its level/CR, including summons and hirelings. That feels worse to me than tweaking the spell.)

[sithlordnergal]

In other words "design every encounter you don't want trounced to nerf the spell and make sure the party adventures in a location where you have an excuse to only give weaker creatures"? Because that seems like a far worse solution than just making the spell so that even if you give some of the decent or strong options, it's not breaking anything. Then you can focus on actually designing your adventure as it makes sense (maybe even giving PCs autonomy on locations and such) as opposed to building all the important parts around a single spell on a single PC.

I should have mentioned that the encounter in question wasn't actually designed to counter Conjure Animals. My actual goal was to make a combat encounter where just trying to brute force your way through it with high damage would be a poor strategy. I also built it to test out the effectiveness of Bodaks when they're positioned in places the players can't reach as a preview of what the players are going to deal with when they finally fight a Dragon Vampire. It being a good counter to Conjure Animals happened to be a side effect. I've yet to actually build an encounter with the sole purpose of countering Conjure Animals. If I did, it'd involve an Anti-Magic zone of some kind.

I've found that if you're making interesting encounters with interesting terrain, it tends to become a good counter to bringing in a bunch of summons on its own. Conjure Animals works best when you're in an open field, with a lot of space. Those encounters are, in my personal opinion, boring. Now, you can't make everything complicated like that encounter, but its really not that hard to limit the size of a battle map while tossing in some environmental hazards. A lot of places do it naturally. The tight tunnels of a cave that you're exploring makes for a poor place to Conjure up 8 beasts, as are the corridors of a temple.

[Dante]

(One of our departed contributors (who uses XP instead of milestone scaling) discovered a different technique to discourage using minions when they were unnecessary: each participant in an encounter earns XP proportional to its level/CR, including summons and hirelings. That feels worse to me than tweaking the spell.)

Hmmm. You could even do both tweaks at the same time.

One thing I like about the 1/2/3/4 fix is that if you were already inclined to use it to conjure e.g. two Giant Octopuses or two Dire Wolves or one Giant Constrictor Snake, the rules tweak doesn't affect you at all. At the same time, I wouldn't do the 1/2/3/4 fix in the middle of a campaign--it's a big enough change that if you're going to use it, it needs to be built into the campaign from session zero.

[sambojin]

We tend to play it as 1/2/4/4, with 4 max summons per cast (even upcasted). It really stops it scaling out of hand, and it's then better to start using bigger/better summons later on in the campaign, with the assumption being that 9+ levels of experience is plenty to try out/ learn new stuff. This is for all Conjure Animals casters, not just Shepherds.

Then there's a list, but you choose what you want (probably best if the DM chooses in this case).

Here's a sample for your player:
CR0 (4 of)
Pick whatever you want. You could probably give eight of these, and mix n match. What, puppies and kittens? Yep.


CR1/8 (4 of)
Camel, Dolphin, Flying Snake, Mastiff, Mule, Pony

CR1/4 (4 of)
Constrictor Snake, Cow, Elk, Giant Badger, Giant Owl, Giant Poisonous Snake, Wolf

CR1/2 (4 of)
Ape (Mega Monkey), Crocodile, Giant Dragonfly, Jaculi, (Magnificent) Giant Seahorse, Warhorse (Super Pony)

CR1 (2 of)
Brown Bear, (Enthusiastic Puppies!) Dire Wolf, (Greatest) Giant Eagle, (Cuddly) Giant Octopus, (Big Friendly) Giant Spider

CR2 (1 of)
(Huggy) Giant Constrictor Snake, (Talky Reindeer) Giant Elk, (Super Big Fuzzy) Huge Polar Bear, Hunter Shark, Pleisiosarus, Quetzalcoatlus


Then you just star up as favorites those things in a phone app (5e Beastiary is my current go-to on Android), show only favorites, use average damage, and go from there. It's fairly quick, and honestly, if Conjure Animals could only do one of those subsets other than CR0-1/8, it'd still be a pretty good spell, even at 4 max summons and 1/2/4/4.


Do not be surprised if all this hard work ends up being "I want a pony!". Some people aren't heavy optimisers. For some people, just calling it "Conjure 4xSuper Ponies or Mega Monkeys or Magnificent Seahorses, or 2xBig Friendly Spiders or Enthusiastic Puppies or Greatest Eagles or Cuddly Octopuses, or 1xSuper Big Fuzzy Bear or Huggy Snake or Talky Reindeer, or 8x (whatever, choose your animal) Dolphins, Birdies, Puppies and/or Kittens" and calling it a day would be fine. Still a good spell 🙂. Yes, I would use that spell. It's awesome. Even if it didn't scale.

(Maybe throw some Ultra Sheep (Cows or Elk) on there as well. Shepherd is also a job title, but it'd be pretty OP)
((Remember, it's not like a Shepherd doesn't have wildshape as well though. You can even totem while in wildshape. And, like, you get Call-in Apache attack helicopter/ Ultra Nice Dragon Friend at lvl9 anyway...))

[sithlordnergal]

Not true. A 10ft-wide hallway can very much accommodate a large creature. HP isn't related to size anyway, especially in those very low CRs, but still. There exists space alright. Could've used a higher-CR, lower-number option for range issues. But smaller creatures would've probably been better anyway due to the still-existent size constraints; maybe not that many would've fit inside the boss room. So I won't push this.


I'll correct myself and be more precise, a 10ft wide hallway can accommodate a few Large creatures, but would be unable to accommodate all 8 of them. And the room past the hallway was also unable to accommodate 8 Large creatures. Now, they could have used high-CR, low-number options, but it doesn't really change that much. They do get more HP, but the damage deals with them pretty quickly.




Yeah, OK, so the suggested spell nerf. No wolves or elks, got it.


Not really a nerf to run a spell RAW. You'll get wolves and elks when you're in a place with wolves and elks, but you won't get them 100% of the time. If you're handing players wolves and elks every single time, then you have no-one but yourself to blame for that. It's like Conjure Woodland Beings, if you're upset because the players always cast it and they always summon 8 Pixies with Polymorph, that's kind of on you.



35hp. Mighty Summons. Could be important for the cloudkill next paragraph, in case a badger goes after the skull lord. But not very big for this scenario.

So, at a +3 to hit, that's 12.2 DPR from the 8 bite attacks and 16.4 from the claws. Not amazing, but not horrible.
Now, if the badgers had advantage (from some other spell or effect) that would be 21.1 bite DPR and 28.4 for the claws. Significantly better. That's nearly 50 DPR, or almost half of the skull lord's hit points.

But maybe you don't think it could've been easy for something else to have granted them advantage. Good thing they can try getting it themselves then. They can shove the skull lord and will be doing so with advantage thanks to the totem. If the first one succeeds, the 7 others will have 43 DPR. If the second one succeeds, the remaining 6 will have 37 DPR. If the third one succeeds, the remaining five will have 31 DPR.

Mighty Summons from a level 9 Shepard Druid using the Bear Spirit Totem would give Giant Badgers 31 HP, not 35. Mighty Summoner grants 2 extra HP per hit dice, while the Spirit Totem gives 5+Druid Level Temp HP. Giant Badgers only have 2 Hit Dice, so that's only +4 HP from that, and 14 HP from the Shepard Druid. Meaning those Badgers are dead at the end of their second turn no matter what from the Bodaks and Cloudkill.

Now, as for shoving, something to note is that they can choose to shove once or use multiattack, so a single Badger can't shove multiple times per round. This is due to the fact that taking the Multiattack Action is different from taking the Attack Action, and in order to shove you have to take the Attack Action. Funnily enough, I got to learn this as a Moon Druid, which I would try to Shove while Wild Shaped. Now, the Badgers do have Advantage on the check, but they only have a +1 to Strength, while Skull Lords have +7. Chances are, it's going to take a few Badgers to knock the guy prone.

Now, obviously a lot can change to make Conjure Animals more or less powerful. Not every battle is going to be in tight quarters, and Conjure Animal really shines in wide open spaces. I know all too well how strong Conjure Animals can be, because I've had DMss let me choose what were summoned in Chult, in encounters where there was just a single big monster with no AoE and no environmental effects. Needless to say, 8 Velociraptors can do a real number on a lone Hydra. But the thing is, those sorts of encounters should be the exception, not the rule.

And whenever I run, I tend to make sure they are the exception, not the rule. Not out of a need to counter Conjure Animals, but simply because fighting in an open field is boring, and too easy. Give me Tucker's Kobolds, not an army of orcs. And by making most of your encounters similar to Tucker's Kobolds, though potentially a bit less deadly cause we want players to have fun and win the encounter, you make combat much more multidimensional and interesting.

[Thunderous Mojo]

Not really a nerf to run a spell RAW. You'll get wolves and elks when you're in a place with wolves and elks, but you won't get them 100% of the time.

Across the entirety of North America, one is going to find animals that fit the broad definition of 5E Wolf and Elk statblock.


Now, as for shoving, something to note is that they can choose to shove once or use multiattack, so a single Badger can't shove multiple times per round. This is due to the fact that taking the Multiattack Action is different from taking the Attack Action, and in order to shove you have to take the Attack Action.

The only substantial difference between Multiattack and Extra Attack is the nomenclature.

MULTIATTACK
A creature that can make multiple attacks on its turn has the Multiattack action. A creature can't use Multiattack when making an opportunity attack, which must be a single melee attack.

EXTRA ATTACK
Beginning at 5th level, you can attack twice, instead of once, whenever you take the Attack action on your turn. The number of attacks increases to three when you reach 11th level in this class and to four when you reach 20th level in this class.

Essentially, with both Multiattack and Extra Attack, a creature is still using the general Attack action described in the PHB, except creatures with Multiattack and Extra Attack get a bit more out of the Action.

Granular parsing, with the intention to limit effectiveness, can have it’s place…but your recommendation is a bit Ticky Tack for my tastes.

The Champion statblock lacks a class tag…
(indeed are there any new monster statblocks that have a non caster, class tag? I do not believe so)…
……….yet, the Champion is clearly representing something approximating a T3 Fighter.

[strangebloke]

In other words "design every encounter you don't want trounced to nerf the spell and make sure the party adventures in a location where you have an excuse to only give weaker creatures"? Because that seems like a far worse solution than just making the spell so that even if you give some of the decent or strong options, it's not breaking anything. Then you can focus on actually designing your adventure as it makes sense (maybe even giving PCs autonomy on locations and such) as opposed to building all the important parts around a single spell on a single PC.
QFT

If something is only "not broken" when the DM is putting all their energy into making sure its not broken, then that thing is incredibly, incredibly broken. Warping the campaign's entire direction to avoid giving your player anything useful? Come on, that's unrealistic. Elk and velociraptors and wolves are all anyone talks about, but cows are up there for damage as well. Cows.

Just nerf the spell outright. RAW isn't sacred, and the spell is disruptive, even before you consider how long the druid's turns are going to take. No I don't care that you have a slick macro for it, you're still wasting everyone's time.

[sambojin]

There is the minor thing that the Summon Beast spell is essentially "Extra Attack" with 18Str and Pack Tactics/ Fly-by at lvl3, and Summon Fey is "Extra attack with riders on teleport and force damage" at lvl5. For potentially an hour. And they both go to Extra Attack x2 at level 7 upcasted. And, quite decent to-hit, if you're going down the heavy-caster build path (+Wis whenever you can).

They're not quite as "weak" as people make them out to be, it's just that they're not as good as conjuring in 4-8x "whatever's with +3-6 to-hit with riders attached" and extra HP and magic attacks. It's a pretty busted spell, *insert everything with Conjure in its title here*.

The Summons are pretty balanced. Might just want to give them spell-slot hitdice (for Shepherd stuff) and go from there. And give a few CR1/2-CR1 options from Conjure Animals, because it's still an amazing spell as a Shepherd Druid, even with the slightly worse ones. I'd be annoyed if I couldn't cast *?Summon?* "Warhorses" or "Brown Bears" or "Dire Wolves" or "Giant Eagles" or whatever occasionally as a Shepherd, because I can normally get something pretty decent from the spell.

Even the wildshape familiars can help, while I'm in caster-form.

But, honestly, there's a lot of classes that wish their "Extra Attack" scaled from +1 at lvl3 (1d8+6 damage for the base form), and went to +2 at lvl7, and +3 at lvl11 (by now it could be a lazy +3x 1d8+10 damage with pack tactics for Summon Beast).
On top of whatever other random stuff they got as they levelled (like the thing doing it was a 10' reach large flying Dragon they could ride around on at lvl9 that does the attacks). And they now have plenty of lower level spell slots, so there can be something doing a thing, if that's what's needed.

The Summon spells are fine as a Shepherd (just needs +2*slotHP). They're pretty powerful. Pseudo-Extra Attack right after your turn (you can still cast instants/cantrips, or even build for Str/Dex melee/shooting on a 1-attack w/feats build, summons don't take your BA), is fine 👍

(16Dex, XBE at lvl1, Sharpshooter at 4, cast the occasional non-summon spell when required, still have GTFO warhorse backup with wildshape. Druids are really easy to do build concepts on)

[Chaos Jackal]

Not really a nerf to run a spell RAW. You'll get wolves and elks when you're in a place with wolves and elks, but you won't get them 100% of the time. If you're handing players wolves and elks every single time, then you have no-one but yourself to blame for that. It's like Conjure Woodland Beings, if you're upset because the players always cast it and they always summon 8 Pixies with Polymorph, that's kind of on you.
I didn't contest that. Just noting that the summons chosen are definitely far from strong. Generally speaking, I find this way of keeping the spell in line pretty bad for various reasons, but that's a different discussion (though it's just one more nail on the coffin of this spell's awful design).


Mighty Summons from a level 9 Shepard Druid using the Bear Spirit Totem would give Giant Badgers 31 HP, not 35. Mighty Summoner grants 2 extra HP per hit dice, while the Spirit Totem gives 5+Druid Level Temp HP. Giant Badgers only have 2 Hit Dice, so that's only +4 HP from that, and 14 HP from the Shepard Druid. Meaning those Badgers are dead at the end of their second turn no matter what from the Bodaks and Cloudkill.
Yeah, I'm not sure where I got 35 from. My mistake. Though, as you probably noted on my take afterwards, it doesn't matter; I just considered them dead after a turn anyway.


Now, as for shoving, something to note is that they can choose to shove once or use multiattack, so a single Badger can't shove multiple times per round. This is due to the fact that taking the Multiattack Action is different from taking the Attack Action, and in order to shove you have to take the Attack Action. Funnily enough, I got to learn this as a Moon Druid, which I would try to Shove while Wild Shaped. Now, the Badgers do have Advantage on the check, but they only have a +1 to Strength, while Skull Lords have +7. Chances are, it's going to take a few Badgers to knock the guy prone.
I'm aware of how Multiattack works. That's why I included options for seven, six and five badgers attacking. With advantage on the shove attempt, the odds aren't even, but they're close, so while you could definitely end up having five badgers shoving before you win the check, you're pretty likely to succeed after two or three attempts. It's also why I afterwards said "it's not unreasonable to expect 30+" rather than just saying "they deal 43 damage".


Now, obviously a lot can change to make Conjure Animals more or less powerful. Not every battle is going to be in tight quarters, and Conjure Animal really shines in wide open spaces. I know all too well how strong Conjure Animals can be, because I've had DMss let me choose what were summoned in Chult, in encounters where there was just a single big monster with no AoE and no environmental effects. Needless to say, 8 Velociraptors can do a real number on a lone Hydra. But the thing is, those sorts of encounters should be the exception, not the rule.

And whenever I run, I tend to make sure they are the exception, not the rule. Not out of a need to counter Conjure Animals, but simply because fighting in an open field is boring, and too easy. Give me Tucker's Kobolds, not an army of orcs. And by making most of your encounters similar to Tucker's Kobolds, though potentially a bit less deadly cause we want players to have fun and win the encounter, you make combat much more multidimensional and interesting.
The point is that even with the ideal situations being exceptions the spell is too good, and it would be much easier to just chop the number of low CR creatures summoned in half and not having to worry as much, rather than jumping through hoops and claiming you're not nerfing the spell when you in fact do so haphazardly.

And that's because the spell's inherent power and abuse potential is too high, even with it supposedly reined back by the DM. All the badgers needed in the above example to get to 50 damage was a source of outside advantage. Very easy to get. On their own, they can easily exceed 30. And remember, that's still just one turn. With a mediocre summon. And no other attempt at combos, which the spell easily enables. Seriously, one way or another, this is one terrible scenario for the spell, exceedingly so. Still works. Which should be saying something.

You don't need an open field or velociraptors. Wolves can do just fine, and they're a commonly picked animal. Or draft horses. Freaking draft horses. Or flying snakes. Or giant toads. Sure, they won't work against Tucker's kobolds, but very little does anyway; you just suck it up, run, dodge and hope some traps can be disarmed. Your scenario is pretty simple and quite far from Tucker's kobolds, which is why conjure animals gets to shine still, even though everything is (intentionally or unintentionally) against it. Hell, instead of rushing the boss, the animals could've just shoved the zombie out of the way and let the players destroy the boss (108hp isn't exactly huge against a lv9 party), getting immediate value out of the spell and keeping it around for more (like another combat, or for scouting, or for triggering traps).

The spell is almost always at least good. Even with badgers in a small space against area effects with no other synergy. And you won't always have these, unless you specifically go out of your way to avoid them and/or the players can't work together. Not everything takes place in a dungeon and not all parties are bad at working together.

It's above and beyond everything else at its level (and 3rd-level has some really good, evergreen offerings) and a lot of things of higher level when the circumstances aren't ideal, just not fully adversarial. It still beats out a number of them in less than stellar conditions. Unlike even the best of the rest, it's also never useless; you'll always get something out of it every time you prepare it. A fireball can prove borderline useless in many cases. Hypnotic pattern is excellent but can still stumble into situations where it's not gonna work. Spirit guardians is probably the only thing that can prove as ubiquitous as conjure animals, and it will more often than not be weaker in damage output.

I've no issue with you taking on more work for yourself as a DM and with wanting to tread the DM-player dynamics of picking the monsters yourself. You do you, have fun while at it. Also no issue if you find the spell to never pose trouble at your table. Glad it works both for you and the players; I usually see one or the other.

However, it's a much simpler, much more straightforward and ultimately much more elegant solution to just reduce the number of beasts summoned. Gives the high-CR option meaning, instead of making it a trap. Speeds up gameplay. Can even make allowing the players pick the beasts a more sustainable option, saving even more time and boosting the fantasy of the spell itself.

[Dante]

QFT

If something is only "not broken" when the DM is putting all their energy into making sure its not broken, then that thing is incredibly, incredibly broken. Warping the campaign's entire direction to avoid giving your player anything useful? Come on, that's unrealistic. Elk and velociraptors and wolves are all anyone talks about, but cows are up there for damage as well. Cows.

Just nerf the spell outright. *Snip*

Goats are surprisingly decent as well... even if they didn't come from a spell. A shepherd druid with 20 goats (from spending 20 gp) will do pretty well, if he can persuade the goats to attack his enemies. (Summoning Giant Goats and giving everybody temp HP will probably help boost goat morale.)

[elyktsorb]

This is wrong. Do nerf Conjure Animals. The spell is just absurdly out of whack. Like summon a bunch of Elks; they hit for 90 damage on level 5. That's just stupid. 45/round is more than enough from a level 3 slot. AOE isn't even enough to make up for this. A level 6 Shepherd Druid has a solid shot at 1v1ing a CR 13 Narzugon, which does have AOE. That's how insane the spell is. No other level 6 character comes even close.


I don't normally advocate for nerfing things. But I summoned elks once as a shepard druid to distract a boss guy while we were doing things, and they just straight up murdered him while all the actual players weren't even within 200ft of the guy.

[tokek]

I won't go down the rabbit hole of balance, Shepherd Druid is strong but I suspect you know that already.

Decision paralysis is the biggest problem in terms of slowing the game down. The dice can be an issue but decision making is worse. Far worse. There is nothing worse for game flow than a player trying to precision manoeuvre all their minions for the perfect effect and then reshuffling them in response to dice rolls. I would recommend some or all of the following

1. Agree with the player ahead of time what the thematic sets of beasts are for their druid. They probably should have 5 or 6 options that fit the theme of their druid, cover major options such as flying/swimming and which you and the player can then have all prepared ahead of time with little helper cards or something similar that has the summons and the stat block on them.

2. Do not allow micromanagment of minions. Get the player to give one clear order each turn and then work with the player to interpret that order with the beasts. Fortunately conjured beasts know friend from foe so the order can be - and often will be - as simple as "attack the nearest enemy"

3. By all means get the other players to help move minis etc in line with the order if that keeps everyone more involved.

4. Minions do what they were ordered and if the order no longer makes sense (e.g. the target dies before they all finish their attacks) they do not change orders but just dodge.

Now the dice can be an issue and I'd suggest making sure you have enough to roll those dice in groups. If 3 wolves attack a target roll all 3 at once. Do not roll for damage, just use the fixed damage on the stat block.

This honestly all works fine if you work with the player and if the player accepts that they don't need to squeeze every last bit of efficiency out of their spell with unrealistic levels of fine control. The spell is plenty powerful enough to be a lot more relaxed than that.

[sithlordnergal]

Across the entirety of North America, one is going to find animals that fit the broad definition of 5E Wolf and Elk statblock.


Maybe in North America, but not so much in DnD worlds.


The only substantial difference between Multiattack and Extra Attack is the nomenclature.

MULTIATTACK
A creature that can make multiple attacks on its turn has the Multiattack action. A creature can't use Multiattack when making an opportunity attack, which must be a single melee attack.

EXTRA ATTACK
Beginning at 5th level, you can attack twice, instead of once, whenever you take the Attack action on your turn. The number of attacks increases to three when you reach 11th level in this class and to four when you reach 20th level in this class.

Essentially, with both Multiattack and Extra Attack, a creature is still using the general Attack action described in the PHB, except creatures with Multiattack and Extra Attack get a bit more out of the Action.

Granular parsing, with the intention to limit effectiveness, can have it’s place…but your recommendation is a bit Ticky Tack for my tastes.

The Champion statblock lacks a class tag…
(indeed are there any new monster statblocks that have a non caster, class tag? I do not believe so)…
……….yet, the Champion is clearly representing something approximating a T3 Fighter.

Its the nomenclature that's important here though. Like it or not, 5e has differentiated the Attack Action and Multiattack, the two are different Actions. Its actually pretty easy to see why Multiattack is not the same as the Attack Action, if they were the same then a Fighter 5 / Moon Druid 2 could use Extra Attack to use Multiattack twice every round. Moon Druid multiclasses would be able to easily get 4 to 6 attacks every round with just Extra Attack and Wild Shape. Is it tacky? Yes. Is it werid? Yeah. Is it annoying at times? Absolutely. But its necessary to keep the two things separate for the sake of balance.

And to be fair, Mike Mearls and Crawford both agree that Multiattack and Attack actions are separate, and would only grant a single use of the action.

[sithlordnergal]

~~SNIP~~

Yeah, I can agree fully that it is a strong spell, far stronger than most 3rd level spells, I just don't see much need to nerf it. I believe I said it before, the only thing in 5e that I've found in need of a nerf is Simulacrum, and even then the only nerf it needs is something to prevent a creature from having multiple Simulacrums at a time. Outside of that, I think Simulacrum is perfectly fine as is. The only times I run into fully OP things are when I occasionally allow homebrew without fully going through each and every potential combo, or if a player and I are misreading/misunderstanding how an ability works.

And yeah, not every DM is going to have the time to set up complicated encounters. Heck, even my example one is on the simple side, given all the players really needed to do was shove the zombie out of the way, and there weren't many other environmental damage effects outside of the Bodaks. And if a DM doesn't have time to do that, then yeah, nerfing Conjure Animals could be the best option. But I would always implore DMs to avoid nerfing things, even things that seem OP.

[strangebloke]

Maybe in North America, but not so much in DnD worlds.

My dude, my guy, my friend. Elk get insane damage. Cows get insane damage. Wolves get insane damage. Horses. Giant Owls.

Where are you adventuring, the plane of fire?

All these options either beat or get close to beating an optimized fifth level martial in their nova damage output, as well as summoning a lot of bodies that the enemy has to fight, as well as being able to do this damage turn after turn after turn. Math: https://www.reddit.com/r/3d6/comments/blwwcc/a_damage_analysis_of_conjure_animals/

[KorvinStarmast]

My dude, my guy, my friend. Elk get insane damage. Cows get insane damage. Wolves get insane damage. Horses. Giant Owls.
It's a concentration spell. One hit on the druid and it can end. Multiple hits on the druid and it can end. (As with any concentration spell).

[Psyren]

+1 to Summon X training wheels and/or nerfing Conjure X. That spell is powerful even on non-Shepherds.


It's a concentration spell. One hit on the druid and it can end. Multiple hits on the druid and it can end. (As with any concentration spell).

I mean, good luck landing a solid hit past all their disposable meatshields :smalltongue:

[KorvinStarmast]

I mean, good luck landing a solid hit past all their disposable meatshields :smalltongue: The enemy is allowed to do ranged attacks, and "archers, take out the spell casters" is a very old D&D mode of play. It's almost like 'thinking tactically as a DM' is needful.

Another issue that arises is the practicality of where to put a summoned critter (when it's 2 or 4 of them) in the initiative order. A number of DMs allow them to take their first action on the round after they have been summoned. I think we've had some discussions on this.


Roll initiative for the summoned creatures as a group, which has its own turns. They obey any verbal commands that you issue to them (no action required by you). If you don’t issue any commands to them, they defend themselves from hostile creatures, but otherwise take no actions. If done as described, sometimes they will act on the next round and sometimes later on the same round as the summoning druid but later. Since there isn't an action penalty for giving them instructions, it is arguable that the druid can give them instructions as soon as they are summoned.

(I think I've seen suggestions about making this a ritual spell before).

[Psyren]

The enemy is allowed to do ranged attacks, and "archers, take out the spell casters" is a very old D&D mode of play. It's almost like 'thinking tactically as a DM' is needful.

Not all fights have archers, the druid can summon just fine from behind cover, and in any event, EVERY druid has to worry about maintaining concentration. It's not exactly an insurmountable offense, you know?



Another issue that arises is the practicality of where to put a summoned critter (when it's 2 or 4 of them) in the initiative order. A number of DMs allow them to take their first action on the round after they have been summoned.

That sounds like yet another reason to steer the player towards Summon Beast, which is crystal clear about when the summon acts in addition to being easier bookkeeping.

[KorvinStarmast]

You don't need an archer for a ranged attack.

That sounds like yet another reason to steer the player towards Summon Beast, which is crystal clear about when the summon acts in addition to being easier bookkeeping. And for a new player, the "when it acts" bit is really helpful which is another way to help new players along.

I tell new players "Full casters tend to be more complex to play" (Wizard, Cleric, Druid, Sorcerer, bard) and the more I see those classes in play the more I find that to be true.

[sithlordnergal]

My dude, my guy, my friend. Elk get insane damage. Cows get insane damage. Wolves get insane damage. Horses. Giant Owls.

Where are you adventuring, the plane of fire?

All these options either beat or get close to beating an optimized fifth level martial in their nova damage output, as well as summoning a lot of bodies that the enemy has to fight, as well as being able to do this damage turn after turn after turn. Math: https://www.reddit.com/r/3d6/comments/blwwcc/a_damage_analysis_of_conjure_animals/

I mean, you can find useful beasts anywhere, but the post I was replying to assumed you could find Wolves or Elk in any environment. Now, that's not to say you can't find any animals. Case in point, Wolves and Elk aren't found in the Arctic Encounter Table, but Giant Owls are. So if you're in the Arctic, you're gonna get Giant Owls, Blood Ravens, some kind of Bear, or a Saber Toothed Tiger. But Wolves and Elks? Never gonna see them in an Arctic Environment.

Now, they can have insane damage, and can outdamage optimized 5th level martials. But for the most part, they lack the HP to stay around for very long. Even with Mighty Summoner, it generally only grants 4 HP to those low CR creatures. The only time they become tanky is with the Druid's Spirit Totem...but that can be used once per Short Rest, and only grants its Temp HP one time. So your Druid shouldn't be able to use it every single encounter.

As long as you have decent AoEs, they're not that much of an issue. And you should always have AoE and ranged options in your encounters, even when making encounters for levels 1 or 2, just to deal with players that try to hide behind a frontline. And heck, Conjure Animals is a Concentration spell. Break the Druid's Concentration, or knock them out.

[sithlordnergal]

Not all fights have archers, the druid can summon just fine from behind cover, and in any event, EVERY druid has to worry about maintaining concentration. It's not exactly an insurmountable offense, you know?


Eh? What encounters don't have ranged options? o_o That feels like it'd be a design flaw of the encounter. The first two rules or encounter design are:

1) Have a way to deal with Ranged Party Members while ignoring the frontline

2) Have AoEs to punish clumps

[strangebloke]

It's a concentration spell. One hit on the druid and it can end. Multiple hits on the druid and it can end. (As with any concentration spell).

Doesn't matter, the spell is OP even if it only lasts a single round. And heaven forbid the druid took resilient con and is standing next to a paladin. heaven forbid they're just hiding behind a wall.

But even if they aren't, warping your whole encounter around a single spell is a sign that the spell is a problem. "every encounter needs super mobile/ranged attackers that can circumvent the meatshield to bring down the druid ROUND 1" is not a sane or reasonable response to "this spell is busted yo."


I mean, you can find useful beasts anywhere, but the post I was replying to assumed you could find Wolves or Elk in any environment. Now, that's not to say you can't find any animals. Case in point, Wolves and Elk aren't found in the Arctic Encounter Table, but Giant Owls are. So if you're in the Arctic, you're gonna get Giant Owls, Blood Ravens, some kind of Bear, or a Saber Toothed Tiger. But Wolves and Elks? Never gonna see them in an Arctic Environment.

Now, they can have insane damage, and can outdamage optimized 5th level martials. But for the most part, they lack the HP to stay around for very long. Even with Mighty Summoner, it generally only grants 4 HP to those low CR creatures. The only time they become tanky is with the Druid's Spirit Totem...but that can be used once per Short Rest, and only grants its Temp HP one time. So your Druid shouldn't be able to use it every single encounter.

As long as you have decent AoEs, they're not that much of an issue. And you should always have AoE and ranged options in your encounters, even when making encounters for levels 1 or 2, just to deal with players that try to hide behind a frontline. And heck, Conjure Animals is a Concentration spell. Break the Druid's Concentration, or knock them out.

Your standards for what every random encounter should be prepared to do to deal with this one utterly busted spell are silly. I would simply run the campaign as I please and nerf the spell, rather than warping all my encounter design to deal with a single spell that is ALSO disruptive to the fun of everyone at the table.

Like what's the upside here? Who benefits from keeping this spell as-is? Nobody!

[KorvinStarmast]

Doesn't matter, the spell is OP even if it only lasts a single round. And heaven forbid the druid took resilient con and is standing next to a paladin. heaven forbid they're just hiding behind a wall. I think maybe you need to pick up on the other ways that concentration can be broken (https://rpg.stackexchange.com/a/74438/22566). (Agree that the "concentrate and dodge / concentrate and hide" gambit is a good one).

But even if they aren't, warping your whole encounter around a single spell is a sign that the spell is a problem. We are back to both hyperbole and a strawman now, and I find your choice to view this spell in isolation to make for a poor analysis.

[sithlordnergal]

Your standards for what every random encounter should be prepared to do to deal with this one utterly busted spell are silly. I would simply run the campaign as I please and nerf the spell, rather than warping all my encounter design to deal with a single spell that is ALSO disruptive to the fun of everyone at the table.

Like what's the upside here? Who benefits from keeping this spell as-is? Nobody!

...You know, that actually explains something. So, I've actually removed the majority of random combat encounters in my games, especially random encounters you'd run into while traveling. Even dungeon delving doesn't really involve many random combat encounters. Environmental random encounters sure, potential dungeon delves or social encounters, yeah. But very, very few random combat encounters. You're more likely to find an abandoned house with a basement that leads to a cave, filled to the brim with traps, then you are a pack of wolves. Even with games like Tomb of Annihilation, I removed 90% of the Combat Encounters, and saved them for specific points instead. Usually when the players were already worn out, or as a way to interrupt the player's Long/Short Rest. And even then, I generally added some environmental traps and dangers that the party had to find and avoid.

And you don't need to warp your entire encounter design to deal with a single spell. If that's what you're thinking I do, then you're gravely mistaken. I just typically find that a properly designed encounter will passively keep Conjure Animals in line.

EDIT: That said, the fact that I don't do random encounters while also restricting Long and Short Rests might be what's preventing Conjure Animal from being as strong as it is. Cause I won't lie, I do know how strong that spell can be. When I played a Druid in ToA, I'd often cast Conjure Animals and let them deal with the combat encounter while the rest of the party dealt with the traps or exploration. I can name multiple times when, as a player, I basically curb stomped an encounter with Conjure Animals alone. However, I also noticed those encounters were, ultimately, very simple and uninteresting, with very little strategy involved outside of "Hit that one guy a lot".

[Psyren]

You don't need an archer for a ranged attack.


Eh? What encounters don't have ranged options? o_o That feels like it'd be a design flaw of the encounter. The first two rules or encounter design are:

1) Have a way to deal with Ranged Party Members while ignoring the frontline

2) Have AoEs to punish clumps

Not all encounters have ranged attackers at all, is my point - archers or otherwise. Like if the DM has you fighting a bunch of dinosaurs or werewolves or oozes, they're probably not going to whip out crossbows, y'know? :smalltongue:


And for a new player, the "when it acts" bit is really helpful which is another way to help new players along.

I tell new players "Full casters tend to be more complex to play" (Wizard, Cleric, Druid, Sorcerer, bard) and the more I see those classes in play the more I find that to be true.

Agreed - which, again, is a point in favor of Summon Beast.

[Eldariel]

I think maybe you need to pick up on the other ways that concentration can be broken (https://rpg.stackexchange.com/a/74438/22566). (Agree that the "concentrate and dodge / concentrate and hide" gambit is a good one).

I mean if the Druid has +9 Con saves on level 6 alongside +9ish Wis-saves thanks to the Paladin, basically all non-spell Concentration-breaking options are outright going to fail (they basically always state "DC 10" unless it's the result of a spell - which this Druid can't fail on regardless of roll) and the ones that won't will have to contend with a +9 Wis save. Hell, it's fully possible they might have Lucky too, from racial feat. If the Druid is failing, what about the rest of the party that doesn't have +billion to all those saves? And again, there's always breaking line of effect, line of sight, etc. with a move action.

Basically, Conjure Animals is quite possibly the hardest spell to break Concentration on. The caster doesn't need to care about spell attack, line of effect, line of sight, AOE, standing, or any such so they're free to position so that they can minimize the chance of even having to roll Concentration saves and if they do, they still will make those vast majority of the time. And the Druid only needs to keep the spell up for a round or two for the animals to deal with whatever could cause those saves so...this just really doesn't matter.


And all the while, the rest of the party is free to do whatever since the Druid is basically single-handedly tanking all enemy attention and doing damage comparable to the rest of the party. Which is pretty awesome. Frankly, you want all the enemies to try and focus you since you can take it; that leaves the squishier party members safe and free to end any enemies that didn't get killed by CA, while the enemy is committing tactical blunder after tactical blunder due to the DM's overzealous attempts at breaking the Druid's Concentration.

[Amnestic]

And you don't need to warp your entire encounter design to deal with a single spell. If that's what you're thinking I do, then you're gravely mistaken. I just typically find that a properly designed encounter will passively keep Conjure Animals in line.

I find "properly designed" as a term here to be doing some absolute work.