Are Beast Bond and Beast Sense worthwhile to a druid when Wild Companion is a thing?

[Segev]

Beast bond essentially allows you, at the cost of your concentration for 10 minutes, communicate telepathically with one friendly or Charmed critter. This lets you issue commands or ask questions, but so would speak with animals, and beast bond is more restrictive.

Beast sense is second level, and lets you, for an hour and at the expense of your concentration, have access to a willing beast's senses. Note that you can't have both up at once, and beast bond only permits its telepathic link if you're in line of sight, anyway, so you cannot be telepathically communicating to a beast scout, directing it and seeing through its eyes.

Wild Companion lets you have a familiar for a few hours at a time. You have telepathy, not limited to line of sight, and you can share senses with it. And it doesn't require your concentration, so you could have something else up (maybe barkskin on your little buddy or something). Oh, and because you can pop it into an extra dimensional space or j st conjure a new one, it is disposable. At best, an enchanted beast is a creature you don't mind losing, but you still can't trivially replace it; you need to catch another one.

Maybe you could use beast bond after [animal friendship[/i] to start issuing mental orders as if it were a minion, but it isn't a minion. It may still ignore you. And you could issue verbal orders with the more-versatile speak with animals spell, with also lasts ten minutes and doesn't require concentration and could even be cast as a ritual if you have the time. Speak to it in Druidic and it is unlikely anybody understands you besides the beast, anyway.

Beast sense feels even more obsolete, though. Maybe you could use it on a beast belonging to someone on whom you wish to spy, but that's a second level spell and concentration after working to get the beast to be willingly or a familiar or wild shape. This seems so situational that, if it ever is useful, it would still be something you prepared only knowing about the very specific situation a day in advance.

These spells are thematic for druids. I want them to be useful. But I have prepared them many times, and never found a situation where they were actually helpful. Are they just bad? Am I missing a trick? Should they be modified in some way to improve them?

[False God]

Beast Bond should probably include the features of Beast Sense. It's obvious use is that it is a temporary connection to a different animal that is not your companion that may have useful information for you. IE: you talk to the pet cat of the noble you are investigating, who has historical information related to said noble's activities that you could not find out with your Wild Companion. Or to talk to a local bird about what they have seen in the last few days.

But IMO, they should probably be a single spell.

Wild Companion is great as something that runs around with you all the time and can go places or do things you can't, but it's only going to know information that a player with functionally the same abilities (or literally a Druid in Wild Shape) could not find out themselves. It's like having a 3rd arm, useful, but it's still an arm.

[Hurrashane]

Beast bond essentially allows you, at the cost of your concentration for 10 minutes, communicate telepathically with one friendly or Charmed critter. This lets you issue commands or ask questions, but so would speak with animals, and beast bond is more restrictive.

Beast sense is second level, and lets you, for an hour and at the expense of your concentration, have access to a willing beast's senses. Note that you can't have both up at once, and beast bond only permits its telepathic link if you're in line of sight, anyway, so you cannot be telepathically communicating to a beast scout, directing it and seeing through its eyes.

Wild Companion lets you have a familiar for a few hours at a time. You have telepathy, not limited to line of sight, and you can share senses with it. And it doesn't require your concentration, so you could have something else up (maybe barkskin on your little buddy or something). Oh, and because you can pop it into an extra dimensional space or j st conjure a new one, it is disposable. At best, an enchanted beast is a creature you don't mind losing, but you still can't trivially replace it; you need to catch another one.

Maybe you could use beast bond after [animal friendship[/i] to start issuing mental orders as if it were a minion, but it isn't a minion. It may still ignore you. And you could issue verbal orders with the more-versatile speak with animals spell, with also lasts ten minutes and doesn't require concentration and could even be cast as a ritual if you have the time. Speak to it in Druidic and it is unlikely anybody understands you besides the beast, anyway.

Beast sense feels even more obsolete, though. Maybe you could use it on a beast belonging to someone on whom you wish to spy, but that's a second level spell and concentration after working to get the beast to be willingly or a familiar or wild shape. This seems so situational that, if it ever is useful, it would still be something you prepared only knowing about the very specific situation a day in advance.

These spells are thematic for druids. I want them to be useful. But I have prepared them many times, and never found a situation where they were actually helpful. Are they just bad? Am I missing a trick? Should they be modified in some way to improve them?

Why would you need both up at once? You're a druid. Animal handling a new beast or talk to them first with speak with animals.

A familiar is great but beast sense can still have it's uses.

Beast bond possibly less so, but at least in the games I play our characters tend to gain pets and mounts on top of familiars so we'd find some use for it.

[Segev]

That's the thing; trained mounts and the like don't need to be mentally commanded; they're trained. And if you need more complex interaction, speak with animals will communicate just as well, but doesn't require concentration and may not even consume a spell slot! Plus, it can talk tl all of the party's pets and mounts.

I have a mount and several pets on my druid, and have never found occasion where casting either of the spells in the thread title was something worth the spell slot, the concentration, or even something I regretted not having prepared when I gave up and stopped preparing them in favor of other spells I had missed.

Not having speak with animals has disappointed me once or twice, enough that I still prepare it a lot even when I don't use it much. But never beast bond or beast sense. I have always preferred to wild shape, myself, or send a familiar, when scouting. Risking my little buddies isn't fun, and they can't respond to changing circumstances to look at what I want to follow the way wild shaped me or my wild companion familiar can.

And that's why one might think both spells at once would be desirable, until you remember that, even if they didn't compete for concentration, beast bond requires line of sight.

I genuinely don't know what its use case is meant to be that speak with animal doesn't completely cover. Even if you need clandestine communication, you could cast speak with animals and wild shape into something innocuous to walk up and chat, animal to animal.


The frustrating thing is that I want these spells to be worth preparing and make them part of my regular bag of tricks, but finding ways to use them that aren't both less effective than other druid tools and also more risky than those tools has proven fruitless. I stopped preparing them long ago and haven't missed them, except as a wistful desire to be thematically druidic. I want his pets to be more useful, but he doesn't see a reason to risk them on things a familiar or he could do better, and these spells which should make them useful as scouts or something ... don't.