Circle of the Shepherd Druid Guide to Fuzzy Fury

[Hael]

I agree. Other than Life Cleric 1, it's better to stick with straight Shepherd unless you like multiclassing.

I'd definitely argue that Peace domain is at least comparable if not superior to life1. The level 1 ability by itself is good for your summons but wouldl probably be optimally utilized on your other party members. However if you can drop it on one of the big grapple summons as your proficiency scales up and you get more additions, the extra d4 to saves and their grapple skill checks is pretty impressive.

The level 2 ability however is *crazy* good for a shepherd druid. Free dash/disengage and a big aoe heal to all your summons with a channel divinity is at least comparable in net efficiency to the level 10 feature a Shepherd gets. That can be worth nearly a full heal to the cr1/4 summons.

Now the level 6 ability simply breaks the game for the Shepherd, however it comes quite late assuming you waited till after lvl 6-7 (and thus only get it in mid tier 3). But the ability to simply tag all your summons and use them to take hits against you is outrageous. If you played it suboptimally and were simply selfish with the ability, you'd be amongst the best tanks in the game (prof times hits into misses per turn). Oh and permanent misty step reactions to move you away is nice as well.

Twilight domain is a little less optimal b/c the channel divinity scales with cleric level. Still 1d6 + clr lvl temp hp each round, advantage to iniatitive, flight and the extra darkvision is a pretty large boost to the little armies survivability and firepower. If I was a lvl 14 monoclass shepherd, i'd be tempted to get a few levels of that.. For instance the 2 lvl dip is definitely, undeniably strong and I think worth the loss of druid endgame featues which don't really mechanically fit.