Gavin Mutter's page

Tesailion wrote:

obadiah wrote:

Check out the dinosaurs. Stegosaurus with vital strike, strong jaw and greater magic fang is pretty nasty.

Is that a cat or a bear?

Maybe you can see if your gm will let you wildshape into cats or bears with the 'Giant Creature' template.

I thought polymorph spells didn't let you assume the form of anything with a template on it.

SRD: Transmutation (Polymorph)

Polymorph spells cannot be used to assume the form of a creature with a template or an advanced version of a creature.

So as great as that would be it probably wont work. The best thing you can do is to get the GM to make a custom huge cat/bear instead without using a template.

Unfortunately there need to be a lot more PF creatures for the druid to get full use out of all of its abilities right now. Until then a lot of specialist druids (like cat and bear) require the GM to come up with new options to keep things interesting.

That said you can deal insane damage in dire tiger form and the lion shaman can pick up rake earlier than should be normal which gives him 5, count 'em, 5 attacks on the pounce (2 claw, 1 bite, 2 rake). That should pretty much kill anything (or a group of anythings).

If you have an animal companion or summon to trip hard targets and provide flank then you can pile on the hurt accurately. At level 6 getting access to rake will make you a damage dealer to be reckoned with (and just imagine adding power attack to all those to boot!).

Then just pick up some barding for your dire tiger form and you'll even have decent AC (and since you likely wont use much else due to restrictions it isn't such a bad proposition either).

But later on you should definitely work with your GM to see about either converting an older 3.5E creature to PF or get him to make an upsized dire tiger without a template. Dire Tiger should probably serve you well as a main combat form till level 8 to 10 or so before you will start wanting something with more oomph.

For the levels in between early levels where barkskin/mage armour are all you need and you don't quite have the cash to grab wild armour just get some barding made up.

Dragonhide breastplates cost a mere 1400 (2400 for +1 enchantment) and less if you craft it yourself. My current Druid's wildshape form has AC20 (+2 NA, +1 Dex, +6 armour, +1 ench) as standard with AC22 when he pops barkskin on.

This puts him close to fighter level AC right now while still allowing all the full-attack goodness several levels ahead of the curve.

The downside is that you'll want natural spell before you go this route because before then if you wildshape in the middle of combat after a few summons are out you wont benefit from it. So this tactic is a minimum level 5 and is best used for when you have a favoured combat form (Deinonychus at level 5 and Dire Tiger on from 6th).

This should hold you over until you can grab heavy armour proficiency and wild dragonhide fullplate for added insanity. With a little proper planning and thought there is no reason to let your druid be a simple glass cannon.

Just remember that for barding to work it is best to stay in wildshape when you suspect danger is near. If caught off guard and out of armour you can, of course, always fight without it and ask for mage armour on top of your barkskin to get you through it.