Questions about the druid class

[Epic Meepo]

The following are a couple questions I had while reading through the druid class.

Armor Proficiency: I understand that metal armor is anathema for druids, but how does that prevent their armor training in light and medium armor from applying to metal armor? If I am trained in light leather armor, how am I not also trained in light leather armor with metal studs on it? And if I somehow can’t conflate training in leather armor with training in metal-studded leather armor, how am I then proficient with ironwood-studded leather armor, which is functionally identical to metal-studded leather armor except it isn’t made of metal?

Druid Order Feats: Is it really necessary to add separate druid order benefits to certain druid feats? If a benefit granted by a druid feat is important to the identity of a druid order, wouldn’t it make more sense for that to be a benefit of the order itself, not the benefit of an otherwise unrelated druid feat? And if the benefit is more important to the identity of the feat than to the order, shouldn’t it just be a benefit granted to every druid who takes the feat, regardless of their order? In other words, shouldn’t a druid order work more like a cleric domain, in that it provides one or two thematic benefits without locking a character out of half of their feat benefits?

[Hespyr]

Along with this could anyone please help me clarify Wildshape as well, how do you know what you can turn into ?? Is it just the spells ie Pest Form at level 2?

[kaid]

I believe with their proficiencies they have the training to use metal medium and light armor but if they actually used it that would be anathema to them. So not that you can't use it but you shouldn't use it.

Also wildshape is basically the various transformation spells. If you are a wild druid or have the feat you gain access to a special pool of wild POWAH!! You can use those points in that pool that can be used to activate one of your various transformation powers like pest form. Also the various wild shape feats apply to those various spells.

[kaid]

Actually I did not notice the druid armor proficiencies it called out specifically trained in non metal variants only. I imagine it is because they are so loath to use metal the act of wearing something with that much metal degrades their performance with it.

[Taenia]

Wild Shape works as the spells of the name given under Pest Form and the various wild shape druid feats you can choose. The nice thing is that you don't necessarily need to take all the wild shape feats because the abilities are auto heightened. You just need to take enough to make sure you have option at each spell tier for example you could take Animal (3, 4, 5), Elemental (5,6,7) and Dragon (6,8) for your wild shape feats.
Or Take Animal (3,4,5), Dinosaur (4,5,7) and Dragon (6,8)

The two that will come up are Animal, only one at level 4 and 5 we can take (Insect pops up at 6th as a feat) and Dragon since we don't have any other level 8 options.

I hope they add Monstrosity Form feat in the final edition to give us another level 8 option and I hope that they had a level 9 tier heightened or new spell to grant us options at that level other than forcing us to buy Druid's Vestments just to use our own stats.

Level 10 only has one option and that is grabbing the 10th level spell and using Nature's Incarnate. Only 1/day for 1 min this is the epitome of our wild shape ability.

Shapechange by the way is a poor feat/spell since it caps at 7th for wild shape, not sure how it works with the autoheighten feature of Wild Shape and because even if it does work the max cap of 8th makes Nature Incarnate a better option.