Wild Druid form feats become obsolete even though they are required as prerequisites

[victusfate]

As a druid levels, their earlier form feats become low/no utility as they transform into only their latest and greatest form or the highest level heighten of a lower form.

In practice this makes it advantageous for druids to retrain out of lower level form feats and pick up something useful instead, but this can't be done due to prerequisite requirements.

At level 8-10+ animal form is strictly weaker than dinosaur form
At level 14+ most forms are weaker than dragon (animal, insect, aerial, elemental, dinosaur)

At level 15+ the wild order druid is better off not being a wild order druid and casting monstrosity form

One last note, constitution is a more appropriate attribute for form change uses per day vs strength which is ignored while form changed.

[DM_Blake]

Maybe it's valuable to still have those other forms available?

Sure, when charging into combat, changing into a dinosaur may be statistically better than changing into an animal.

But changing into a rat might be better for exploring a city and there were no flying dinosaurs (unless that ability includes changing into pterosaurs which were not actually dinosaurs and, strictly speaking, were just animals).

It sounds like Wild Order Druids should benefit from including mostrosities at their highest levels - maybe that's a good suggestion for the devs (or for house rules if needed).

[Bast L.]

Pest form is too slow imo. A cat's movement shouldn't be 10 unless it's a 3 legged cat. The durations are also pretty short. Also, I agree that strength mod for uses is just odd, and makes wild order druids MAD.

[kaid]

Bast L. wrote:

Pest form is too slow imo. A cat's movement shouldn't be 10 unless it's a 3 legged cat. The durations are also pretty short. Also, I agree that strength mod for uses is just odd, and makes wild order druids MAD.

Once you get the feat to boost stuff to an hour duration pest form becomes a pretty handy scouting tool. Even without it the ability is still nice. You can scout better in dungeons better than almost anything. What is another rat or mouse scurrying around in a dungeon. I would agree as they level though they probably are not using their older powers as combat forms but being able to heighten them out to 1 hour durations still allows for nice recon ability in forms that are not useless in combat against non top end threats.

[Draco18s]

DM_Blake wrote:

But changing into a rat might be better for exploring a city

Duration: 1 minute

Good luck with that.

[kaid]

Draco18s wrote:

DM_Blake wrote:

But changing into a rat might be better for exploring a city

Duration: 1 minute

Good luck with that.

Pest form is:

Casting Duration 10 minutes or until dismissed

Ten minutes per wildshape pool point or pest form spell initially is pretty usable amount of scouting time for parties early on. Eventually you can extend that to an hour per wild shaping use.

[Draco18s]

10 minutes is still almost nothing in an out-of-combat situation.

[pauljathome]

Draco18s wrote:

10 minutes is still almost nothing in an out-of-combat situation.

I disagree. For most GMs it's long enough for "I scout out the manor house/fort/village". Probably not enough for "scout the palace/town/castle" but I'm fine with that waiting for higher levels

[Altwolf]

I like the aspect of a none combat wildshape options, but there should be combat options for a low level druid. Pest form should include some swarm options imo.

That aside. I like this class, but needs some tweaking for sure

[Fuzzypaws]

Wild shaping can be improved greatly if they:

• Reduce the number of spells / feats and give the ones that remain meaningful and more frequent heighten options. There shouldn't even be a Dinosaur Form spell for instance, it should be folded in as options of a heightened Animal Form spell.
  
• Reduce the spell tier of Animal Form to 1st and present some decent 1st tier options, so a druid can have a combat form at 1st level.
  
• Have heightened battle forms that are viable all the way to 19th-20th level.
  
• Make duration longer. Pest Form (the scouting form) should be 1 hour. All the combat forms should be 10 minutes.

All of this would make it work a lot better even without changing their paradigm of the transformation spells replacing your stats.

[StratoNexus]

Fuzzypaws wrote:

Wild shaping can be improved greatly if they:[list]

Reduce the number of spells / feats and give the ones that remain meaningful and more frequent heighten options. There shouldn't even be a Dinosaur Form spell for instance, it should be folded in as options of a heightened Animal Form spell.

Reduce the spell tier of Animal Form to 1st and present some decent 1st tier options, so a druid can have a combat form at 1st level.

Yeah, dinosaur form should just be a heightened version of Animal Form.

Druids do have a low-level combat form and they can use it a lot. Humanoid. It would likely be good to have a high strength so this form is useful in combat.

[Kodyboy]

Wildshape is basically pointless in PF2. In addition to the crushing of the animal companion this makes the whole druid class useless.

[Themetricsystem]

Kodyboy wrote:

Wildshape is basically pointless in PF2. In addition to the crushing of the animal companion this makes the whole druid class useless.

Every time I see a post from you it always "This sucks I should just go play 5e" or "Sorcerers are bad this game is UNPLAYABLE" or some spin on that message... do you come here to contribute to conversation or are you just trying to bash on change without discourse because change is bad?

[Madame Endor]

I really loathe the way that they attempt to make wild shape useful as you progress up the levels.

1. Pest Form seems like something that should be harder than Animal Form. True, you are less useful in combat than in pest form when in animal form, but you are a tiny fraction of your natural size, so it would seem to take more power to get that shape. The real power is that most creatures, particularly humanoids, would likely ignore you, making it a near perfect scouting form and near perfect form to get past most creatures, which in some ways would make it more valuable than the other forms. As a GM, I see it as a low level spell making PCs want to spend time killing every rodent, amphibian, lizard, and bird to kill potential low level druids. In a city with a sewer system, a swamp with reptiles, or a farm with grain storage, every tiny animal is a potential enemy. If tiny forms were limited to rarer higher level druids, it would be less of a problem.

2. Dinosaur Form and Dragon Form don't seem like forms that nature druids should have to use to fight at higher levels. Dinosaurs are animals out of time, and because of that, don't seem that natural. Dragons are intelligent magical creatures often associated with the supernatural, so they even more seem unnatural. I could see some character concepts built around spells and feats that go from smaller to larger dinosaurs or from smaller to larger dragons, but having them as the only viable combat options at high level for Wild Order druids is disappointing.

2. Animal Form seems like something that should be available either as a lower level spell or as a weaker version with less powerful forms at an earlier level. I'd also like to be able to have characters have powerful common animal forms at higher levels that can go toe to toe with higher level characters. That would seem to be more in line with a nature druid concept. I loathe that animal forms are only useful for combat in a small window of levels in the middle. I'd like to see animal forms scale over levels in a similar way to animal companions with feats and abilities that enhance their combat.

[pauljathome]

Kodyboy wrote:

Wildshape is basically pointless in PF2. In addition to the crushing of the animal companion this makes the whole druid class useless.

Yup, my druid was TOTALLY useless in play. It was just my imagination when he was the last man standing and took down the big bad by himself. And it was my imagination when he and his bear consistently did more damage than the fighter (admittedly. the fighter was a pregen :-)). Oh, and his wisdom based skills NEVER came up, of course. No perception checks in the scenario, Survival was all but useless (well, except for those 4 or 5 times). And who needs spells?

Have you actually PLAYED the game? I strongly suspect not from your posts

[Taenia]

I ran though an adapted level 13 module on my druid with a fighter/wizard(rogue)/cleric. The druid and the fighter were the frontline. I noticed the following:

Accuracy and AC were close with the fighter always ahead. Druid did good damage. THe problem would be the subsequent levels, at 14 the fighter would advance but the druid would not in those terms. After that the Dragon Form ability fails to scale appropriately (numbers are off) and after 15th you just get your basic numbers making something like fighter dedication for the expert proficiency more important but your damage caps at level 13, other than via breath weapon.

You don't need to take all the feats. I used my 7th level spells for Elemental Form and took the Healing Transformation feat. This let me go into each battle down a few hp and heal up right away. Plus outside of a fight I was able to use spells to both buff and heal to make up for any extra damage I took over the fighter.

Fighter Dedication really helped to get Attack of Opportunity. With your size and reach the Druids tends to generate more of them then the fighter did by a longshot.

He was better at athletics than the fighter. Given his Gargantuan size he could trip anything and did several times to either improve are attacks or force an AoO from both of us.

Size became an issue several times where the smallest appropriate size was Huge for the level. We ran two fights twice and even using the Druid Vestments and level appropriate gear the damage downgrade was significant. I think there needs to be more options for smaller high level forms.

I would like some utility options, I did pick up some low level forms just in case like a 5th level Aerial and a 6th level Dragon. They did not get used but i liked the options.

One thing I did note was that in AP/Modules I did run out of Wild Shapes. But it seems that with a healing focused cleric and back up Druid you can actually push through a lot of fights. The 1 min duration means you need 1 use per fight and at level 13 i only had 4 (19 str, only had 3 wild order feats (wild shape, animal form, ferocious form) so I didn't get the fifth. We were forced to pull back after about 7 encounters, I spent one in Dragon form (6th) but it didnt hold up well and only the right spells/and luckily choosing the right option with my dragon at time of prep did it work out.

Overall I think the druid needs a slight combat buff at the expense of a resource (using spells to boost attack/AC/damage for example as part of wild shape or spell points or something.) Needs options for smaller forms at higher levels, would love to require less feats and have AoO be a wild druid feat (basically get an AoO when in a different form or something) The expert spell proficiency never came up for my build.

[Quickdraw]

The problem is Pest Form speed just suspends disbelief. If you think a human is 3 times faster than a cat, go chase your neighborhood stray. House cats on average are faster than humans.