Wild Shape - Viability of Animal Form in the long term?

[Arachnofiend]

One of the things that turned me off of playing Wild Shape Druids even though I quite like it conceptually in PF1 was how you had to transform into progressively larger and more extravagant forms to stay at full effectiveness - if your character concept was a wolf totem shaman, too bad, you better get used to the idea of transforming into a dinosaur at some point.

It doesn't seem like it's much different in PF2 either - even if you're building to make your attack bonus scale off of your own bonuses over those provided by Wild Shape your damage bonus is still dependent on the form you take, so even within animal form deciding to go Medium instead of Huge is reducing your damage significantly. This isn't even getting into all of the utility higher level forms can give you like reach, flight, etc.

It's possible I'm missing something here but I am going to have a very difficult time being enthusiastic about Wild Shape if the game assumes I'm eventually going to turn into a giant worm every combat no matter what my concept was.

[Perpdepog]

Isn't that what the animal instinct barbarian is meant to address? I believe that their ability to transform into their animal self is backed up by getting to use more of your own statistics than the typical transformation spell.

I'm not saying that that's what you should be playing-mostly because the advice of "play a different class" has never meshed well with me-I'm honestly asking because I've forgotten and don't have the book in front of me.

[citricking]

Yep, you have to change forms to be viable. I guess they could release new spells that updated forms to be viable for all spell levels, I hope they do that, but doubt it.

[Arachnofiend]

Perpdepog wrote:

Isn't that what the animal instinct barbarian is meant to address? I believe that their ability to transform into their animal self is backed up by getting to use more of your own statistics than the typical transformation spell.

I'm not saying that that's what you should be playing-mostly because the advice of "play a different class" has never meshed well with me-I'm honestly asking because I've forgotten and don't have the book in front of me.

Animal Instinct works really well for hybrid form characters but performs poorly if you're actually trying to turn into the animal - you can't do it at all before 8th and I'm pretty sure even at the level you get it Animal Rage is outright worse than just continuing to do your normal thing.

[Saldiven]

When I've run players with similar character concepts in the past, I would just let them re-skin the new shape to look like what they wanted. We'd figure out how to make it work as well as possible. That T-rex would be played like a really huge wolf, for example.

Obviously not a purely rules-legal way of doing it, but I doubt many people would complain.

[NemoNoName]

Just use the Wild Morph focus spell and say you are turning into Wolf instead of merely gaining the claws.