The Druid is among the most versatile classes in D&D, with a spell list that is concerned less with doing any one particular mechanical thing best, but more on adhering to the theme of being the "nature spellcaster."
In some ways, this makes them a Jack of All Trades (though not quite like the Bard).
Interestingly, in testing for "One D&D" (5.5e, D&D 2024, whatever you want to call it) they actually toyed with turning Wild Shape into "Channel Nature," aligning it more clearly with the Cleric and Paladin, with Wild Shape being one of the default options to use with it. In practice, this is actually still pretty much the case, but they just went back on this change. Most subclasses, and all the non-Moon subclasses in the new PHB, have some use for your Wild Shape charges other than turning into an animal. This was true for all three subclasses printed in Tasha's, but that idea had evidently not quite dawned on the designers in earlier subclasses.
There aren't a ton to go through here, as Druids have generally had among the fewest subclasses. We have the Circles of Dreams, of the Shepherd, of Spores, and of Wildfire (as Stars was reprinted in the PHB.)
Dreams: Yes
This might be controversial, as the concept here is admittedly a little vague. The Fey are often associated with nature, but they're also kind of the most "unnatural" part of nature, and I often picture some Fey as being in grand marble halls with some kind of chess motif (Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass are strong reference points for me regarding the Fey). This is also a subclass that had a pretty scattershot mechanical identity. But I really like the idea of a Druid subclass that leans hard into the surreal. That might mean a mechanical overhaul, but I'd be curious to see what they did with it.
Shepherd: Yes
This has actually been a pretty popular subclass, but given the profound redesign of summoning spells, some of its features are either not as powerful as they used to be or just kind of don't make sense - the 2024 rules don't care about "magical" bludgeoning, piercing, and slashing damage, for example, which was a pretty potent feature for this subclass. The fact that we're not summoning, generally, more than one creature at a time also really devalues things like the Bear totem (which I think of as the Juicy Cockroach thanks to Dimension 20's Unsleeping City). I think we could stand to have some more summoner subclasses like Conjurers and this in the new paradigm.
Spores: No
Now, I kind of hate to say this, as I've made it very clear in my previous posts that I really love a dark subclass. This made a ton of sense as the "Golgari Druid" subclass for Guildmaster's Guide to Ravnica. But I think outside of that context, it doesn't totally seem replicable, and I think we could go a different route for dark druids (personally, I'd love it if they made an alternative shapeshifting subclass to Moon druids that used bespoke stat blocks. I created a "Circle of Monsters" subclass as homebrew that did that.) There is some mechanical awkwardness to it - making the Halo of Spores use a reaction to deal damage is very odd, and it'd be nice if Symbiotic Entity were a bonus action. But I think maybe we can move on from this already twice-published subclass.
Wildfire: No
Don't get me wrong: I actually really love this subclass. But I think that it probably doesn't need much of an update. I wouldn't hate it if we got some little tweaks (summoning the Wildfire spirit as a bonus action would be nice, but it's in line with something like the Artillerist Artificer).
And holy crap, are we done? Yeah, it turns out that in all of 5E, there are only 8 Druid subclasses WotC has published. That might incline me to be more open to more reprints, but perhaps it actually means they really need to come up with some new ones!
No comments:
Post a Comment