Best Feats for Druid 5e
by Prince Phantom
The Druid is one of the most complex classes in the game, but if you dive into this class and find out how it ticks, it will also be one of the strongest of all 5e classes. Personally I love this complexity, and I feel like it has a place in this game especially since we have plenty of very simple classes that are easy for beginners.
What exactly makes the Druid so complex is two-fold: Wildshape and summoning spells. Wildshape is pretty much just a utility feature for everyone but Moon Druids, but every Druid should be taking advantage of powerful summoning spells like Conjure Animals and Conjure Woodland Beings. Druids only need a couple of feats to be optimal, which is great because it allows us to take more flavorful feats at higher levels. We’ll be looking for feats that improve our defenses and spellcasting.
Best Feats for Druid 5e
War Caster (ASAP): Druids will typically hold a shield and their spellcasting focus, which strangely means that they have to drop one to cast spells that have a somatic component but not a material one. Yes, that is weird and confusing and you should probably ignore that rule, but even if you ignore it you should still take this feat. Advantage on concentration checks is very important, as a quick check of the Druid’s spell list reveals that almost all of their best spells are concentration. We probably won’t be getting many opportunity attacks but it will be nice to actually be able to do something useful when we do.
Telekinetic (Lv 4): A couple of subclasses provide us with something to consistently do with our bonus action. A 5ft shove doesn’t sound like much, but we can use it to deal extra damage with spells like Moonbeam and other damaging area of effect spells. If we plan on using summoning spells every combat (which is a perfectly valid strategy) this becomes a bit less useful, however, we can still benefit off of spells cast by other players like a Cleric’s Spirit Guardians.
Alert (Lv 4): Druids are a unique brand of control caster. Our basic play pattern starting next level will be to summon 8 beasts and use them to deal damage and keep the board gunked up. This keeps us and our allies safe and wastes a ton of enemy actions. This strategy works best when we go early in initiative, as it becomes much harder to put a wolf in between us and the orc when the orc is 5ft in front of us. The other benefits are nice too, but the initiative bonus is the most important to us.
Resilient (Lv 8): Take this for Constitution and never fail a concentration check again thanks to this and War Caster. Advantage equates to about +4.5 for the roll, and assuming a constitution of at least 14 with this feat, you will have a +5 to your save. This means you would have to roll below a 5 on both die to fail the standard DC 10 concentration check, and this continues to scale with our proficiency bonus, getting even better as soon as next level.
Lucky (Lv 12): So few feats synergize with the average Druid that we are already at the point where we can consider Lucky. Now we really shouldn’t be failing any concentration checks, even higher DC ones. We’ll also use this to prevent crits against us and reroll other important saves that we fail.
Tough (Lv 12): We will take Tough for the same reason everyone else takes Tough; we need more hp at these high levels. Monsters are hitting much harder and our d8 hit die is looking a little small at this point. It’s also much harder to simply keep enemies at bay with our summons at this level, as many enemies can teleport or get to us in other ways, so we should be expecting to be targeted more often. This is especially true if we are fighting intelligent enemies (common at this level), as they will know to target the caster to break their concentration rather than mow down the summons themselves.
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