Best Feats for Spores Druid 5e
The Circle of Spores is sometimes called the weakest of the Druid subclasses, and for the life of me I cannot understand why. Yes, Halo of Spores and Spreading Spores are horrible features, no doubt about it. However, if you can focus for a moment on the features that are good, namely Symbiotic Entity, you’ll find some very interesting and powerful build ideas. Symbiotic Entity is just a house of a feature. A mountain of temporary hit points, a strange incentive to be in melee, and making our Halo of Spores actually a sort-of-maybe-occasionally useful ability.
This ability also heavily discourages multiclassing, making optimization a unique challenge for this subclass, and one that I come back to very frequently. I’d say this is probably my favorite Druid to think about and theory craft, and here are the feats that I keep coming back to. I do believe the Spores Druid is a bit more feat hungry than other Druids, so I am recommending you start with a feat at level 1 through your race.
Best Feats for Spores Druid 5e
Polearm Master (Lv 1): This plus Shillelagh and Symbiotic Entity actually makes this Druid a perfectly viable melee brawler at early to mid levels. We’re dealing d8+d6+Wis and then d4+d6+Wis each turn without expending basically any resources. Granted, this isn’t going to scale incredibly well into the late game, but finding ways to buff our attacks isn’t super hard to do, and the reaction attack when an enemy comes in range will always be nice to have for a little bonus to damage. Combining this with Crusher and Sentinel means that if we hit that reaction attack, our enemy is pushed 5ft away and cannot approach us at all. To be fair, that’s 3 feats so you’re not getting that till level 8, but it is something you can do!
War Caster (Lv 4): This Druid is specifically well equipped to be in melee, but you definitely don’t have to be if you don’t want to. Either way, War Caster is a feat that feels like it was built for Druids. We desperately need advantage on our concentration checks, we might be wanting to have our hands full, and replacing an opportunity attack with a spell is super cool. Full marks all around for this one.
Telekinetic/Crusher (Lv 8): This Druid doesn’t have any use for their bonus action unless you took Polearm Master, so I don’t recommend Telekinetic for those of you who did. Take Crusher here instead. Both provide a 5ft push but in slightly different ways. Neither way is so different that they aren’t useful for us. While I did previously say that Spreading Spores is a bad feature (and I stand by that statement), layering it overtop of an existing area of effect like a Web is a fine enough way to deal a little extra damage, and these feats help us keep enemies in both our spells and our spores.
Fey Touched (Lv 8): What can I say? Misty Step and Silvery Barbs are great spells that both fill holes in the Druid spell list. Teleportation is severely lacking on our list and the options we do have are really bad. Druids are also lacking in reaction options outside of Absorb Elements, and while this subclass does give us a reaction, it’s a terrible one so I’m not likely to use it very much.
Alert (Lv 8): All Druids love to go first to set up their control or summon spells, and we especially want to go first if we want to take as much advantage as possible from Symbiotic Entity. Ideally, we’d activate Symbiotic Entity just before combat begins, which is easier to do by using stealth and Pass without Trace, so coordination with your party to employ that strategy is vital to getting the most out of your features.
Resilient Constitution (Lv 12): With all of the durability enhancements and flavor that this subclass brings, I kinda feel like this should be our 10th level subclass feature instead. Either way, we want this to buff concentration checks and we ideally want to round our constitution up to a new modifier, so keep that in mind at character creation. With this and War Caster, our concentration is as sure as it could possibly be, and we’ll reliably be making the check even into the high tiers.
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