Circle of the Shepherd Druid 5e

Review by Sam West, Twitter:@Crier Kobold

Druids are the core summoner in 5th edition. Want to conjure animals and fey to overwhelm your foes in a stampede of hooves? Conjure Animals has your back. Summon Beast is a new addition that gives you a cheap, efficient companion you can get back over and over for bonus attacks and excellent utility.

Circle of the Shepherd is the dedicated summoning support option available to druids; because summoning is one of Druid’s strengths anyway, Shepherd by default will be doing powerful things. Its low-tier features are excellent, and while Mighty Summoner has some issues, the remaining features make up for the middling middle levels.

2nd Level: Speech of the Woods and Spirit Totem

Speech of the Woods is similar to Speak with Animals stuffed together with Sylvan language proficiencies. As a druid, this is something I just always find myself wanting: a way to clearly and in-game language communicate somewhat with animals. This ribbon gives you exactly that.

Spirit Totem provides the core play pattern empowerment option; as a bonus action, you get a 30-foot radius boon sphere with varying empowerment options for various situations. It recharges on short or long rest, making it something you can regularly use on big, splashy encounters.

You pick a Spirit on use from Bear, Hawk, and Unicorn.

Bear is a bunch of temporary hit points with advantage on Strength checks and saves, making it at its best at padding out your group and offering some grapple assistance.
Hawk gives you a new reaction to grant advantage to creatures making attacks, which is excellent in almost every environment. On top of that, everyone gets advantage on Perception checks, which can be great against hidden enemies.
Finally, Unicorn does a similar perception boon to Hawk, and instead of a reaction to grant advantage, empowers your healing spells by letting single target efficient healing heal everyone in the area for a good chunk of hit points that scales exceptionally with level. You really want access to Healing Word for this to shine brightest, and if this is a route you want to go I’d highly recommend finding ways to get it on your sheet, but even without, Unicorn can have enough impact in the mid and upper tiers to justify using, especially if the whole group is banged up after three or four encounters prior and you have tools to heal efficiently and cheaply.

Of the three, Hawk is definitely the go to for almost every encounter, especially in the low tiers. Reactions are hard to come by; having a tool to grant advantage over and over can keep your rogue’s Sneak Attack turned on and give your paladin more opportunity to fish for crits. Bear is pretty niche, but might be something you use in efficient parties who readily are getting advantage on their own, or when going against Ropers or other grapplers. Unicorn is at its best with Healing Word in the upper tiers alongside powerful summoning magic and long-duration concentration effects; it's something you’ll probably start using more the later the game gets that will expand your party’s hit points massively.

6th Level: Mighty Summoner

Mighty Summoner does two things: gives most of your summoned creatures bonus hit points, and lets their attacks overcome mundane damage residences.

The elephant in the room is that the Summon X spells forwent hit dice, making them gain no benefit from the first portion. Summon Draconic Spirit, released later, does have hit dice, and works otherwise identically to Summon Beast and Summon Fey. If you want your summons to benefit from this, I’d reference it and talk to your DM about what looks like an oversight to me.

Still, Conjure Animals and Conjure Woodland Beings still benefit from Mighty Summoner’s bonus hit points to help your swarms stay nice and healthy. Ignoring damage resistance is an unfortunate necessary evil; it's nice to have, but hardly feels like a feature.

Fortunately, summoning magic is so good anyway having any incentive to use it will result in you having a good time. These effects are innately game-warping, and while Mighty Summoner doesn’t add a lot of power to them, it doesn’t really need to.

10th Level: Guardian Spirits

Guardian Spirit enhances your Spirit Totem by granting it a persistent healing effect that boosts your summoned creatures’ hit points. Healing with no action cost is a lot better than healing with action costs. Every one of your beasts having a Regenerate-like feature that restores 5 or more hit points a round will help them take an extra hit or two before going down, extending their usefulness further should they be taking hits.

It only affecting summoned creatures pushes monsters to want to kill you first, as if you go down, so do the summoned creatures. This can be tricky to navigate, and because the option gets nothing else at 10th level, will sometimes feel like a non-feature. Guardian Spirit rewards positioning and using your summoned creatures for their hit points, which you’re granting them plenty of. This paired with Unicorn Healing Word spam can result in summoned beasts that feel unkillable in the totem zone, which is a pretty sweet fantasy that is limited majorly by the region it's locked to.

14th Level: Faithful Summons

Faithful Summons is a mess of a capstone; a 9th level Conjure Animals when you go down is a big, splashy effect that even lets you select what beasts are summoned. There will be some munchkin opportunities where you’ll deliberately drop to 0 with a heal at the ready to get your concentration-free 9th-level Conjure Animals prior to a major fight, which can wildly swing party balance out of wack.

This kind of effect is so difficult to design, and I think this option fails spectacularly. You’re encouraged to die to get a more powerful effect than any other feature you have access to, and if you don’t go to 0, this feature has no text. Your only means of controlling it comes with deliberately hurting yourself to get the effect off, which is the best use case for it. When it works, you’re getting four multi-attack CR 2 beasts with a bunch of bonus hit points with the potential of more healing from your Spirit Totems. Want four cave bears, each making two attacks with +7 to hit and 1d8/2d6+5 attacks each? Want that on TOP of your other concentration slot for ANOTHER Conjure Animals, usually involving sixteen to twenty-four giant owls? You can have it all!

At least they gated the Conjure Animals to its most fair mode, that being the CR 2 beast option. There is just fundamentally a problem in design when a feature requires you drop to function; it acts as a non-feature when you’re succeeding, and isn’t something you can really choose to use unless you’re deliberately hurting yourself, which feels entirely unintended and cheesy. Given the rest of this subclass is dedicated to boosting the durability of your summoned companions and allies, you’re not going to be regularly getting into the danger zone yourself. At least there is some comfort in knowing if the monsters do opt to ignore your summoned beasts, them hitting you will simply result in summoning EVEN MORE beasts!

All Together

Summon Beast, Summon Fey, and Conjure Animals are excellent spells that will change how your DM manages the game. Circle of the Shepherd encourages these casts by boosting the summoned creature’s hit points while providing you and your allies a Spirit Totem zone of boons. Mighty Summoners is a passive improvement to make your summons effective against the majority of monsters while empowering their hit point total, which expands nicely with multiple castings. Guardian Spirit can create cool “animal defender” feelings with regenerating beasts controlling the zone you set up with your totem. Faithful Summons is a horrendously designed feature that will range from no utility whatsoever when you aren’t regularly going down to utter abuse when you drop yourself to zero to summon them, then heal up off of Regenerate or some similar big heal effect.

You can play a fair Shepherd that probably just leans heavily on Summon Beast and Fey with Hawk totem giving you a bit more of a supportive feel. With Conjure Woodland Beings and Animals are both game-breaking effects that you’ll want to talk to your DM about before using, and are empowered further by this subclass. Want to lean into the summoner fantasy? This is a perfectly reasonable way to do it.

Thank you for visiting!

If you’d like to support this ongoing project, you can do so by buying my books, getting some sweet C&C merch, or joining my Patreon.

The text on this page is Open Game Content, and is licensed for public use under the terms of the Open Game License v1.0a.

‘d20 System’ and the ‘d20 System’ logo are trademarks of Wizards of the Coast, Inc.
and are used according to the terms of the d20 System License version 6.0.
A copy of this License can be found at www.wizards.com/d20.