Struggling to make use of my Druid

[NathanVenture]

I've been playing through Icewind Dale for the first time and - apart from the second floor of Dragon's Eye - I've found my party (consisting of a Bard, Fighter/Thief, Barbarian, Fighter/Cleric, Druid and Sorcerer) more than capable of handling every challenge Insane difficulty has thrown my way up to early(?) Chapter 6. However, while the other five members of my party continue to get stronger as I make progress, it feels as though my Druid peaked in Chapter 2.

Entangle, Spike Growth, and Wall of Moonlight aren't anywhere near as useful now as they were early on. Pixie Dust and Iron Skins are great, but a third arcane caster could've done that and plenty more. Lastly, Alicorn Lance is the only level 2 divine spell my Druid has memorized and I admittedly don't use it as often as I should.

Equipment-wise my Druid is faring poorly, having just now upgraded from Yeti Hide Armor (from Chapter 1) to Umber Hulk Plate, but still spending most fights spinning a Sling +1 from the rear, with nothing else worth mentioning.

If anyone experienced with IWD Druids has pointers on how I can get mine to contribute more than just healing or extra missile damage, I'm all ears... as long as it doesn't involve enemy loot being destroyed.

[philos3]

Druid Spells (in general IMHO) are better in IWD than BG. A couple of great spells I did not see you list are:

4th level spell Static Charge (not available without a mod in BG). It is a devastating spell does 2d8 plus 1d8 per caster level. So a 7th level druid can hit (no chance of a miss) an enemy with 9d8. that will drop a lot of the potential opponents.
While it's one bad aspect is only going off once per turn (not round) the discharge is automatic and the spell last for 9 turns which can last you through most of a map area. Plus leave you free to cast other spells or shoot missiles.

5th level druid spells Stone Spikes (also not in BG) and Insect Plague (this is in BG). Stone Spikes are Spike Growth on steroids. Twice the damage plus slows those in the AOE by 35% (so they get hit more often). Insect plague is a great anti-mage/cleric spell. Granted there are not a huge number of them in IWD but this spell neutralizes them. The spell causes damage every round for several turns, results in 100% spell casting failure, AND there is no saving throw. IIRC the damage occurs every couple of seconds and can do a potential 100 HP of damage (I think).

Avenger subclass of Druids are a good offensive choice too. They receive some mage spells like web and lightning bolt as they advance in their spell list.

[NathanVenture]

I've avoided weapons/spells that deal double digit cold/lightning damage for almost my entire playthrough since I've had bad experiences with them deleting non-essential loot, though I should give Static Charge a shot whenever I encounter a map populated by enemies with little to nothing of value.

Stone Spikes doesn't appear to do more damage than Spike Growth, but it wouldn't be the first time the actual effects of a spell differ from its description, or even its name. I'll also make sure to keep an Insect Plague memorized and try it on the next caster I see. As for sixth and seventh level spells, I'm trying Dolorous Decay and Creeping Doom - which I'm presuming are Druid specific - though I can't say whether or not they're good yet.

Regarding the Avenger suggestion, I think I'm a little too far into the game to change up my party and start over, but it's something to consider if I do a casual playthrough after 100% achievements.

[a_delo3]

Druids are very powerful across the whole game but become really insane once can start to spam elementals and shambling mounds (if are wondering how powerful these things are, just figure that can take down the endgame bosses of both the main campaign and heart of winter sidequest).
Once have summoned your minions turn into an elemental* and join the fray.

As far as I know the only spells capable of deleting loot are disintegrate (I make liberal use of this spell because good loot is found on bosses and bosses usually do not fail the save), polymorph others and flesh to stone; direct damage ones leave all the crap on the ground ready to be looted but are not the best asset of a druid with the notable exception of call lightning: this should not be underestimated because can quickly clear a few otherwise quite nasty areas in Trial of the luremaster and heart of winter expansions; I however prefer to cast it via the nymph (4th level call woodland being, an extremely good spell).

The other direct damage spells are almost ok if are playing at low difficulties, but hardly worth a slot otherwise: I like the animation of the wave so keep one in the book as a stylish finisher but that's all.
Static charge can be decent if plan to have your druid close to the heat but goes off once a turn, not once a round like the outdoor version, so overall it is not as good as call woodland being or giant insect (the rivals for 4th level slots); it is more useful if are playing as a shapeshifter or tend to spend a lot of time shapeshifted (cast ironskin, cast static charge, turn into werewolf/elemental and go for the kill).
Nature's beauty is good because inflict blindness w/o save in a decent area (and more useful than what you may think, especially in HoF) and occasionally may even kill something.

Dolorous decay and creeping doom are very bad (the latter is very different from BG2 and creates 5 frail minions): the best l6 spell is summon fire elemental, followed by wondrous recall; fill your l7 slots with stalkers and once you got your fill add one Nature's beauty.
Insect plague instead works just as in BG2 so quickly disable enemy spellcasters of any kind.

*if plan to use wildshapes be sure to put one pip into single-hand weapon style to score critical hits on 19 and 20

[Hemmingfish]

One of my favourite Druid spells is the level 4 spell Giant Insect. Bombardier Beetles have an area of effect damage + stun effect that they periodically use, usually immediately after summoning, and Boring Beetles are decently tanky against physical damage. That one spell is half the reason I take druids.

[Black Sheep Inc]

Druids make for fantastic summoners, to the point that I'd say Totemic Druid is (arguably) the best in that role in the game.

[NathanVenture]

Oddly I was under the impression that cold/lightning overkills destroyed loot going into IWD, and I thought I saw it happen when I killed an enemy with The Snow Maiden's Reaver, though in hindsight that might've been the fault of its instant kill effect.

I haven't been using summons in my playthrough apart from Call Woodland Beings for early game Cure Mass Light Wounds. If they truly are that good on their own, then I can't wait to see them boosted with all the AOE buff spells at my disposal.

[a_delo3]

IME the best kits are shapeshifter and avenger, followed by vanilla.
Shapeshifter is extremely effective at mangling things, avenger has the best low-level spells so has a slight edge over other kits if prefer to play the druid more as a caster.
Totemic trades shapeshifting (which is very good in IWD) with the ability to summon weak minions but since the game cap regular minions to 6 these spirits are rather pointless.

Call woodland being is a sort of swiss army knife: with a single spell slot the druid has access to hold monster (one of the best spell in the game!), domination, charm, call lightning, barkskin and of course mass cure light wounds.
The nymph however is not very good at bashing things: for this task the bugs summoned by giant insect are way better.
They are tough, deal a lot of damage and have a fairly powerful aoe acid/stun ability.
Choosing how many slots fill with either spell may be somewhat difficult; since you have a cleric which likely can spam animate dead (another excellent spell) I'd say to take a few more nymphs and a few less bugs

Snow maiden reaver has a low chance to turn the target into ice so indeed this is what happened (just like when hit something with black blade of disaster).

[NathanVenture]

I've come back to report that I finished the base game of IWD, and while I didn't use Druid summons for the final boss, I did turn my Druid into a more formidable frontliner than the Fighter/Cleric with the power of Iron Skins, Armor of Faith, Entropy Shield, Storm Shield and Shapeshifting. If I were to start the game over again with the knowledge I have now, I would keep the Bard, Fighter/Thief, Barbarian and Sorcerer mostly the same, change the Fighter/Cleric to a Priest of Lathander/Tyr and change the Druid to a Fighter/Druid.

[Warlock]

Fighter/Druid is fun.

If you do, I recommend doing a dual-class human fighter/druid vs. a half-elf multi-class.

The extra melee comes in handy early on, you can specialize/master weapons/skills, and then level up fast in Druid when you make the switch.

You can make an obnoxiously strong PC that way.

Single-class Druid , I think has more headroom in BG2, but there the fighter/druid and fighter/cleric are really strong in high levels.

I think there's spells you might have been missing or under-utilizing, and we could note that the Druid spell lists changed from original IWD to Enhanced Edition.

[NathanVenture]

Guilty as charged in regard to the lack of spell experimentation, and yes I was thinking that Berserker or Kensai 13/Druid would be the way to go (on Insane difficulty of course) - though the stringent stat requirements and ethos restrictions for Druid dual classing would likely render them a pea-brained paperweight for the first half of the game, especially if I go with Kensai.

[a_delo3]

If want a druid capable of frontline I suggest shapeshifter: not only it is an incredibly capable brawler (for the very first steps is stronger even than full-fledged warriors and needs little if any in term of equipment. Later the greater werewolf is incredibly tanky and most of its tankiness is built-in so will not be affected by dispel or ambushes) but gives you also full spell progression; also druidic spells have long to very long casting times so you do not want to sling spells in the middle of the fray anyway (and if some orc is gutting your druid it is way safer to shapeshift into something rather than trying to protect the bacon with ironskins).
For my last L1 HoF however I took avenger, mostly because find really fun the elemental shapes and having chromatic orb and web is pretty handy (the rest of the lineup was shaman, barbarian, skald, sorcerer, shadowdancer. With a L1 party the game is hardest at the beginning, while become more or less as classic rules by the severed hand so I opted for single-class characters due to faster leveling).

[Daboss]

Originally posted by NathanVenture:

Guilty as charged in regard to the lack of spell experimentation, and yes I was thinking that Berserker or Kensai 13/Druid would be the way to go (on Insane difficulty of course) - though the stringent stat requirements and ethos restrictions for Druid dual classing would likely render them a pea-brained paperweight for the first half of the game, especially if I go with Kensai.

Fighter/druid is the way to go or just level 9 berserker to druid. Then you just miss 0,5 attacks. It goes very fast to level upp druid from that point. For me i see the druid as good tank.

[[‡]=Storky=[‡]]

I've tried Shaman ( Druid without book ) with in a quite standard party on Heart of Fury Mode. Monsters there are quite harmless but very very beefy.

I was combining the Mage's AOE spells with the Druid ones. Suprisingly Druid spells deal more damage overall. They have higher damage potential.

Also gotta say that Druid spells in this game have quite short casting time.

[[‡]=Storky=[‡]]

Originally posted by a_delo3:

Druids are very powerful across the whole game but become really insane once can start to spam elementals and shambling mounds (if are wondering how powerful these things are, just figure that can take down the endgame bosses of both the main campaign and heart of winter sidequest).
Once have summoned your minions turn into an elemental* and join the fray.

Amazing, I thought to kill Belhefeit you have to use +3 weapons with super low THAC0 of a warrior. Do these elementals have this?

I wanted to make a summon centered party, but to kill the bosses I have to keep 3+ fighters in my party

[a_delo3]

Sure, they hits like magical weapons and can do the job by themselves both for the big bad demon and for the evil dragoness in heart of winter.
The bugs are fine too: they will not kill the big demon but are more than enough for the small serpent-like one in the volcano (yxunomei or something along this line): by then the shamblers are not available even with the hughe xp boost from HoF but a steady supply of bugs may keep the serpent-demon-lady stunned (and use their little pincers to remove big chunks of her :) ).

IME 3 full time fighters are too many for HoF since for the first chapters are basically useless (they start to hit things from L10 onward and need a fair deal of stuff to survive in the fray for a few rounds; before hitting L10 the best they can do is to pelt baddies with a sling and before getting out the vale of shadow will be basically equipped with crap).

On open air areas call lightning is indeed the most damaging thing you can cast, especially if there are multiple instances of it running: only wail of the banshee may come close to such degree of pain.
On closed areas however I found the direct-damage druid spells somewhat underwhelming; the only one I used a lot was the L3 arcane lightning bolt allowed to the avenge because, despite being capped at 10d6, it could be made to bounce for big pain in those winding corridors and the avenger could cast a higher # of these than even a sorcerer thanks to the wisdom bonus (also shamblers are highly resistant to electric damage so would not risk toasting my boys). On the other hand skulltrap (d6 no cap) and abi dalzim (d8, no cap) could clear a room at once. Unfortunately including the party and their minion if badly aimed :)