Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Wild Shape Bear Sucks

I hope you’re right, and I would be cool with what you describe. Larian isn’t Blizzard I guess. As a gamer I’m pretty wary when a developer says “oh we will fix that in a later version and make it cool”. Two years later, nothing.

But I’ll have faith for now. Full release is only a few days away. But if I ding level ten and all I’ve got is a polar bear and an air elemental vs Circle of Land I shall return to these forums to gripe!

But I do. That was very much a land druid, in the trailer that showed the owlbear wildshape. You could tell because it had natural recovery charges.

Oooooo, transform into an Owlbear, talk to the Owlbear with the Cub, or just the cub.. I see so many thngs to try.

I agree the utility of the polar bear shape is limited. In my moon druid EA playthrough I only really found it useful for tanking at (iirc) level 2, and once I hit level 3-4, the extra HP were of limited use even with Barkskin, and I was as well using wolf for additional damage, especially with Flaming Sphere to trigger Pack Tactics.

I found that any moon druid options suffer from issues with the way EA handles concentration spells and very much hope that’s changed in full release, and that was my biggest problem with the class. I wouldn’t mind if the polar bear were made a bit better, but I actually wasn’t that fussed that it wasn’t always the best go-to option. I enjoyed working out how to best use the shapes we got in both combat and exploration so having incentives to mix things up was a plus.

I’ll be disappointed if the moon druid doesn’t continue to get some cool exclusive wildshapes as we progress. The Dire Raven at level 4 has some fun situational uses, but I think moon druids are hurting for a good general combat wildshape by level 5, so hopefully that’s what we’ll get for a subclass feature at level 6. But if we do, I think I’ll be reasonably happy with the early game wildshape progression of the moon druid.

Druid is underpowered compared to every other class. I brought this up a while ago.
1) Heat metal is broken, targets weapon only and not armor and doesn't give a choice.
2) Few if any good ranged options
3) most spells require concentration, without the other feats this is not helpful as the enemy AI prioritizes caster who have concentration.
4) animal forms are underpowered for combat, specifically the combat animal forms. Bear is particularly bad.

They could "solve" bear by giving it rage, otherwise it has no business tanking. It has no AC, it just has a lot of health which isn't very useful on its own for tanking. Its attack is also underpowered.

Its sad that the Rangers summoned 'pet' Boar is better than any druid form.

I'll take a Druid along over a Wizard any day of the week, though. I cannot count the amount of times I had to refiviy Gale.

The wild shape thing.. It;s not supposed to be the be-all-and-end-all ability of the Druid. It's there for utility. You *Can* tank as a bear, but if you outperform the Barbarian at it, that would be bad, too. It's a team-based game. Still, you get the bear's HP, and when it's out, you turn back without having taking damage. It's good stuff compared to say, a Cleric's Aid.

Wildshape is mostly for versatility, utility and infiltration shenanigens. Druids absolutely *rock* at that. Literally be a fly on the wall. This may translate a bit odd in a computer game, I admit. BUt hey; even if you're not in a good position to do something; quickly turn into a wolf or a bird and resposition. It gives you options. In the end, I will take options over raw power. It's just more fun.

I do feel that for a moon druid specifically, it should be possible for wildshaping to be the defining feature of the class and they should be able to melee combat in wildshape and be effective. Which, in fairness, I think they they pretty much can in EA, as long as we don't expect a wildshaped druid to be as effective as a warrior class in melee, which would be overpowered considering their versatility.

As mentioned, the polar bear isn't bad for tanking at the lowest level, with high enough HP to soak up damage, the taunt ability to attract aggro from squishier allies, and the ability to cast Barkskin to increase AC.

Past level 3, the bear is less useful outside of specific cases where taunt or a meat shield are handy, but using the wolf form in conjunction with the weird house-ruled Flaming Sphere can make the druid a pretty useful damage dealer (with the Sphere basically being a tanky summon that can be brought into combat to attract aggro, do at least a little damage and provide a nearby ally to the wolf to trigger its pack tactics advantage).

I still found the wolf the most generally useful combat shape up to level 5, though the Deep Rothe could be handy in places with a lot of shoving potential, but by the end of EA their HP was lagging which meant going into melee was dangerous as there was a high risk of my druid suddenly becoming a squishy human in the midst of the fight, but I'd be okay with that as long as we get another decent form at level 6. The other forms I found more useful for utility (with the moon druid's Dire Raven being my favourite for scouting, though hopefully it'll be still better in the full release as I was told when I reported it as a bug that the issues it has with dealing with encumbrance would be fixed.)

My biggest problem with the moon druid was that I feel it should be able to rely on effective use of concentration spells to help buff, control or damage while in wildshape to help make up the power gap between its melee wildshapes and the melee effectiveness of warrior classes. But maintaining concentration in EA is unreasonably hard, partly because enemy AI focuses on breaking concentration though if a character is in melee I think that's fair enough, but also because it is just checked too frequently, potentially many times per turn, and I believe is also broken by some conditions that wouldn't break it in tabletop. Plus, there are a few concentration damage spells that moon druids should be able to rely on to help boost their damage output, like Heat Metal, Moonbeam and Chain Lightning, by casting before using wildshape but then still be able to use their per turn abilities once changed (which is per RAW), but the way Larian had implemented them in EA meant that the activation features were disabled in wildshape as though we were casting new spells.

The thing is... We're talking about MOON DRUID here. The subclass that focuses exclusively on giving the druid powerful forms that are meant to be useful in combat.

But Larian's Moon Druid only get a couple of new forms in EA, and they aren't better than what any other druid has access to. Bear is about on par, if slightly worse, than wolf or giant spider, and those are forms every druid has access to.

This means that the ENTIRE subclass of Moon Druid is... Bonus action Wildshape and a weak heal at the cost of spellslots in form, and the heal doesn't matter since most enemies can one or two-shot your forms.

Meanwhile Land Druid gets wildshape forms just as powerful and versatile as what Moon Druid has access to but also gets Natural Recovery and access to an expanded spell list. It's just objectively the better subclass right now.

Moon Druid needs access to stronger forms or the entire point of the subclass is lost. Who wants to play a subclass that gets one actually unique feature for the entire game?

Exactly this.

I don't quite remember where I saw this, but I have seen a *lot* of available forms in one of the published videos. There's bound to be something good in there. The Owlbear especially is already becoming my favorite thing. It's funny, because that was never a creature Druids could shape into, but now that we have a movie that let the Druid do this, it's an expected feature.

This is very true, and quite frankly why I couldn't make Gale work. I wonder how enemy AI works in the full release. They stated that on the hardest difficulty, enemies will actively target concentration - but also that normal difficulty will mirror that which we've seen in EA. I have considerable faith in the devs. But, if this means that on hard, this targeting is only increased whilst on normal it is the same... Then I suspect the game favors non-casters more.

Back to wildshape - Yes, Wolves are quick and come with pack tactics. Spiders too give a lot of tactical ability, for instance when combined with a wizard casting Web.. Moon Druids should be able to shape into Elementals at higher levels. I admit I've never played TT with a druid that attained that, so not too sure how much of an advantage that is. I can definitely see why the bear form is underwhelming, though. I wonder if Halsin's [Were]Bear form differs from other Druids, or if he's at all able to shape into different forms