An Eclectic Collection of Fun and Effective Builds

[LudicSavant]

Got anything for Land Druids (pref. VHuman)?

So let's build a Land Druid! This post sort of turned into a whole mini-guide, so buckle in.

When one starts building a Land, a few questions tend to pop up:
1) I actually care about my AC if I'm not going to be a Moon bear all the time. How do I get my AC up? Is the non-metal armor thing a problem?
2) Which Land should I pick?
3) What the heck am I gonna do with my bonus actions?
4) What am I doing to be relevant when I'm not burning spell slots?

Armor Solutions
So, there have been numerous long and divisive threads about whether a Druid can opt to break the non-metal armor taboo.

If you or your DM is on the "don't break the taboo" side of the fence, don't panic, there are solutions. Note page 143 of the DMG, where one of the minor properties that can be assigned to armor is "strange material." Point this out to your DM and see if you can find armor made of bone, chitin, scales, ironwood, or any of the various precedents for non-metallic medium/heavy armor set by multiple editions of D&D lore.

A relevant Sage Advice can be found here, and it specifically calls out the possibility of finding things like non-metal chain mail, as well as the fact that finding such things is not out of line with their balance expectations for the Druid. So I'd generally recommend that route.

There is also the option of being a Mysteriously Medium Elephantman (from Guildmaster's Guide to Ravnica) and getting a Constitution-based AC calc as well as a bunch of good Druid features. Or of beng a Goblin who needs AC less because of their ability to hide as a bonus action. Lizardfolk can be an option too, but only really if you've rolled high on stats (otherwise, you won't have the Dexterity for their natural armor to really make a difference).

Which Land?
Okay, so let's take a look at the unique spells we get for each list.
Arctic: Slow, Cone of Cold
Coast: Mirror Image, Misty Step
Desert: Blur, Create Food and Water, Silence
Forest: Divination, Spider Climb
Grassland: Divination, Haste, Invisibility, Dream
Mountain: Lightning Bolt, Passwall, Spider Climb
Swamp: Darkness, Melf's Acid Arrow, Stinking Cloud
Underdark: Cloudkill, Gaseous Form, Greater Invisibility, Spider Climb, Stinking Cloud, Web

The easiest one to rule out is probably Swamp. Melf's Acid Arrow is mathematically garbage, Darkness is competing with other excellent Concentration options (including ones that do fairly similar things like Fog Cloud or Sleet Storm), and so is Stinking Cloud. It doesn't have a great listing of non-unique options to always have prepared, either.

Forest also has a pretty unexciting list of unique spells. Divination is nice, but Grassland has that and Haste. Spider Climb is on multiple Land lists, too, and competes for your Concentration.

Mountain gets Lightning Bolt. Yeah, it's not Fireball, but Druids don't get that. Your non-Concentration blasting choices would otherwise be limited to Tidal Wave or Erupting Earth. Or nothing, if you were core-only. But I rather like Tidal Wave. As for its non-unique spells, it's got Wall of Stone and Spike Growth.

Desert. The main point of interest here is Silence. It can help shut down casters, provided your party can also keep them from moving out of the area. It can also help you out in the Exploration pillar. And it's a ritual. Blur faces stiff Concentration competition, while Create Food and Water is largely unnecessary for a person who can cast Goodberry. Like Mountain, it also gets Wall of Stone.

Arctic will grab you Slow, which is a pretty solid CC. And while Cone of Cold isn't exactly the best blast in D&D, Druids seriously don't have a lot of competition in the no-Concentration AoE blast department. It also has one of the best selections of non-unique options to always have prepared, like Freedom of Movement, Sleet Storm, Spike Growth, and Hold Person.

Underdark has the most unique spells, but they're basically all Concentration, and the Druid has an excellent selection of Concentration spells already (it's easily the category of spells where they need the least help). Greater Invisibility is probably the main highlight. Just how good it is will depend largely on your party composition.

Grassland will hand out Haste, Invisibility, and Divination. Pass Without Trace and Freedom of Movement are nice things to always have prepared.

Coast leaps out at me as granting two good non-Concentration spells which have little competition for their role on the Druid spell list. For non-uniques, Freedom of Movement and Conjure Elemental are nice to have prepared.

Misty Step in particular is fantastic to have, especially since (unlike a Moon Druid) you generally want to avoid melees and grapples and the like. And Land Druids should always keep an eye out for bonus actions.

Bonus Actions
- Healing Spirit and, more situationally, Healing Word. One of the things to notice about Healing Spirit is that it upcasts quite well. You know that Lore Bard/Life Cleric Aura of Vitality combo that people were saying made for an insane healer in PHB-only? Well Life Cleric 1/Druid X can match or exceed that healing with a Healing Spirit cast with the same third level slot.
- Racial features. One fun option is the Goblin Hazard/Whip Druid who remains unseen throughout the fight (by bonus action Hiding at the end of every turn) while maintaining various hazards or summons and pulling people into them with Advantage Thorn Whips (occasionally appending Fury of the Small). These are the ninja guardians of nature. Another option is the Shifter from Wayfinder's Guide to Eberron.

- Misty Step (Coast Druid)
- Heat Metal uses a bonus action to maintain its effect. It's situational, but against certain enemies it's quite crippling.
- Flaming Sphere is yet another 2nd level spell option, though the damage is rather underwhelming unless you're able to land it multiple times per turn. Unfortunately, pushing someone into the sphere doesn't damage them by RAW. Which seems weird to me, but I don't write the rules. It's also competing with some Concentration options that don't take actions to maintain at all.
- Grasping Vine can pull someone around the map, but takes Concentration (which you'll often want for creating hazards you want to pull people into in the first place).
-Activate Shillelagh or Magic Stone or Flame Blade. Buuut we're often better off just throwing out a cantrip rather than what is basically a normal attack. Flame Blade is extra bad because it takes your Concentration. Magic Stone at least lets you hand out stuff to mooks who have little better to do with their actions. If you really want to have a half-decent melee attack with Shillelagh, my recommendation would be to try to pick up one of the SCAGtrips from somewhere (like Variant Half-Elf).

Resourceless Output
A Land Druid should not hoard their spell slots; the entire point is that you get more of them than other Druids. That said, I think my favorite option for resourceless combat contribution is Create Bonfire + Thorn Whip.

Create Bonfire is an AoE hazard (yes, a 5-foot cube can potentially hit multiple creatures), and can potentially deal its damage multiple times per round by knocking enemies through the area. It uses Concentration, but that doesn't matter nearly as much if you're not using spell slots anyways. You can also march it along at the front of the party, so that it's up right when a combat starts (and might even block off enemies who win initiative when you open a doorway or something). And it can provide a ranged light source while you're at it. It's worth noting that there's no risk of your allies taking damage from getting thrown into the fire, either, because you can just drop Concentration at any time, even when it's not your turn. Especially valuable if you have a good grappler or the like in your party.

Thorn Whip combos with this, dealing some damage and allowing you to pull enemies into hazards (like your Create Bonfire) or otherwise troublesome positions. If you can get a height advantage over your enemy, you can also use it to make them fall (and when a creature falls, they land prone). The fact that's it's magical piercing damage also means that basically nothing resists it.

If you're going the Goblin route, you even get to make the attack roll with Advantage (having hidden on a previous turn) and then use your bonus action at the end of your turn to Hide again!

While this works well enough with just you, try teaming up with (for example) a Warlock with Repelling Blast and a grappler frontliner and watch those bonfire dice really stack up!

Also note that having a teammate pressuring an enemy is one of the reasons why Thorn Whip's 10 feet of movement is often enough; an enemy will often try to circle out of the Bonfire but still be in range of your frontliner, so that they don't have to eat an OA. That keeps them within 10 feet of the bonfire, or gets your team an OA. Win/win.

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Now that I've answered the four questions I posed, here are some actual builds:

Build 5: The Lifeguard (Coastal Life Druid)
Note: Healing Spirit is a controversial spell widely regarded as overpowered. So much so, in fact, that Jeremy Crawford himself recommended a houserule for it. As such, this build will be assuming you're using that nerf, just because I expect that the spell will be accepted at more tables that way. If you're using the RAW version, you don't need to change anything; the build is just even better.

Edit: Hey, Healing Spirit got officially nerfed by errata! So good thing I wasn't counting on getting the old version

Disclaimer out of the way, here's a build that will provide lots and lots of healing.


VHuman Life Cleric 1 / Land Druid (Coast) X
Starting stats: WIS>CON>at least 14 Dex OR 15 Str
ASIs: Resilient (+1 Constitution), Max Wis, Lucky, Warcaster, Prodigy (Perception)
Cantrips: Thorn Whip, Create Bonfire, Guidance, Shape Water, Fire Bolt (Rakdos)
GGtR Guild Affiliation: Rakdos

This build focuses on pumping out massive amounts of healing (in and out of combat) while keeping you safe and using potent CCs (including potent non-Concentration CCs) while you're at it. And it can make people trigger the OAs of all of their summons and allies. And like all Druids, has the versatility of knowing their full spell list.

Armor
The Life Cleric dip means we're free to choose between either the Medium Armor or Heavy Armor route (and both are fine). Medium Armor means we can invest more in Dexterity for better initiative, Dex saves (which are more important than Str saves), and have a smoother progression (e.g. better AC with default / starting armors) at the cost of 1 less AC in the long run.

Healing
The main strategy here is to take advantage of the Life Cleric dip's synergy with the Druid spell list to give you some of the best healing in the game. The first component of this is Goodberry; at the end of an adventuring day, you basically can convert all of your leftover spell slots into a giant pile of potions for the next day. Every single slot spent on Goodberry in this way gives you a whopping 40 hp worth of potions (or 50 with a level 2 slot, 60 with level 3, etc due to how the Life Domain ability works), and doesn't cut into your spell slots for the following day. It just lasts 24 hours, so you can make all of these right before you Long Rest and have 'em in the morning. Hand them out to the party (especially minions and pets!) and now everyone can pick everyone up off the death gate.

The second component of this is Healing Spirit. Each tick with give you 1d6+4 healing, it can potentially tick on multiple allies multiple times per round (though it doesn't need to to be worth it), and it only takes a bonus action to cast it or move it around... and as a Land Druid you don't have a whole lot else to do with your bonus action. Also notable is that Healing Spirit upcasts very well. For example, with a third level slot it will heal 2d6+5 per tick, essentially making it a (mostly) superior version of the old Life Domain + Aura of Vitality combo that Lore Bards were doing in core. And that trick was already great.

Later on you get things like Heal to be able to just burst people back up to full. And you have options like Command and Plant Growth for powerful CC that doesn't mess with your Healing Spirit Concentration (and Land's Stride means that you can walk through that Plant Growth!). Abilities like Land's Stride, Nature's Sanctuary, Misty Step, and Mirror Image (combined with your reliable Concentration feats) means that disrupting you can be quite difficult for the enemy.

Altogether this can really cut into enemy DPR and make your party very hard to put down or keep down. You might initially think that 2d6+5 just sounds like a normal attack, but remember that healing auto-hits, while attacks don't, and that this is just a bonus action, and that it can tick multiple times per round. To get a proper sense of how good this healing is, you should be comparing your output to enemy DPR (counting miss chance and such) rather than just their potential damage-on-hit. Add onto that the fact that the party will be topped off on HP at the start of every new encounter and you're a force multiplier for your party's survivability.

Rakdos and Cleric spells
But wait, healing isn't your only good trick that not every Land Druid can do. I'm not going to reiterate a whole spell guide for Druids here though, and just stick to what Rakdos and Cleric can add for you. Our Rakdos affiliation means that not only can we summon a ton of creatures with spells like Conjure Animals, but after we make them swarm the enemy, we can cast Dissonant Whispers on them in order to make them trigger tons of OAs, dealing considerable damage. It also means that we can hit back with Hellish Rebuke if they think attacking the back line caster is a good idea. Or cast Haste. Or Fire Wall as another thing we can Thorn Whip people through. It also means that we get an actually decent ranged damage cantrip, which Druids usually don't have.

Cleric, on the other hand, mostly adds Bless (an excellent use of Concentration), Command (a rare non-Concentration CC which can be upcast as an AoE, very handy), Sanctuary (another bonus action! And no Concentration! We need those for Land Druids!), and Guiding Bolt (handy at low levels). That's about it for the notable adds.

If you would rather not be affiiated with Rakdos, see "variants" below.

Feats
Resilient is there mainly to make your Concentration better. Lucky does that and also a bunch of other things. Warcaster is also mainly there to make your Concentration better. Prodigy will make you spot everything. The order of feats can be changed up as you like, except that Resilient and Max Wis should be first, and Prodigy provides more benefits the higher your Proficiency is. If you rolled for stats and thus don't need to spend as many ASIs maxing Wisdom, see "variants" for further options.

Cantrips
We use Thorn Whip and Create Bonfire in the way described above in "Resourceless Output." Guidance is spammed liberally out of combat. Shape Water is to be used creatively. Fire Bolt gives us a long range option.

Variants:
- Some other good races for this include Loxodon, Shifter, Hill Dwarf, and Aarakocra. Stats should be adjusted accordingly. For example, if you're a Hill Dwarf with Point Buy, dump Strength, start with 17 Con, and bump it to 18 when you get Resilient.
- The Observant feat is excellent and synergistic with some of the above races. Great choice if you have an odd Wisdom score.
- Alert is always a goodie.
- The Defensive Duelist feat will give you an at-will +6 AC reaction at high levels. It could be worth considering for the level 19 ASI. You just have to hold a weapon, not actually attack anyone with it.
- Prodigy can of course just be augmenting whatever skill you like.
- Magic Initiate could give you a better damage cantrip at higher levels, like Toll the Dead. And grab you a familiar or the like while you're at it.
- If you drop the Rakdos affiliation, replace "Fire Bolt" with something like "Frostbite" or "Mold Earth."

Build 6: Goblin Hazard Druid

Goblin Land Druid 20
Starting stats (Point Buy): 17 Dex / 16 Con / 15 Wis
ASIs: +1 Wis/Dex (18/16), +2 Wis (18), +2 Wis (20), +2 Dex (20), Lucky
Land type: Either Coast, Underdark, Grassland, or Arctic.
Guild Affiliation options: Rakdos has some good adds if you're gonna take one (Dissonant Whispers + summons is a thing). Orzhov is an option for Spirit Guardians (which also has synergy with Thorn Whip).

This solves the "Land Druids don't have a lot of bonus actions" problem by being a Goblin. Being a Goblin means you spend all your time stealthed, You break stealth to do whatever your Action is (with Advantage if it's an attack, like Thorn Whip or Fire Bolt with Rakdos), then use your bonus action at the end of your turn to return to stealth. Being a Goblin also means you can tack on some extra damage in a pinch with Fury of the Small.

You basically set down Concentration effects (often hazards such as Sleet Storm or Spike Growth or Create Bonfire, or summons such as Conjure Animals) and harass people with Thorn Whip or other non-Concentration spells. And just do pretty much all the standard Land Druid things while spending most of your time stealthed. Take advantage of Land's Stride to help kite people.

This guy teams up well with things like grapplers or Repelling Blast Warlocks.