Talk:Circle of the Wildlife (5e Subclass)

I moved ConcealedLight's comments to the talk page, which are as follow:

• Animal Companion. Consider changing this to a recommended list of beasts and putting a CR limit as well as a note to dungeon masters on allowing players to pick a beast of choice. You could also have this CR limit increase at certain levels but be careful and considered with doing that.

• Companion's Bond.

I understand this restriction is to stop low level stomping but consider lifting it when the druid reaches a certain level.

Consider added a feature here that allows you companion to share traits with you, for example the wolfs Pack Tactics or the black bears Keen Smell.

The understanding of drudic is already implyed in the first line.

You could arm your Ape with a spear and it wouldn't suffer negatives from using it ask it gains the user proficiency bonus. Monsters don't have proficiency bonus's so I reworded it to better reflect what they get.

The fluff at the beginning is to show that all your companions in your time as a druid get this health increase not just the one you have with you when you level up.

Allowing a stat increase of 1 per normal druid levels is better and more streamline. Also, monsters don't have a cap on stats at 20, that restriction is only for players so saying "as usual" isn't accurate, however, keep that restriction and if you want to lift it, lift it at level 10.

And here are my replies on the comments:

• In General. I benchmarked the Unearthed Arcana version of the ranger, which greatly revised the Animal Companion feature. I do assume that you might have seen some differences between my wordings and the wordings from Player's Handbook, and I really should have told you beforehand. Anyways, I'm using this UA article as a baseline, and will explain my stances based on this.

• Animal Companion. The revised ranger has a caveat concerning expanding companion list, on page 6 of the PDF file linked above. It specifies, "As a rule of thumb, a beast can serve as an animal companion if it is Medium or smaller, has 15 or fewer hit points, and cannot deal more than 8 damage with a single attack. In general, that applies to creatures with a challenge rating of 1/4 or less, but there are exceptions." I was thinking of this rule as a guideline, maybe I can explicitly specify on the page.

• Companion's Bond. Thank you for the comprehensive comments, but I think I too have to make some comments.

Erasing Multiattack is the part of the revised ranger things.

Adding traits... That must be awesome, thank you for commenting on that. I'll see if I can implement that.

I was just, you know, in case some picky DM might rule out like, "Your Druidic is a feature, not a proper language, so your animal companion doesn't know that." But yes, understanding all languages kinda imply that all.

Actually monsters do have proficiency bonus, you can see page 8 from your Monster Manual, as well as the caveat on page 9 concering armors and weapons. Again, the wordings are based on the revised ranger stuffs, and I wasn't assuming that an ape as an animal companion would wield a spear, the idea never occurred to me until you mentioned it. Maybe you can train your ape to wield a spear, perhaps? (Downtime activity will be a bit complicated, though, but just think of it, it's awesome as heck!)

Now this is a tricky part - Hit Dice and ability score improvement. I'm using, yet again, the revised ranger as a baseline. Ranger's animal companion gains Hit Dice improvement every level, and five ASIs. Druids, on the other hand, could do with maybe a little less, considering that they already have awesome spellcasting powers and Wild Shape feature that makes them a good bruiser. So I decided, maybe half as much as ranger's animal companion would do. Hence additional Hit Dice for every two levels, plus two ASIs, in par with druid's archetype features.

Your suggestion on ASI is valid, though, although that might be a bit too strong, perhaps. A +1 to one ability score on every level means +17 at 20th level, which is absurdly high even for a beast. I didn't want to risk any further, so I settled down to the easiest way possible.

In short: Thanks for the comments, and although there seems to be some differences in ideas between you and I, your comments did wonders to improve my work further. I would work on the revision after some contemplation, and would implement your comments in that process as much as possible. Again, thanks for the comment, and thanks for having me! --WeirdoWhoever (talk) 06:07, 27 August 2017 (MDT)

---

Neat-o! I must of have completely skimmed over the part about proficiency, thanks. In regards to the ASI I meant that when the druid gets an ASI they can increase one of their animal companions stats by 1 meaning they would only get 5 points to add in total I didn't mean they would increase their companions stats once per level gained that'd be crazy. I haven't played the druid myself and my only time seeing it played it wasn't that good comparatively so my suggestions are coming from more of a "how can I make this archetype strong enough to be comparable to the moon druid and then other classes." Anyways good luck, hope you players like it and if you want me to take another swing at something I'm in the tavern or drop in on my talk page with a link.