Moon Druid Wild Shape - Buff at Higher Levels

Moon Druids are a popular choice in many games.  At low levels they have huge effective hit point pools from two animal shapes and then their natural amount.  They make great tanks at certain levels.  Debatable they are too good at these major step levels.  There big power steps are:

• Level 2 -- First access to wild shape
• Level 4 -- Swimming forms
• Level 6 -- CR2 Wild shapes
• Level 8 -- Flying forms 
• Level 10 -- Elemental forms

They receive bumps to wild shape at 9, 12, 15, and 17 when more shapes become available, but those bumps are smaller because of narrow choices (there just aren't a lot of beasts in high CR categories) and they fall behind other melee attackers on the accuracy front.

In this post I will look at two homebrew rules that buff these relative weaknesses.

First, I want to credit the page that gave me these ideas.  It can be found on terminallynerdy.com authored by Clay (no last name given).  The two rules he suggests are:

1. Use the Druid's proficiency bonus not the beasts,
2. Allow shifting into plant type creatures in addition to beast.

I think these changes do a good job of filling in the relative weakspots of the class.  I'll discuss each below, following that, I will include a table that shows the to hit bonus of a cross section of shapes at various druid levels. 

Druid's Proficiency Bonus Not The Beast's

Since attack bonuses are fundamentally a stat bonus plus a proficiency.  This rule simply replaces the beasts proficiency with the player character's,  Doing this has zero effect for druids below 5th level.

It improves the accuracy of beast shapes at level 5,  9, 12, 15, and 18.  Corresponding to the increased proficiency at each level.  This gives druids in wild shape an accuracy bump that corresponds with other classes.  Conveniently, none of those bump levels are existing bumps in druid power. 

This also has the effect of extending the useful life of forms.  Under RAW a 12th level druid who wants a combat form really, really wants to be elephant (76 HP, 12 AC, +8 Hit, 3d6+10 damage) as a combat form.  Its basically the only CR4 choice.  Other melees who have capped their primary stat will be attacking with a +9 to hit, maybe more if they have a magic weapon.  This rule helps lower CR creatures, a Dire Wolf (37 HP, 14 AC, +5 Hit, 2d6+3 damage) would have a +7 to hit bonus.  It's not a great combat choice, but that additional +2 to hit makes it more viable.

This rule does place a bit more burden on the Moon Druid to calculate +hit bonuses.  They can use the lower bonus, if they don't have time or interest in calculating and tracking +hit with this method.

Determining Creatures Proficiency Bonus

Determining the creature's proficiency bonus is easier to do mechanically than it might appear.  Attack bonuses are calculated by adding the appropriate stat (typically STR or DEX) bonus to the creature's proficiency bonus calculated from CR.  Alternatively, you can subtract the stat bonus from the creature's listed to hit bonus and the result is (usually) the proficiency bonus.

I did both calculations for the 32 shape shift forms shown in my table and found that both methods gave the same result with one exception.  (The Ankylosaurus appears to be more accurate than it should be.)

The quickest method of calculating the monster's proficiency bonus is just to convert the CR.  For the range allowed to Druid's, CR0 - CR4 have a proficiency bonus of 2, CR5 - CR6 have a proficiency of 3.

Allow Plant Forms

This one is very straightforward.  Thematically, druids are all about nature, that's both animals and plants.  Allowing druids to pick plant forms allows more choice.  This is especially true in the "higher" CR categories where very few beasts exist.

Table of To Hit Bonuses

Below is an image of the table I built to examine teh effect of this rule.  It can (probably) be accessed from my Google drive as well.