How to Play a Circle Of Stars Druid in Dungeons and Dragons 5e

this week's episode of our show has been sponsored by fables this is a subscription-based monthly episodic adventure series that is now heading into its third episode with the fourth episode just on the horizon fables has had a lot of amazing writers contribute to the project in a lot of the episodes that we've seen released including yours truly which have written the final episode which is yet to be revealed fables is a complete campaign told in six episodes with each episode debuting once per month over the next several months we did get to contribute to the final chapter of this campaign and design the dungeon that you get to play through so if you are excited to jump into this campaign and see more of what monty and i have created for grim dark campaign settings get ready because we're pretty proud of some of the great elements we got to throw into that dungeon so if you want to get your hands on the first three episodes in the upcoming fourth episode make sure to check the links below to grab your copy today and now on to this week's episode greetings my name is monty martin and i'm kelly mclaughlin and we are the dungeon dudes welcome to our channel where we cover everything d and d including advice for players and guides for dungeon masters we upload new videos on tuesdays and thursdays so please subscribe to our channel so that you never miss an episode today we are looking at how to play a circle of stars druid in dungeons and dragons fifth edition the circle of stars druid was a really exciting addition that was added in in tash's cauldron of everything and it adds a bit of cosmic energy into the druid class a druid that follows the stars above for guidance and wields celestial power in their magic really conjures up those images of druids who used to follow the constellations and perhaps even those who built the ancient monoliths based around celestial formations the circle of star seeks guidance from the stars above and conjures up celestial powers to wield to augment their druidic abilities today we're going to take a look at what races feats and spells we might use to augment and bring a very potent stars druid to our games of dungeons and dragons a lot of the choices that we make with our druid are going to be universal for almost all druids so for this video we're going to specifically look at what makes the stars druid unique and what we might pick to really augment the given abilities that we gain by playing this subclass there's a lot to discuss today so let's get rolling let's begin with a quick summary of what we're going to gain when we choose the circle of stars druids choose their subclasses at level two and when we do so we get two new features right away at second level the first is our star map this is a map of the constellations that we've created there's a bunch of different flavor suggestions for what it looks like but the starry map has two prominent features first of all when you're holding it you have the guidance cantrip and second you also have the guiding bolt spell prepared it doesn't count against the number of spells that you normally prepare and you can cast guiding bolt without using a spell slot a number of times per day equal to your proficiency modifier the second ability that we gain right away is starry form and this is a new way to use our wild shape now instead of using it to change into a beast we use it to be imbued by a constellation and we get to choose which constellation we want when we use the wild shape feature to use starry form you get to choose from either the archer the chalice or the dragon and in short archer allows you to use a bonus action to make a spell attack to deal additional damage chalice allows you to add additional healing onto your healing spells and dragon augments your ability to concentrate on spells this feature is augmented further at 10th level with twinkling constellation which adds additional dice to our archer or chalice options and when we use the dragon option we now gain a flying speed you activate your starry form as a bonus action on your turn and it lasts for one minute but doesn't require concentration when you first gain the feature you have to choose the constellation that you want to have active and in some cases like the archer when you choose archer you get to fire that celestial bolt right away however at 10th level you actually get to shift from form to form at the start of each of your turns giving a lot of flexibility until 10th level though you're locked in to whatever constellation you choose when you activate the form so if you want to change your form you have to activate the power again because using this feature is based on your wild shape it does mean though that you gain your uses of it when you finish a short rest which is very beneficial because you're going to be able to reliably have this going all the time this is augmented further at 14th level with the ability full of stars now you become incorporeal when you use your starry form and you are now resistant to bludgeoning piercing and slashing damage the only other feature we're going to get from being a circle stars druid is cosmic omens which comes online at level 6. this allows us to roll a d6 at the start of the adventuring day and then whether we roll an even or an odd result we can apply wheel or woe depending on the result of the die when we see a creature take an attack roll an ability check or a saving throw if at the start of the day the d6 year old was even for the rest of the day when you use this reaction you add one d6 to an attack roll ability check or saving throw if the die that you rolled at the start of the day was odd then you're going to apply a d6 penalty instead so this is a little confusing i'm going to acknowledge because you're rolling the die at the start of the day to figure out if you're buffing or debuffing and then you roll before someone takes either an attack roll ability check or saving throw to apply that debuff you don't get to apply this after you know whether they succeeded or failed that makes it a little bit harder to use than some other abilities we've seen on recent subclasses where you get to see the outcome of the role first and then decide if you're going to use the feature so you want to be pretty careful on when you use this still having a buffer debuff readily available is a pretty cool feature but i think when we go into building that's kind of the icing on the cake yeah where what we actually want to focus on is how we're going to use our starry form um starry form is a really cool alternative to wild shape so this is a great way to not be a moon druid and i actually do think that the stars druid makes a really good candidate one of the best candidates in the druids all together for a blaster druid yes the archer ability is pretty cool because it's a bonus action it deals a ranged spell attack that is d8 damage plus your wisdom modifier it goes up to 280 2d8 damage at uh 10th level and once you're in your sorry form you can use this at will so you very much reliably have this damage dealing option and basically the spell is uh basically the archer is kind of like getting spiritual weapon as a druid yeah and when we pair that with that other early ability that gives us guiding bolt as a free spell to cast where we don't have to use a spell slot a number of times equal to our proficiency bonus it means that we can reliably use this one-two punch of guiding bolt archery to make sure that we're dealing a good amount of damage when we get into building our druid the first question of course is what racial options are we going to pick and what ability scores now this is where i think the star druid doesn't really differ too much from other druids i agree and really whatever your favorite druid race is going to be is going to be pretty cool here the the stars druid for me really pulls us around being a caster and in i think in general the ability score breakdown for druids is pretty straightforward across the board you want a good wisdom score a good constitution score and anything you have left over is gravy right you can put a little bit in dexterity if you want a higher ac and i think it's worthy here because your own ac is going to matter here um because you're probably going to be wearing medium armor and using a shield as a stars druid and then having your star map maybe on your shield you can use the star map as a spellcasting focus so you can either oddly be carrying a shield and wearing armor and carrying a map in your other hand which is a weird way to go into battle but hey why not i would definitely allow you to have like the map on your shield or maybe on a quarter staff or emblazoned in some sort of creative way on your body perhaps as a tattoo i would be really open-ended as a dm to being permissive with this because i i think that it's fine i like the idea of the quarter staff with the built-in scroll at the top that you can pull down yeah that's kind of cool yeah yeah so there's a lot of cool ways to imagine your stars druid but again your race and ability scores are pretty much going to be yeah the bread and butter of what you usually do with a druid you're not doing too much different here if we're using point by i'm going to put a 15 in wisdom and constitution and i'm gonna put as many other points into dexterity and then leave everything else either at eight or ten depending on what other sort of breakdown you wanna have i'm probably dumping charisma i've lived in the woods and been staring at the stars for too long i'm not talking other people yeah and you probably don't really need your strength score too much with this caster character you're you're very much going to play like a wizard or a castry cleric so if you want to leave those at eight because you're doing point by that's totally fine if you're choosing your race i think really the world is your oyster here especially if you're playing with the tash's cauldron of everything customizable options because you're just gonna end up putting a plus one or plus two in wisdom and the other plus one into constitution and forgetting about it i really don't think that there's any standout for druids anymore no not really and i mean like some of the extra abilities we gain from picking a class like really the question is theme the only one that i'm really going to mention here is i think like an asamar star druid who's connected to celestial elements is kind of a cool flavor to go with you know another fun one could be a tortelle druid because first of all there's the ac but then you could also kind of follow that uh terry pratchett discworld model of being like the tortoise with the world inscribed on your back and your shell has your star map on it that might be kind of cute i could also see playing like an allen or an aracoqura to get the fly speed earlier on you are gonna be able to fly with the dragon form as part of the subclass but if you are allowed to take one of those race racial options you might want to go for that um the fear bog is a perennial favorite i think as well with the druids in general and there's always elves so i think the world is kind of your oyster here you're really flexible about what you can choose and of course if you can't really choose anything you can always choose the custom lineage or the variant human and pick up a feat like resilient right off the bat once you've chosen your race and ability scores really the only other options here are spells and feats and what's really interesting with these stars druid is again we're focusing on the starry form so there are three elements at play here and when monty and i analyzed this subclass what we came out with is that at early levels i personally think we're going to be relying on the archery constellation more than the chalice or the dragon the reason for this is that the archery is going to amplify our blaster nature and i think that again this druid makes a great blaster with already gaining guiding bolt you can lay down a lot of damage by using archer once we get to tenth level where we can switch every turn which constellation we're using that's where we are going to be using the chalice and the dragon more often at key moments during a battle but when we're looking at this build all three are going to be options that we want to play around with which means in your spell selection we're going to talk about a few specifics but again the standard picks for druid are all going to work really well here you want to make sure that you're having a good variety of spells that blast targets healing options and concentration options because those are going to play into the three starry forms that we have so don't focus too much down one path make sure that you have a bit of variety so that you can play with all of the elements of this subclass now that said there are a couple really cool combos that we can build around each of the different starry forms depending on what tactics we want to utilize in our adventures and this is ultimately one of the really cool things about the druid more broadly is that it's a very adaptable character like nature itself which almost always adapts to changing circumstances druids are really good at reacting to certain situations and certain battlefield conditions and switching around so that they can accommodate for those things with it with the stars druid in particular is really good at being a blaster when they need to and then switching from archer to chalice when you need a little bit more healing or switching into dragon when you need to really keep that reliability on an important concentration spell here's one of the ways that we could look at this if we are in our archer form we go into that form and we can start launching that bolt of celestial energy but then what spells might we pair that with i think there's kind of one iconic pick here and that's a moonbeam um moonbeam is an amazing concentration spell that scales up really really well it brings down a focused area of damage that causes constitution that creatures have to make a con save or they're gonna take radiant damage it's gonna appear really nicely from the radiant damage of the archer form well moonbeam only targets a very small area while it's still in play you can use your action to move it this means that you can spend your action moving your moon beam and still fire your bonus action celestial bolt making it really easy for you to position moonbeam where it's going to have the maximum effect but there's a one other really cool spell that we can throw into the mix that makes things very very useful and that's the druid cantrip thorn whip thorn whip has a range of 30 feet and it pulls the creature that you hit 10 feet and does a little bit of piercing damage this means that if you can position your moonbeam in a place where you can thorn whip an enemy into the area of moonbeam they take damage when they enter the moonbeam and then they take the damage again when they start their turn in the area of the moon beam as well this is really cool because now you're getting twice the damage of moon beam plus the damage from thorium whip plus the damage from your from your archer constellation which makes you a great little damage dealer in the form of a caster and all of those are using pretty renewable resources one concentration spell your starry form and a cantrip now if you want to augment this even further keep in mind that we have a lot of uses of guiding bolt so when you don't need to move your moon beam because it's already in a prime location and and you already have the enemies in there that you need you can now guiding both those same enemies and then blast them additionally with your archer ability so you have a lot of reliable ways to dish out damage now but if we also pair that with another spell like gust you now have movement moving in both directions if somebody leaves the moon beam towards you you can gust and push them back and still be able to blast them with your archer if they are on the other side you thorn whip them in and then blast them with your archer so you can reliably dish out a lot of damage and this is why with this particular archer build i think one of the key feats that we want to look at is actually going to be uh spell sniper spell sniper doubles the range of our spells that require attack rolls which would change the range of thorn whip from 30 feet to 60 feet now you do get to choose another cantrip when you select this feat and unfortunately you actually want to choose thorn whip as the spell you get from this feat because it's one of the only it's one of the only wisdom-based attack role spells that you can access so it's a little limited in that regard but it also allows you to not to ignore cover when you're using thor whip too so it's a nifty feat to give you more flexibility with this combo we also have some great spell picks like thunder wave erupting earth and recently added cone of cold all of which can really amplify this blaster archetype that we're designing our stars drew it around and you can take all of those and be dishing out a lot of good damage on the battlefield what's great about the stars druid is as we move into our play with the chalice build i think that you can actually have all three builds that we're going to mention going on with your druid at the same time and switch hit between which one is most useful with the chalice build this allows you to add an additional d8 to a creature within 30 feet of you or yourself when you use a healing spell on a creature at later levels at level 10 this becomes 2d8 so i think there's one spell in particular that this is going to play with and that is healing word what's important to note is that no matter how many creatures you're healing you can only gain an additional 1d8 or 2d8 at level 10. also keep in mind that you need to cast the healing spell in order to use this ability so something like healing spirit or aura of vitality are not actually going to work well with the chalice ability because it's not when a creature is healed it's when you cast a healing spell however with the simple bonus action use of healing word i think what's really important is at level 10 being able to switch to chalice at the beginning of your turn means that when two characters go down on a single turn and it gets to your turn you can turn on chalice hit two creatures with the healing word one with healing word one with chalice get them both up and you've just saved the day or if there's one target who's gone down and is in a pretty dangerous situation you can choose them as the target of chalice as well meaning that they gain the benefits of healing word as well as also gaining the additional d8 and at level 10 2d8 plus your wisdom modifier meaning they are now gaining 2d8 plus double your wisdom modifier plus a d4 which is a lot better than just a d4 plus your whistle modifier yeah it's actually enough to get someone back into the fight because the average of all those dice at 10th level is going to be about 20 hit points or so which i think is durable enough to take at least one more hit and considering you only spent a first level spell slot and a bonus action to do that it means that while this chalice combo is running if you're at tenth level you can still have your moon beam going and you could actually still be thorn whipping somebody while doing this you just gave up the only thing you gave up was the archer damage for that turn so that's a quite effective swap when you need to bring that in in a pinch again it is worth reiterating though is that unfortunately this doesn't really play with spells like healing spirit or a vitality it's probably worth bringing one of those spells to heal up the party but that would be something i would do outside of combat not within it i think this really calls back to the tension of perhaps the cleric playstyle where you where in combat healing is great for bringing someone back into the fight or saving someone's life but oftentimes just spamming healing on people who don't need it or healing somebody who's just going to get knocked down again is where you want to be a little bit more conservative with your resources so i think the chalice is the most limited to this specific combo and i do think that that means that the chalice feature is something that we're actually not going to be using very reliably until 10th level and it's kind of a switch that we turn on when they're when danger mode is activated and people are going down finally we come to the dragon dragon's benefit is pretty passive when you're concentrating on a spell or you have to make an intelligence or wisdom check you can treat any result of 9 or lower as a 10 instead this means that in practice if you have the resilient constitution fee giving you proficiency and constitution saving throws and at least a 14 constitution this means that in order to actually fail a concentration check you would need to take over 30 points of damage assuming you're about level 5. this means that if you have a concentration spell that you need to keep in play like polymorph or a summon spell or another big buff spell switch into dragon concentrate on that and that's all you need i think that it's it's much better for a kind of battle of attrition scenario where you as the druid are expecting to take a lot of damage because truth be told druids don't have a lot of defensive abilities they're not like a wizard who often has things like shield and counterspell and mage armor and blink and blur and all these other things that can protect them while they're doing other things so you might actually take those hits and need to make those concentration checks making this pretty useful i think where this becomes really effective though is when you do reach 10th level and with your dragon form you gain a flying speed of 20 feet and can hover because this kind of really brings into focus that weakness that often comes with a caster being flying because as a caster when you're flying the last thing that you want is to get shot and lose concentration dragon automatically helps you with that so you can fly into the air summon a bunch of creatures know that your concentration isn't going to go down and know that you're going to be protected at least from melee attacks and i do think that that's a great way to go is the flying summoner playing with the dragon option is really great so again you're gonna pick up some of your favorite druid summoning spells and just fly around the battlefield with your meat shields on the ground doing all the work well you still get to blast enemies with your free guiding bolts being able to readily switch between these three play styles is what is going to make the star druid really cool and again if you take the spell sniper fee to the resilient constitution feat healing word moon beam a few of these summoning spells and other blasty spells you have everything you need to readily switch between these and you can do all of that in one character build making this a really versatile class now with the dragon option there are a few other cool things that we might be able to take like maybe the telekinetic feat to move people around again concentrating on moon beam moving it around the battlefield and using telekinetic to shove people into the way of moonbeam telekinetic requires a bonus action to use the feature that lets you push someone five feet so it doesn't work very well with the archer form but it works quite nicely when you are in dragon form because you have nothing else to use with your bonus action another great spell to use while you're in dragon form is heat metal again heat metal requires a bonus action to deal the additional damage so when you're in archer mode heat metal isn't going to be your go-to but if you plan to drop heat metal once you're level 10 being able to switch to dragon mode and saying now i'm going to drop heat metal and maintain concentration on that spell while i deal damage every turn with my bonus action is a great play so filling out your druid with these great options these great spells knowing when to use them and which form is going to benefit them the best is the real play here with the star druid the the starter would makes really good use of these simple combinations and it allows you to really take whatever other spells you want to have from the druid spell list to kind of backfill for whatever situations you might be emerging in or whatever role you might need to fill in the party and that can be one that is very versatile and adaptable because you've got a couple core tricks that are good in a wide range of situations and then if you need to bring that be that character that's bringing a couple more battlefield control spells like in tangle or wall of fire or transmute rock you can bring those if you want to bring summoning spells like conjure animals or conjure woodland beings or summon fae you can bring those and be a pretty good summoner not as good as the shepherds perhaps but still a really good summoner that's got this really great blaster component to them as well or if you just need to bring the part be the party band-aid and bring along heel and lesser restoration and other spells like aid you can do that because again your ability to be a blaster is really efficient on your spell slots i think that's a really cool thing like even with a cleric that is doing the spirit guardians guiding bolt and spiritual weapon thing they end up spending more spell slots to do that than you do you have this very renewable resource in the form of starry form so you can kind of keep doing it all day the other thing i really love about the stars druid is that this is a druid where using your wild shape for the standard purposes actually doesn't seem the most interesting to me and although we are mostly going to be using our wild shape for starry form and i might shy away from using it for anything else i do want to mention that tash's gave us the option of using our wild shape to summon a familiar and i think that that is the only other thing i would consider using my wild shape for because the other ability that we didn't talk about is cosmic omen and i'm going to talk about the familiar and cosmic omen as the icing on the cake having a familiar fly in and use the help action to gain you advantage on one of your spell attacks just means that you are more readily landing those damage dealing spells so that's a really cool way to sure things up and when we look at cosmic omen again the hard part about this is that you use it before you see the results of the die but if you're grabbing somebody with thorn whip and dragging them into your moon beam and you know that they have a good saving throw then you might want to use that ability to debuff them or to sure up some of your allies it's just an extra little bit of of sauce that you get to add into your meal here with this character to sure things up at the right moments i think cosmic omen is actually best for supporting your allies whether that is using your reaction to give another ally a more reliable saving throw of their own if you're getting the a wheel version and if you're getting the woe version it might more often be than not be more beneficial for you to use it on your allies abilities that require saving throws rather than your own druids do have a couple spells that are save or suck you know they do think get things like entangle they do get whole person and you can always polymorph a bad guy into a nat but they don't get the best ones so it might be that if you have a party wizard that has something like banishment or flesh to stone or disintegrate you might want to use the woe version of your cosmic omens to augment the spells of your party members before your own so this has been a look at the circle of stars druid in dungeons and dragons 5th edition tell us about some of the cool things you've done with a stars druid in the comments below the videos that we make on our channel are made possible thanks to the incredible generosity of our patreon supporters if you enjoy the work that we do here on youtube please consider becoming a supporter of the channel by following the links in the description below and don't forget to check out our live play the fate of drakenheim which airs tuesday evenings on twitch you can find all the previous episodes right up over here and we've got plenty more class guides for d5e right up over here please subscribe to our channel so that you never miss an episode thanks so much for watching we'll see you next time in the dungeon

Channel: Dungeon Dudes

Views: 69,654

Keywords: dungeons, dragons, tabletop, gaming, roleplaying, games, accessories, rules, rule, gameplay, play, game, rpg, d20, player, character, D&D, 5e, DM, PC, tips, advice, guide, guides, review, dice, books, book

Id: fFomtlnf6Nw

Length: 28min 36sec (1716 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 22 2022