(Playing on veteran upscale all by the way). Of course my monk abilities hep a lot for survivability and damage dealing, but I think if I had gone single class shifter my play style and impact wouldn't be much different - cast some buffs and healing spells, cast some storm spells, shift multiple times to kill weakened enemies and win. I am the biggest damage dealer in melee in my party (ahead of swashbuckler Eder and Paladin Pallagina) and second damage dealer by spells (after aloth but ahead of cipher serafen and priest aloth). But otherwise, you could play a shifter like a regular druid with more forms to play with and easier and quicker self healing by shifting. The only thing you really lose is taste of the hunt, since you can't cast that while shifted (so i didn't even take it). I mean why would anyone cast a spell when shifted unless it is an emergency, and even then you are probably in the midst of melee and surrounded, so why stop and cast a spell and suffer interrupts. You lose almost nothing with a shifter versus plain druid.

I am enjoying my shifter/monk (Nalpazca) run. If you went that route, I would recommend using the Essence Interrupter from Port Maje with the Soul Diplomacy upgrade, as you should crit reliably enough to generate new temporary allies when you kill an enemy. The only caveat at the moment is there is a bug affecting the scaling of many of the summoned creatures (they are weaker than they should be at higher levels), but hopefully that should be fixed soon. ThereвЂ™s a minor accuracy penalty that can be mitigated by using certain weapons and/or Marked Prey, but it increases your casting options, provides reliable ranged weapon damage, and an animal companion to assist your summons. If you are looking for some possible multiclass ideas, I recently tested out an Arcane Archer/Ancient. The Spine of Thicket Green is also another choice to boost the PL of some of your other spells.

Oh, and I'm (only?) playing on hard difficulty - never managed to make the leap up to PotD in either game - so things don't have to be perfectly optimised, just reasonably effective and, most importantly, interesting to play.Дruids are great! You can pick up Lord DarynвЂ™s Voluge pretty early in the game, which can provide a boost to the PL of your storm-keyword spells. For the same reason, I'm leaning towards going single class, but I'd certainly be open to ideas for multi-class options that fit a spellslinger druid. I probably want to build a more caster-centric character, so that rules out Shifter, but I'm not committed to or against any of the other subclasses - Fury is the one I'm least interested in as I'd kinda like to keep the option to heal open, but if there's some particularly interesting stuff you can do with one, I'd consider it. So I thought I'd see if anyone here has any advice on builds or spell/item interactions which stand out for the class. Despite being my favourite class in the first game, I've not really done much with them in this one barring a mainly AI controlled Tekehu who came along on one of my runs. Planning on starting a new playthrough of Deadfire soon, and I'm leaning towards playing as a Druid.

Druids of the talon