JerekKruger

You can, but in true English form you can also say "Je ne sais quoi" because if there's one thing the English language does best, it's steal from other languages. It's like the old saying about English not having a word for schadenfreude. It's nonsense, of course we have a word for schadenfreude, it's schadenfreude. (I feel like I need an award because I spelled correctly schadenfreude first try)

Because you're smarter, or more charismatic, or are more driven? There could be many different reasons why you are the leader of the group. Or perhaps you're not the leader, perhaps your group doesn't really have a leader. When I meet up with my main group of friends we don't elect a leader: we decide things by consensus. By the way, you won't think Eder is stronger than you when you hit level 9 and get relentless storm. In fact you'll be hard pressed to believe anything is stronger than you for a duration of that spell.

One downside (or perhaps upside) to this is you'll be allowed to wear a helm.

A rough and ready solution to your problem is to simply not hit the level up button until the content starts to feel too difficult.

Perhaps a Druid is not for you. All classes are going to be fairly weak at the beginning of the game. Your character is an ordinary guy who has his quest thrust upon him: he has to work at becoming powerful. Act I, and possibly act II as well, are very much low level campaigns. Compare to, say, Baldur's Gate 1: no class you pick will feel powerful for the first few levels. Even fighters could be killed by a couple of unlucky hits, and wizards couldn't afford to be hit at all. It took until around level 5 for characters to start feeling competent and they didn't start feeling powerful until perhaps 9+. In this respect PoE is doing the job of being a spiritual successor to BG very well. If you enter combat expecting the game to play like an action RPG you're going to be disappointed. Not sure quite what you mean about the personal story not entering the plot: for the first half or so of the game, the personal story drives the plot.

Okay, your Con is a little low, but it shouldn't be having too much of an affect on your survivability. Are you moving around after you reach melee range?

It's not surprising that your druid will be a bit fragile in the early game, but this should improve as you increase in level. I'm a bit surprised that you died so quickly after spiritshift ran out, was your endurance already low? One thing to remember is that if you're in melee, and you move out of melee, the enemy gets a free disengagement attack which gets a bonus to accuracy and damage and, if it hits, will likely allow the enemy to re-engage, meaning they'll get another if you keep trying to move away from melee. This might be why you went down so quickly and is why I recommend not trying to move away from melee. In the early game even tough classes like Fighters can get punished pretty harshly by these attacks. If you need to flee melee, and you don't have a Priest to Withdraw you, another option would be to have Eder use knockdown on the enemy which is currently engaging your Druid (you can see Engagement by little lines connecting your character to an enemy) which allows you to flee without worrying about disengagment. What attributes did you take? What armour and weapons are you currently using. EDIT: also don't beat yourself up if you're finding the game hard on easy. First, the early game is the hardest part of the game (barring certain boss fights). Two, easy is not actually much easier than normal or hard: the only significant difficultly steps are story mode and PotD; easy, normal and hard are all very similar. Third, there are a lot of intricacies to the combat in PoE which take quite some time to learn, it'll take a while before you have a good understanding of them all.

Early game in most fights you'll simply spiritshift straight away as you don't have that many spells per rest yet and fights are mostly easy and quick to beat. In harder fights, you might want to cast a few spells first, before shifting and going into combat. In the later game fights tend to be longer, and you have a lot more spells per rest (and after level 9 you get spells per encounter too) so you'll probably start most battles with some spells before shifting. Don't target AoE spells on an enemy. By this I mean when casting an AoE spell, don't click directly on an enemy when targetting. As you've discovered, if you do the enemy will move and hence so will your AoE template. Instead you should target the ground where the enemy will be when the spell fires. This might sound hard since the enemy is moving, but remember that the enemy is moving towards you so if you keep your party standing still then you know, with a reasonable degree of accuracy, where the enemy will stop moving - just in front of your lines. With this knowledge, you cast your AoE spell so that it hits just in front of your line and the enemy will obligingly walk into it. Alternatively, you can always wait until all melee combatants are engaged before casting AoE spells, but once again don't target an enemy, target the ground. Also remember that a fair number of Druid spells are FoeAoE, so you don't have to worry about friendly fire with these. As for taking damage when disengaging: you don't necessarily have to disengage. Unless you're taking massive damage you can stay in melee and use your spells from there. The druid actually has a fair number of spells which are best used in this range (cone spells, point blank AoE spells etc.). As Ben No.3 says, it might be sensible to use a shield to make yourself tankier for this role. If you do find yourself taking lots of damage whilst in melee, if you have a Priest you can cast Withdraw on your Druid to allow you to escape.

I wouldn't even bother picking up Jêna's Lance. I'd run with a normal or fine pike until I could visit Dyrford then run with Tall Grass from then on (then again, I am a massive spendthrift). I wouldn't describe Tall Grass as mid to late game: you can (theoretically*) get it immediately after unlocking Caed Nua so, potentially as early as level 3 or 4. @Slack83er whilst there aren't a lot of different pikes, do remember that Tall Grass is a very good weapon. Inflicting prone on crit is very good, and the synergy with 10% of hits converted to crits is great. *I say theoretically because you might be a bit short on cash at this stage.

No, a halberd is a specific type of polearm. A pike is a long, two-handed spear.

You might be right, I always assumed "pike" only referred to the military weapon but I am no expert. Certainly a military style pike would be a truly terrible weapon in the sort of fights PoE has.

It's worth noting that pikes in PoE are closer to (two-handed) spears than pikes in length. Calling them pikes is generous. Also Tall Grass is a very good weapon and is available relatively early on.

There are actually a lot of builds in the build archive that use weapons other than Bittercut. Dual Bittercut gets mentioned a lot because it is, indeed, very powerful (perhaps more importantly, it's powerful because of a non-obvious quirk of the game mechanics), but if you go through the builds that are listed most of them don't use them. I agree, but this is already mostly the case: Tidefall, Hours of St. Rumbalt, Tall Grass, Blade of the Endless Path, Spelltongue, Drawn in Spring, Godansthunyr, Acuan Giamas. These are all excellent (melee) weapons already. The only thing I think is missing is some examples of specific weapon types: an earlier sword, some better quarterstaves, etc.I don't think the game lacks for a variety of good weapons. To elaborate, most of the builds that make use of dual Bittercuts would work (almost) as well with dual something else good. Don't feel like builds are absolute guides which, if deviated even slightly from, will collapse: they're not.

Anything short of 10/rest might as well be 0/rest for me anyway.

Well no, the vast majority of players never look at a forum, and pick a weapon without any research based on personal preference. We people discussing PoE here are all very much outliers already. But even if what you said were correct, so what? Short of making every weapon identical there's always going to be a weapon which is "best" (even if marginally) and players who care about min-maxing will gravitate towards it. Min-maxers enjoy the process of finding out exactly which weapon that is, they enjoy the process of immersing themselves in the rules and coming up with strange builds that allow for ridiculously high damage numbers. They are not going to be pleased with a game that becomes more homogeneous in the desire to be more balanced. Meanwhile there are plenty of players (even ones who post here) who don't care about min-maxing to the same extent, and who pick weapons based on other reasons. Some of them (myself included) play on PotD. You're vastly overrating the importance of the specific shift to the performance of a spiritshift Druid. The important aspects are the high weapon damage (which is shared between all spiritshift forms) and spells (which all druids have). The speed of Cat or wounding of Boar are icing on an already huge cake. You could run as a Wolf or Bear and still be horrendously powerful using the Thunder Cat build.

Well, clearly not, since you yourself just said you're going to choose Bear; and I regularly chose other weapons than sabres even though they were lower damage. It's not like this game is so difficult, or any option is so under powered that a player is severely penalised for not optimising. Even the much maligned Rogue is more than capable of playing through PotD with a party (I am not good enough to comment on solo).

Don't give Obsidian ideas. PoE isn't an MMO, it doesn't need to be balanced.

Woah, that post is amazing!

Tested it. Created two Mountain Dwarf Druids with 5/20/2/3/4/18 for attributes*, one a Cat and one a Boar. Did the fight against the wolves on the first map. Results: Cat: 7 attacks during spiritshift duration Boar: 5 attacks during spiritshift duration Even with the various factors that could through off the results (delay between start of spiritshift and first attack, interruptions from the wolves etc.) this difference seems enough to suggest that the cat does indeed attack faster. More careful testing would be needed to determine exactly how much faster. Certainly it is wrong to conclude from this very limited data that the cat attacks 40% faster (7/5) because of the aforementioned potential errors, because we don't know exactly how close to the next attack each form was after spiritshift ended, and (heuristically) because 40% is a pretty huge bonus. My guess would be the cat form attacks 25% faster, since the easiest way for Obsidian to modify this is to simply give the cat form the same 25% speed enchant that weapons have. I believe this is exactly how the boar's raw wounding works which further supports this. *Low might and perception to avoid hitting as much as possible, and low intellect to avoid the fight being over before Spiritshift ran out.

Not according to this post: https://forums.obsidian.net/topic/85177-spiritshift-druid-question/?do=findComment&comment=1786920 Might of course be wrong, but I haven't seen any concrete sources saying otherwise. I'll test it myself if no one else has actually done so.

Sorry, Cat Spiritshift have an inherent speed boost as well as Cat Flurry?

There's no reason in the lore that cat form would fit better.

Yeah, I saw that and assumed that someone copied their value from in game without removing Might and level bonuses.

I'm more interested in knowing how good a party member the Sky Dragon is, and whether it can gain experience. Perhaps I shall play through as a completely dragon based party: sky, adra, alpine, two bog and... I guess Cail?

Oh, I hadn't thought about this point. Yeah that makes a lot of sense. EDIT: and rereading the build I realise Boeroer says exactly that...