QuantumFX wrote on Jun 20
th, 2013 at 10:32am:
You should try the build before you knock it. The main problem with the druid animal forms is that Turbine, in their fucked-up, Feather_of_Sun coding style, tied all the usefulness of the forms to feats on a feat starved class.
With the 2 Monk/9 Fighter split you can fit in all the Natural Fighting Feats, get setup for Overwhelming Crit (Cleave and Great cleave work great in wolf form.) It make for a *very* fun AoE gish melee build.
If they ditched the Natural Fighting feats, and put the bonuses into the natural Adept PrE you would see a lot of kick ass druid builds out there.
This is what's making me question this build on anything but monk or fighter lives. The feats are just so tight that if you drop the fighter 9 or the monk 9 it gets much harder to fit everything in. Ranger for example gives tons of feats but none of which help the primary goals of this build. Barbarian gives no feats. Arti gives none that help, etc.
In order to make a ranger version with improved critical: bludgeoning work you can't go with the monk 2 splash and still get all 3 natural fighting feats during heroic levels. That's because natural fighting has to come at 12, 15, and 18 and must be a level-based feat. Improved Critical requires a BAB of 8+. Druid 9 gives 6 BAB so assuming we front-load the druid levels (the entire point of the build) we can't take Improved Critical on a class level until level 12. That means we'd have to take Fighter 2 for our splash since it allows us to take that 2nd fighter level whenever we want and pick up iCrit: Bludgeoning.
Front-loading the ranger levels doesn't help either as we have to have 9 druid levels by level 12 to take natural fighting. The only other option would be to stay pure druid all the way to 9 and then splash but the splashes are what allow us to afford feats like cleave, great cleave, and toughness early in the leveling curve.
I'm still debating this as my next life will be a ranger past life and I'd love to stay with this framework...but 3 less feats would probably mean dumping stunning fist, maximize, and quicken.
I can definitely attest to this build on both the monk and fighter lives does very good damage. Especially if you go with the rogue dilettante and abuse stunning fist/improved deception. It's just very feat intensive both in number of feats and where those feats fit in to the leveling structure.