Faerie Tricks & Big Sticks:

Iluzry’s Guide to Druid Spells & Spellcasting ft.

WraithMagus

Introduction
Heyo Internet, my name is Iluzry or Polypan if you’ve seen me around! I am not what one would call a
veteran, I don’t think, but I’ve been playing this game for a longer time! This guide, and the ones
following it are all a part of my overall goal to give people more up to date content for pathfinder players
to use, because I love the game and I want to help everyone become the ungodly kaiju monster of their
DM’s dreams/nightmares.

To See My List of Guides, Go Here

I guess if I keep doing this I should get like a patreon or something. For now, I’m just a girl who likes
making people feel strong. I’m new to this so if you are looking at this guide in the future, I hope it
helps!! From one player to another. NOW onto the guide.

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Table of Contents
Introduction
Table of Contents
Rating System
Guide Overview
Druid Spellcasting: A Refresher Course
Pros and Cons Table
Laws of the Jungle
Law 0: The Wolf That May Break It Must Die
Law I: The Strength of the Wolf is the Pack
Law II: Drink Deeply But Never Too Deep
Law III: Remember the Wolf is a Hunter
Law IV: When Ye Fight With A Wolf of the Pack…
● Avoid SR Checks
■ Battlefield Control:
■ Conjure Creatures:
■ Choose “SR: No” Spells:
● Boost SR Checks
■ Feats
■ Race
■ Items
■ Spells:
Spell Categories
Druid Spells by Level
Orisons (0th Level Spells)
Utility
Information
1st Level Spells
Control
Buff
Debuff
Blast
Heal
Summons
Utility
Protection
Beastmaster
Information
2nd Level Spells
Control
Buff
Debuff
Blast
Heal
Summons
Utility
Protection
Beastmaster
Information

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3rd Level Spells
Control
Buff
Debuff
Blast
Heal
Summons
Utility
Protection
Beastmaster
Information
4th Level Spells
Control
Buff
Debuff
Blast
Heal
Summons
Utility
Protection
Beastmaster
Information
5th Level Spells
Control
Buff
Debuff
Blast
Heal
Summons
Utility
Protection
Beastmaster
Information
6th Level Spells
Control
Buff
Debuff
Blast
Heal
Summons
Utility
Protection
Beastmaster
Information
7th Level Spells
Control
Buff
Debuff
Blast
Heal

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 Summons
Utility
Protection
Beastmaster
Information
8th Level Spells
Control
Buff
Debuff
Blast
Heal
Summons
Utility
Protection
Beastmaster
Information
9th Level Spells
Control
Buff
Debuff
Blast
Heal
Summons
Utility
Protection
Beastmaster
Information

Rating System
All Guides use the Color Rating System and honestly? It’s a good Idea.
● Game Breaking (6/5): This feature or option is so powerful, so useful,
so unapologetically ridiculous that it very well make snap the game in
half. DM’s reading this guide are welcome to ban these options, or are
warned to somehow work around them. Players? Use these powers
carefully.
● ✰TAKE ME NOW✰ (5.9/5): Everyone wants this in their build as soon as
possible
● Take Me Please! (5/5): Everyone wants this in their build
● Fantastic (4/5): You don’t need to have it but you definitely will
enjoy it if you take it.
● Fine, I Guess (3/5): Pretty good. They'll be helpful and have some
use, but aren't likely to make things incredibly amazing.
● Maybe Don’t (2/5): It is useful in incredibly specific situations or
just gives really small bonuses. It is technically useful but not in
any way that matters.
● Actively Bad (1/5): You do not want this, and it does not help you or
makes you worse.
● Unrated: This is rare but some options are unratable. Likely a class
feature that is powered on DM fiat, in which case...ask the DM,
something that is campaign dependent or something that literally does
nothing

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5
Guide Overview
So okay I haven’t made a guide in a while due to, well, being depressed and really, it seemed like a
daunting task. So I figured, why not go back to my roots and work on the guide that started it all: THE
GUIDE TO DRUIDS! Seems easy enough.

Except…people seem terminally afraid of reviewing druid spells. I don’t know why. I don’t know what
happened. But it seems like no one or their grandmother seemed like it was worth doing…for some
reason.

Now before you ask, I have an alibi. I know how druids work and they can prep new spells every day
and thought, well clearly, that means if you make a mistake, you can learn, easy peasy, no questions
needed. So I wiped my hands of it and focused my energy on the poor baby spontaneous casters who
don’t really have a way to function.

That said…there is A LOT to the druid spell list that is pretty god damned impressive, and it’d be a
shame if I didn’t give it a try. Just be warned…it might be a bit different than what I usually do. But hey,
what else is new? Other than this guide?

Those Who Came Before Me:

● paizo.com - Forums: Advice: Best Druid Spells By Level
● Druid Spells - Google Sheets
● what are some of the best 1-9 druid spells? : Pathfinder_RPG (reddit.com)
● paizo.com - Forums: Advice: High level druid spells

Druid Spellcasting: A Refresher Course

Remember, as a Druid, you are a Prepared Divine Fullcaster. This is an AMAZING set up, and will give
us access to a lot of power, but does come with some...hiccups to keep us from causing hurricanes at
level 1. We’ll get there.

Pros and Cons Table

Pros Cons
● You are the Fullcaster: From 0 to 9th level ● Must Prepare one spell per slot: Because
spells, you have more options than anyone. If you have to prepare every spell you use, you
this were your only merit, it’d still make you basically have to predict the future on how
one of the strongest classes in the game. much you’ll need specific abilities! This can be
Don’t believe me? Ask the wizard. annoying because well..sometimes we need 3
● Can Swap Spells DAILY: That's right! As a or 4 fireballs.
prepared caster you can change out every ● Cannot Wear Metal Armor: There are many
single spell you plan to use, every day. This is ways around this but it IS something we
why the wizard is known as the silver bullet need to get around. Not having access to
caster, with the perfect spell for all occasions! metal armor means that while we can
● You are a Divine Caster: This means you
defend ourselves, we can’t immediately
get access to neato divine feats, and don’t
tank it up like clerics
have to worry about arcane spell failure,
● Get Less Spells Per Day: A subtle but real
making you much easier to defend!
issue is that we just get less spell slots than
● Know All Your Spells: That's right. At each
our spontaneous brethren. So why is this
spell level, you get access to EVERY SINGLE
blue? Because pearls of power exist and make
SPELL ON YOUR LIST. JUST ALL OF
this not a real problem aye lmao.
THEM. Combined with your ability to swap
● Cannot Cast Opposite Alignment Spells: So

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 spells daily, you have unparalleled versatility. if you are LG, no chaotic or evil spells for you.
● No Metamagic Casting Problems: You prep Luckily, as a druid, you have to be kinda
spells with metamagic already to go!!!! No neutral, so this is much less of a problem for
casting speed debuffs. you than others.

Laws of the Jungle

Alright so as a druid player, I have to approach this problem differently than I would most classes, due
to the fact that you are in fact, not like most other classes. You are a prepared, divine caster who isn't a
cleric, but also isn't a wizard, and likes plants and animals more than most planar entities and can do a
bunch of crazy stuff but no one really knows what so…how do we handle this?

Basically, instead of having a doctrine about how we approach spell selection overall like we would for
a spontaneous caster, we have to approach spell selection per day and per level. As you level up, you
will get access to more and more spells, and only have so many slots to use each day. So we need to
learn how to use each of these slots intelligently, and not get locked into choice paralysis. Got it? Okay
let’s get started.

Law 0: The Wolf That May Break It Must Die

Okay so this is a rule more for me than for any of you. I am only going to be reviewing spells that I think
deserve to be talked about. Mainly to save us both time. If you want someone to review every single
spell, that's not me. But I will give some spells consideration.

That said, DO NOT TAKE MY WORD AS GOSPEL. There are plenty of spells that I won’t review
because they seem too situational, BUT GUESS WHAT??? YOU ARE A DRUID! YOU CAN AFFORD
SITUATIONAL! If you are on the ocean, look for sea spells! If you happen to be fighting a bunch of
people super weak to poison, TAKE ALL THE POISON POWERS!

I will not give you all of the answers. Just the ones I think are worthwhile

Law I: The Strength of the Wolf is the Pack

What does this mean? KNOW YOUR TEAM COMP. Know what your team does, what they need and
what they don’t. This will save you from preparing spells that no one cares about and allow you to fill in
the gaps where they can’t on daily missions.

This may sounds obvious to some of you, but believe me, knowing what y⁷our team can and can’t do is
super helpful! Moreover, make sure your team knows what YOU can do. Yes being mysterious is cool
and fun…until the fighter gets caught in your entangle, fails a strength check, and gets pelted by
archers because no one knew how the spells worked.

Everyone should know what you have prepared, and you should know how you are going to use each
spell to either boost yourself or your team. This will make you THAT much more powerful, because you
can utilize EVERY SINGLE SPELL to its greatest capacity without having to trip over your squad or vice
versa.

Law II: Remember the night is for hunting, and forget not the day is for sleep.
You can roughly break Pathfinder into two distinct types of time: “In combat” and “not in combat,” and
this has serious knock-on effects when it comes to evaluating spells.

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When you aren’t in combat, time is often loosely tracked. So long as you don’t have min/level spells
going on, anything that takes less than half an hour often means little. When you cast spells out of
combat, they cost spell slots, but that’s all it really costs you.

When you’re in combat, you’re on an initiative track and you have a set number of actions per turn.
Once you’ve had your actions, you give up control for probably several minutes until it’s your turn again.
Spells, therefore, don’t just cost your spell slots, they also cost your actions, and actions are often far
more valuable than spell slots. This is the action economy, and the action economy is king. It’s not
about whether spells are “helpful” or not, it’s about whether they are the best use of your precious
action or not.

Fundamentally, because tabletop combat is a lot slower (in terms of game actions that can happen per
real-life minute) than video games, tabletop combat is made to be much faster to play out in terms of
actual rounds than any video game RPG or MMO you might be used to. A typical encounter lasts 4
rounds or less (or 24 game time seconds or less), and is decided in the first 2 rounds (12 seconds),
when you start knocking out some of the enemies and thus cut down the amount of actions per round
the enemy can take. This is why initiative is so important - if you go last, you might not get to go at all!
The book also suggests having four encounters per adventuring day (at least, in a dungeon, you
hopefully shouldn’t face that much trouble in town or just walking along the road), so you can generally
do the math that you’re going to face maybe 14 rounds of combat, with 8 of those rounds being critical
you do the most effective actions you can.

Basically, if you give Team Monster free reign, they will kill your party in some unknown number of
turns. It may take team monster a dozen turns (monster turns, not rounds) to TPK the party, it may be
50 if they roll badly, or they may wipe your party if you allow them to take even three unimpeded turns if
they’re extremely deadly and your side’s saves are bad rolls. You have that many turns to slow that
demise down and eventually end the threat entirely. When you get a turn, it should be focused on
whatever will do the most to stop or hinder their attempts to kill you, whether that is denying them a
chance to attack because of control spells, giving your allies more effective turns than your own turn is
worth with key support spells, summoning allies that can take their own actions or eat damage (thus
adding more turns before the enemy kills you), or just plain killing the enemy so they can’t take any
hostile actions.

This is why many buff spells (which can be cast out of battle) are great spells. Getting a +2 to
something important for just a spell slot is a good deal, as you’re spending your spell slot making your
ally potentially 10% more likely to succeed at a given thing or reducing incoming damage by 10% or
something similar. Debuff spells, however, are often terrible, even if they’re mirror images of the buff
spell that is good. A debuff spell that inflicts a -2 (such as by inflicting sicken) is not worth your action
even if you ignore that debuff spells often have a saving throw to negate them, and thus often only work
half the time, anyway. A -5 debuff is generally not worth your action mid-battle (a 25% chance to make
the enemy lose their turn when they probably only would get another turn or two to live doesn’t break
even on average for the action spent casting), even if the +2 cast out of battle vies for the same spell
slot.

Likewise, a buff spell that is rounds/level duration needs to be vastly better than a buff spell with
min/level or greater duration, as a rounds/level duration generally means that something needs to be
cast in combat. Hence, if you’re casting a spell to assist an ally mid-battle, it better assist an ally in a
way that is worth more than the action you spent to cast it! If you were going to cast a +2 bonus to
attack on an ally mid-battle, that generally only improves their odds of success with their actions by
10%, but costs you a whole action to give it out. They’re probably only getting 1-3 more actions all
battle, and actions earlier in battle are more important than actions later, because the battle becomes
too lopsided when PCs or monsters start dropping, and one side gets an action advantage. Hence,
you’re basically getting a return of 10-30% of an action for your action and spell slot, because it only
matters if the d20 lands on those two numbers that became successes specifically because of your

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spell. (Even if we’re talking about a full attack with multiple attacks, you’re only giving a 10%
improvement on odds of that rounds’ action. If they get four attacks, and one is successful solely
because of your spell, that is a 25% improvement in their action, because only that quarter of their full
action benefitted.) That’s a bad trade in the action economy. Spells like Haste (which isn’t a druid spell)
are good trades because adding attacks to the whole party for the whole battle can add up to

It’s also for this reason that it’s important to stress that druids are not a “healer class”, at least, like
in MMOs! Combat healing of HP is in general not a good idea, but druids are exceptionally bad at it,
having no pool of healing besides actually memorizing spells which are often a spell slot higher than the
cleric would have to spend. Again, MMO combat tends to be slow and deliberate, focusing on being
able to grind down damage spongy enemies that are designed to last a minute to an hour for a raid
boss while keeping yourself healed up and buffed. Pathfinder combat is designed so a round or two of
pounding will kill the enemy. There is no difference between fighting at 1 HP and 100 HP, and wasting
a round healing an ally for 20 HP is silly when the enemy does 50 HP of damage per round. Healing
mid-battle is like a doctor trying to treat a patient’s burn wounds before removing them from the fire -
even if it’s somehow successful, you very quickly wind up in the same place, anyway. Even in an ideal
scenario, where you heal someone just in time so they stay up when the next attack would have taken
them down, the tyranny of the action economy still reigns supreme, because now you’ve spent a round
keep an ally in the fight, where they can use their own actions, but they’re only one enemy attack away
from death, and you’ve done nothing to stop the enemy from killing them next turn (and there may be
more than one monster…). Even if the ally gets their turn next, if you went before the monster, you
could have just stopped the monster from nearly killing them. It only makes sense as a trade in the
action economy if your ally’s turn is worth more than yours is, and you’re a big powerful druid, so you
shouldn’t just let that go unchallenged. And that’s if the spell saves your ally, and they weren’t going to
survive it anyway or they die in spite of the spell you cast, then you just wasted precious actions on
something that didn’t work while losing an ally and the monsters are now coming to eat you next with
nothing to show for that action you spent. Your attempt to heal might just lead to a TPK. The best way
to keep your allies healthy is to focus on avoiding them taking damage in the first place, preferably by
killing the enemy before they can attack! You can heal at your leisure when battle is over.

There’s another side to “healing”, which is condition removal, and this tends to be more competitive in
the action economy (because a condition can make an ally unable to act, but spending your turn curing
them can give them their turn back), but the same trade-offs apply. Using a scroll of Remove Fear to
bring the fighter and rogue that failed will saves back into combat, and thus regaining their turns in the
action economy, does have value, but you have to ask if you can’t just finish combat faster if you used
your action to finish off the enemy on your own? It might be obvious that this won’t be a combat you
win in the next turn, in which case removing conditions from your allies that prevent them from acting is
often the optimal choice, but if it’s possible to just kill the enemy this round, or you have a means of
preventing them from acting to further hurt your allies (by casting spells like a wall that seal the enemy
off from you entirely) those are often better than allowing your enemy to have more turns to try killing
you.

Law III: Drink Deeply But Never Too Deep

Effectively this just means that you can take a certain number of spells for specific tasks, but you never
want to over-specialize, even for a day if you can avoid it. Remember, we only have so many spells.
How do we avoid this?

● If a lower level spell can do it, don’t upcast: Remember, we have more spells at lower levels,
and though DCS may scale, if a lower level spell can do the job, it’s better to prepare a more
specialized lower level spell, and leave more general higher level slots for more powerful
effects.

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● Save Half Your Slots for General Daily Tasks: I know it sounds like a lot, but trust me, having
a set of general spells that are useful every day can help a ton and make sure that you don’t
spend all of your slots of any level on something that didn’t matter as much as you expected
● Information IS USEFUL: Okay okay I know I harp on this all of the time, I know, but this goes
DOUBLE For you as a prepared caster. Why? Because knowing the challenges that are coming
up to you will inevitably mean that you can prepare better spells to handle them. So making sure
that you take advantage of scrying/divination/commune and other such spells so that you can
make better choices in the future IS A MUST.
● Prepare to prepare for the day ahead: Prepared spellcasters can swap out all their spells, but
often, they tend to have sets of spells they use often. If you are going into a dungeon today,
and therefore expect a lot of combat, pack more spells than normal for combat and load up on
all the buffs you can use. “Dungeon days” often have more encounters than normal, pack all
their events into a short period of time when you know you’re in most danger, and therefore, you
know when you need your pre-combat buffs. “Travel days”, meanwhile, are often ones where
you can’t prepare your best buffs before combat, unless they are some of the few that last for
hours/level. You might fight a random encounter or two, but can’t expect to have your buffs up,
so you need to focus on spells you actually will cast mid-fight. This often means less spells for
combat, and you should likely spend them on travel-related spells, or information spells to avoid
unwanted fights, which druids are experts at. “Urban days” spent in town might still have a
surprise encounter, so you want some combat spells, but consider more information or utility
spells. Look those spells over, and think about what sorts of problems you might need to solve,
or think about what options you have to gain information you need from the spells at your
disposal. If there are hostile powers in the city with you, consider what methods they might use,
and how best to defend against an actual ambush, as well as an ambush in the social arena.
Having a list of spells you commonly want for travel days so you don’t have to stare at your spell
list every time you switch from dungeon to travel really helps avoid a lot of wasted time. If I’m
doing a travel day, I generally know I want spells like Nature’s Paths every time, so having that
prepared and easily referenced means I only have to think about what changes from a typical
routine I might need.
● ✰Don’t prepare a spell slot “just in case”, take a scroll!✰: Spells are use-it-or-lose-it. A
spell you never cast because you kept it as an anti-whatever spell “just in case” is a wasted
spell slot that could have been spent doing something like protecting an ally with a buff. Scrolls
and wands might cost money, but remember that gold is a river, and there’s no better use for
your gold than avoiding death from things you could easily prevent with a consumable item.
Spells that reverse common conditions are often low-level, cheap, and don’t involve saving
throws, so pack them to handle “just in case” situations that might never come. 25 gp wasted
on a scroll you didn’t use is ultimately a much lesser waste than running out of combat spells
mid-battle because you packed too many “Remove Whatever” spells. When looking at spells,
lower-level ones that don’t depend on saves, beating SR, or duration can be made scrolls or
wands fairly easily, and even duration can be extended with upcasting. Use scrolls for niche
just-in-cases, because they’ll still be there tomorrow if you don’t use it, but you should focus on
preparing the spells you can use in most cases.
● Prepare spells to avoid being tailed and have a secure campsite: As a prepared caster,
you are nearly unbeatable in a fight you are prepared for, but the party can be exceptionally
vulnerable if attacked while trying to recover. Spells like Pass Without Trace let you avoid being
tailed back to where you’re huddling up for post-battle healing or into your campsite. Commune
With Birds to find good places to camp, away from the hunting patterns of big predators. Use
spells like Sylvan Hideaway to make a secure shelter that leaves you hard to detect if nobody
saw your trail to the camping spot. Secure your campsite, and you’ll ensure that you’re only
fighting when you’re ready for it.
● If you are a casting-focused druid, your top two spell levels are for combat spells: By
“casting-focused”, I mean a character who primarily uses their spells in combat and likely has
wis as their highest ability score. Your top-level spell slots are often your best combat spells
(and if they aren’t, you can put metamagic on lower-level ones). If you’re casting every round in

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 combat, remember that means you want around 10 spells you want to cast in combat, and your
top two spell levels represent your best 5 or 7 spell slots, so you’ll need a few more combat
spell slots at lower levels. It depends on how much your GM believes in multiple encounters in
a day, however, so you just need to get a good feel for how many spells you’re going to need to
cast in combat that day. Everything past those ten spells might be utility, buff, information, or
other types of magic without impacting your combat potential any. This means more and more
of your spell slots are going to be open for these kinds of spells as you level up. You’re only
hurting yourself if you pack nothing but combat spells and wind up with nothing to cast outside
battle, but you’re going to hurt a lot worse if you don’t have prepared combat spells. That said,
if you’re unsure, leave more spell slots open. It’s exceedingly rare (and may indicate a sadistic
GM) to have a day where you have to fight significant numbers of encounters without a chance
to stop for 15 minutes to prepare blank spell slots or do healing. Think long and hard before
giving your top-level spell slots away to non-combat spells if you’re preparing for battle that day.
● High-level caster-focused druids should use metamagic: Druids probably need metamagic
more than wizards do. Druids have a lot of fantastic low-level control spells, but Paizo didn’t
seem to remember druid existed at all when assigning high-level spells, and their spell choices
really fall off a cliff around SL 7. (Not that there aren’t still great spells, but there’s just a lot less
of them.) Often, you see SL 6 control spells that aren’t much better than an SL 3, and you know
what? You can just slap a metamagic like dazing on your SL 3 and make it a vastly better spell
than the SL 6 that does something sort of similar to a SL 3 without metamagic. High level slots
are also great for quickened spells so you can just cast two SL 3 spells in the same round (it’s
just that one takes up a SL 7 as a quickened spell).
● If you are a gish-focused druid, you should focus on buffs cast before combat: When I
say “gish-focused”, I mean a druid that prefers to make physical attacks in battle, often in a
polymorphed form, and where they tend to have a focus on physical ability scores, usually
strength. (And since you aren’t maxing your wisdom, your save DCs will be unreliable, so you
should avoid offensive casting unless you can find no-save spells.) Since you aren’t casting in
combat, don’t worry about saving spells for casting mid-battle with your slots, and focus on
having the best buffs you can before battle starts. Druids are masters of buff spells, especially
for animal companions. Druids gain several types of spells that provide bonuses other PC
classes don’t typically provide, so there’s always room for spells like Barkskin on anyone who
will go into melee. Consider pearls of power for those lower-level slots so you can cast Barkskin
on every party member. It’s not crazy to spend the majority of your spell slots just on buffs
before kicking in a door of a dungeon - just remember that min/level spells are likely to need
recasting. Also remember that buffing an animal companion is an important part of buffing, and
basically necessary if you want to keep them from dying constantly at higher levels. You not
only buff attacks of animals, but you can add whole new attacks to animal companions with
some beastmaster-type spells. Even if you have low Wis/poor save DCs, spells without saves
that shape the battlefield, like wall spells or spells like Entangle that create large patches of
difficult terrain that slow the chance for enemies to reach you, and thus gang up on you can tip
things in your favor.
● Leave spell slots empty: While not as easily used as spontaneous casting, you can leave spell
slots open when preparing spells, and fill them as you need them, so long as you have 15
minutes to meditate. Past really low-level play, try to always leave a few spell slots open in your
middle and lower level spell slots. A level 12 casting-focused druid with SL 6 slots open to them
should at least leave a SL 4 and a SL 2 open, for example, to give some options.

Law IV: Remember the Wolf is a Hunter

This one is a bit of a stretch, but I’m trying to keep a theme here! Anyway, ITEMS! Yes you have spells.
Yes you are all powerful, yes you have unbelievable cosmic might…but as much as I hate to say it, you
CANNOT forget your items. They will save you, so many times over, and make your life as a caster that
much easier.

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Now, as you should all know by now, I am terrible at times. What I include is the BARE MINIMUM.
PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE, remember to get other stuff to augment your casting? Okay? OKAY?
Great.

● Pearls of Power I-IV: Get your spells back! Oh look DAILY EXTRA SLOTS!!! After level 4 or so,
they get hilariously expensive, but before that, it’s literally extra spell slots, so if you don’t know
what to spend your money on…more slots is more slots. These increase in price quadratically,
so lower-level pearls like 1 and 2 are generally what you want to focus on. There are many low-
level utility or buff spells you’ll want to spam constantly. If you need more of a higher-level spell,
scrolls might be cheaper, as you need to use a pearl about 40 times to start making it more
price competitive than a scroll.
● ✰Scrolls✰: But iluzry, I can just prepare the super niche spell whenever I want, why do I need
a scroll? Because sure, you might hypothetically be able to leave blank spell slots, sit and
meditate for a spell you didn’t know you’d need, but if everyone else just failed a save against
frightening presence and are fleeing leaving you the only one standing their ground, the dragon
isn’t giving you fifteen minutes before picking you off one-by-one like hors d'oeuvres. Think of
how Batman or James Bond are constantly getting threatened by some devious trap, and how
they just cock an eyebrow, pull something out of their utility belt or shoe or something, and it’s
some gadget that is perfectly suited to escaping that death trap: Scrolls are your utility belt to
hold all the things that solve problems it would be impractical to memorize every day. Scrolls
turn a TPK into a “You just activated my trap card!” If using pearls of power to cast more spells
per day seems good to you, then just think about how scrolls are a source of indefinite spells
per day, and they cost a lot less per use than pearls. Scrolls use minimum stats, so they have
awful save DCs and durations most of the time, although you can pay more for upleveled scrolls
to pass caster checks. This means the ideal spell scroll is something that negates a time-critical
condition that removes a character’s ability to act in combat (like paralyzed, stunned,
nauseated, frightened, etc.) preferably without a caster check. Their cost ramps up
quadratically with a particular discount for SL 1 spells (one SL 2 scroll costs the same as six SL
1 scrolls), so it often is better to keep a range of low-level spells that specifically negate one
ailment rather than higher-level spells that negate many. Also, druids have a wide variety of
spells they can cast, but don’t perfectly fill the roles a cleric or wizard can, but with UMD, if
there’s a utility spell you want bad enough to pay for it, you can still use it. Druids don’t get
Restoration, for example, so if nobody in the party can cast it, that’s your only option for
removing negative levels. If someone else in the party has scribe scroll (like a wizard that
doesn’t trade it away in an archetype,) then you can “provide” the spell for them while they make
the scroll. There are also only “divine,” “arcane,” and “psychic” scrolls, so if you get a hunter-
written Delay Poison scroll, its price is that of an SL 1, but you can cast it without UMD as from
your spell list.
● Wands: They’re the CostCo value pack of scrolls. If “indefinite spell slots” excites you, wands
are the way to spam the same spell over and over as much as you need at a 40% bulk order
discount to the cost per use if you don’t mind buying in lots of 50. Since scribe scroll reduces
the price by 50%, if you have scribe scroll but not craft wand in the party, wands become nearly
useless.
● ✰Metamagic Rods✰: Druids have sometimes limited spell selection, especially at higher
levels. It’s often better to just metamagic lower-level spells than use the highest-level spells
available. Don’t have any good acid spells when facing a fire-resistant troll? Elemental
metamagic rods have your elemental damage coverage covered. Want to make the most of
your buffs, especially at low levels? Lesser extend rods are dirt cheap and work on a huge
array of good spells. Want to shoot those dang birds from the sky? Did you know dazed
monsters automatically fall? Can I interest you in a dazing spell rod?
● ✰Rod of Giant Summons✰: Psst. Hey kid, over here. Yeah, I know I’m over in the “other” rod
section most people forget about, but you want to know the best-kept secret of summoning?
There’s a not-metamagic rod that applies something similar to a metamagic but isn’t available in
any feat and it stacks with all your summon feats. The entry-level option is a steal at the low-

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 low price 3k gp, just like a metamagic rod for a +1 SL metamagic! It’s like putting an automatic
Enlarge Person on your summons, but it gives +3 AC and +4 Str and Con, for just -2 Dex and
possibly not fitting into hallways. (At least, with the rebuild rules - the quick rules are weird and
don’t increase size.) Plus, you can make all your friends laugh when you say you’re summoning
a giant giant crab! (Where’s that weak point?!) Summoning more than one creature at a time?!
This works on every creature in a (summoning) spell, no matter how many you get, making
summoning crowds of lesser level creatures pay off even more - combine it with superior
summons! You want to summon? YOU WANT THIS ROD! Don’t delay, get yours today!
● Staves: OK, so hear me out. Staves were bad to start with, and Paizo made them worse.
However, there is one saving grace to staves: You don’t pay for the material components of
spells you cast with them. Druids can’t use Blood Money or false focus normally, so outside of
dipping a level of sorcerer, this is one of the only material component tricks that works for you.
This means that if there’s a material component cost spell you’re going to cast a lot, then a staff
that casts that spell for you can save a lot of money for you in the long run. You need to pay 50
times the price in material components, divided by the number of charges per use, so if you
make a 10-charge use staff, it only costs 5 times the normal material component price of a spell.
For spells with very large material component costs, if you’re going to cast them more than 7-8
times during the course of the entire game, but not need it every day, consider using a staff that
uses 10 charges for the spell. Want to repeatedly Reincarnate hoping to get lucky? Why pay a
material component cost each time? A staff that only casts Reincarnate at 10 charges costs
only 7,560 gp! (A Cyclic Reincarnation staff costs 30,280 gp.) If you have the craft wondrous
item feat in the party, make an arcane battery for an additional 11,000 gp as a static cost to
halve the rate of time to recharge them, which helps the turnaround time on using the spells
enough to get your money’s worth. (Don’t take the 24 hour “attunement” time to mean you can’t
switch the battery between staves - if you’re not use the staff actively every day, you can swap
the battery around to make recharging other staves faster without eating too much into your cost
savings if you’re getting more than one staff.) If you’re taking UMD to use scrolls, you might as
well get a staff that can do things like cast Restoration so you can remove negative levels. (Just
ask to add a cantrip used by most classes, like Light, when you get the staff commissioned from
a cleric so you can recharge the staff yourself or have others recharge it while you recharge the
Reincarnate staff.) There’s little reason to get craft staff as a feat unless your GM says there is
nobody willing to make staves for you on commission, since most of the price of staves I’m
talking about comes in the form of those material components, which crafting yourself doesn’t
help with, although if you have a wizard friend and want to make a 3-charge Communal
Stoneskin staff for 11.5k gp that, if cast on four characters each time pays for itself in saved
material component costs in 12 casts, you can. That said, with variable-cost material
components, like that of Communal Stoneskin or Permanency, get really interesting… That
said, if you’re very high-level and have a wizard to help you with it, check out Memory of
Function, which says “if the object uses charges, the object becomes fully charged”… and can
be made a staff spell. With a five charge cost Memory of Function staff running you about 121k
gp, you get a staff that can infinitely recharge all other staves and wands, then recharge itself,
then recharge others ad infinitum. Only Paizo breaking staves by making them impractically
expensive really keeps the broken pricing of no material components from breaking the game…
● Ring of Natural Attunement (Kami): Get some better options for your higher-level summons,
and a free shikigami summon every day. Some of these are just clearly better than your options
without the ring, especially Toshigami for Summon Nature’s Ally IX. Because this simply adds
to your SNA list, you can even use Alter Summoned Monster to create these kami out of lesser
summons!
● Evergreen Seed Pouch: Oh hey, you know how most of your spells make or impact plants?
Wouldn’t it suck if there weren’t any plants to create or manipulate? Well here you go, this
makes fucking plants for you to fuck with. You’re welcome. Before you spend 16k on a seed
pouch, however, ask if you can just bring your own potted berry plants. You can carry a few
smaller blueberry or wild strawberry plants in fist-sized pots on your mule’s saddlebags as
Goodberry material, or throw them to create plants to Entangle with, GM willing. That said, if it

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 grows plants to the entire extent of the radius, this magic item automatically creates trees that
Entangle throughout the whole 40-foot radius of Entangle, so it becomes an anti-air spell. It also
lets you use Plant Growth in any terrain, and that is downright crippling without offering a spell
resistance check or saving throw. Just remember to use Freedom of Movement so you don’t
cripple yourself or your allies in the process.
● Magician’s Hat: 3/day lets you swap metamagic feats from one spell to another! That’s really
useful, especially since you can prepare spells with metamagic feats
● Beast Talisman: Expend spell slots to make your attacks more powerful! Sure this is mainly
meant to be a guide for spells, but this is an aMAZING way to save money and turn used spell
slots into a surprising amount of damage, even if its a standard action!
● Ring of Eloquence & Polymorph Pouch: So obviously you are taking natural spell, obviously,
but that doesn’t let you actually speak to your team, nor use material components. Well
congrats, now you can. No excuses!!!!

Law V: When Ye Fight With A Wolf of the Pack…

…Don’t forget SR. As we grow into our almighty power, spell resistance will become our greatest foe. In
effect, Spell Resistance (SR) acts as a secondary defense against spells, much like AC works as a
defense against martial attacks. Basically, if a monster has Spell Resistance (SR) and if your spell says
“Spell Resistance: Yes”, you now have to roll a d20+your caster level. If you get a number below the
creatures SR? You fail to affect a creature with your spell. At all. Completely bypassing any saves,
statuses or so on and so forth.

Being an entirely passive magical defense, even if a creature is entirely paralyzed IT WILL STILL HAVE
SPELL RESISTANCE. The problem lies in the fact that after level 11 or so, most, if not all of the
creatures you encounter will have SR...and not an insignificant amount of it. (SR is usually based
on CR, with SR usually being CR+11, so you have a 50% chance of any spells succeeding on enemies
with CR equivalent to your level. As you learn to play better, GMs are likely to throw even higher-CR
threats your way.) More frustratingly, most spells have to contest spell resistance to affect a creature
directly!!!

So what do we do about it?

● Avoid SR Checks
○ So our first strategy is to take spells and abilities that avoid SR checks entirely! When we
choose our spells, we should choose them in such a way that we can bypass Spell
Resistance as a mechanic, while still remaining useful on the battlefield. So how do we
do it?
■ Battlefield Control:
● The easiest way to do this is to make sure you have spells that don’t
DIRECTLY affect the monsters in question. Battlefield control spells tend
to have SR less often, and can still have massive effects on creatures.
Find ways to change how creatures act without having to interact with
them directly!
■ Conjure Creatures:
● Summoning spells are another amazing way to get around this. You can
bring a creature into existence, with its own extraordinary, supernatural
and spell-like abilities, that may have abilities that bypass that
resistance...also free actions!
■ Choose “SR: No” Spells:
● I know this might be obvious but it matters! Keep track of which of your
spells make you roll SR and which ones do not! There are some really

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 good spells in this game that get even more powerful because they ignore
this mechanic!
● Boost SR Checks
○ The second strategy is just to make sure you can pass your SR checks when they come
up! You’ll probably want to do both of these if I’m honest, but like I said, boosting this
isn’t the easiest thing in the world! So what’s a good way to make sure you can break
that check?
■ Feats
● Knowledgeable Spellcaster: Okay so this one is hilariously powerful
because in exchange for a knowledge roll, you can get +3 to overcoming
SR and then when you have 10 ranks, its +5. That beats out and stacks
with spell penetration and all you have to do is be decent at Information.
1000% worth it.
● Spell Penetration and Greater Spell Penetration: Super duper boring
and eat up a good part of your build but...they give you +2 to spell
penetration each for a total of +4 on all SR checks.
● Piercing Spell: Treats their opponent’s SR as 5 lower when applied! This
is really helpful so long as you do not forget Rule 3.
● Varisian Tattoo: +1 vs. SR (for a single school)
● Bloodmage Initiate: +1 vs. SR (for a single school)
● Spell Specialization: +2 vs. SR (single spell only)
■ Race
● Elves get a natural +2 to all SR checks via Keen Magic
● Half Elves can take the Elven Spirit to also have +2 to all SR checks
■ Items
● Dweomer's Essence: +5 vs. SR (once)
● Orange Prism Ioun Stone: +1 vs. SR
● Pipes of Dissolution: +2 vs. SR (requires Perform skill)
● Numerology Cylinder: +2 vs SR (requires Know. skill)
■ Spells:
● Ally Across Time (1st Level) /Army Across Time (5th Level): Boost
your caster level into the stratosphere and then just...roll SR with
impunity.

Law VI: Keep peace with the Lords of the Jungle - the Tiger, the Panther, the Bear. (But
eat those cocky birds!)…
So, as a druid, you gain a large number of control spells that largely manipulate terrain. You often
either are a great melee fighter or have an animal companion that is a melee fighter. As a factory-
standard druid without archetypes or feats only gets a sling as a ranged option. The thing is, anything
that can fly can generally ignore a lot of your spells and also your melee combatants if they can just
stay in the air and bombard you with ranged attacks. If your entire build is based around keeping
enemies at a distance and wearing them down without letting them hit you, a monster that just flies over
your devious traps makes a majority of your build worthless.

Even worse than this, the dreaded Freedom from Movement (or as I tend to call it, “Freedom from Druid
Spells”) basically negates the entire concept of control spells, making any attempts at casting to slow
down creatures with it worthless.

Fighting fliers
Don’t be worthless, have a plan to get back at those flying punks…

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 ● Certain spells target fliers specifically. Smaller fliers are particularly vulnerable to high-speed
winds, so spells like Wind Wall or Control Winds directly blast them backwards. Spells like
Burdened Thoughts and Rope Tornado explicitly call out fliers with mechanics to force them to
the ground without specific saves.
● Target fliers with spells or abilities that inflict conditions that prevent taking actions, such as
paralyzed, stunned, or dazed. Flight requires an action (even if a free action) taken every round
to avoid crashing (as confirmed in an FAQ), so negating their actions causes them to crash
because they cannot take the action to hover. Dazing spell metamagic on a damage spell will
force fliers to crash. There is no FAQ confirming it, but arguably having both the nauseated and
staggered conditions at the same time (such as from a Stinking Cloud-like effect and a Slow-like
effect) removes all your actions as daze does. Even more up to the GM, certain actions like
grappling the wings of a flyer or if fliers are entangled can impair flight, but there are no real
RAW rules for this sort of thing.
● Speaking of entangled, the Entangle spell (and its derivatives) are technically a 40-foot radius
spell that affects plants within the radius… that’s not necessarily based upon plants on the
ground, so trees can become a vertical difficult terrain and potential vector of entangling
creatures. As trees are rooted, fliers entangled in a tree are unable to move at all (although this
includes preventing falling).
● Fliers need to make a DC 15 fly check on any round they do not move to hover. For clumsy
fliers, this is a genuine threat, and one that can force them to keep moving to avoid those
checks, and spending move actions moving means they’re not able to full attack. Many ancient
dragons, for example, have fly bonuses only a couple points better than they did as young
dragons. Remind your GM of this limitation when fliers give you problems. (And pay attention to
how some of your creatures have poor fly skill, and make sure you put at least a rank into fly
before you wild shape into a bird…) Note that encumbrance adds penalties to fly checks, and
so do the heavier wind speeds. Certain spells can make hovering more difficult, and if they
can’t safely hover, a flier may either have to move or risk crashing.
● Summon flying creatures or ones with ranged attacks. Even at low levels, you can have eagles
and air elementals. Aether elementals can simply throw flying creatures to the ground and
make them not flying anymore. Throw them into your control spell killzone. Creatures like
manticores are potent brawlers in mid levels. You can also just wildshape yourself or
polymorph your animal companion into a form that can fly, like a vilderavn. You’re giving up on
control and just going for regular combat at this point, but if it works, you don’t need to think up
more clever plans.

Fighting Freedom of Movement

Even worse than fliers are enemies with Freedom of Movement as a buff, or even as a constant
passive ability. Proteans, for example, have a permanent Freedom of Movement effect, which means
that the majority of your control spells have no effect at all! Clearly, this cannot stand. Here are some
ways to get around their immunities:
● Overall, a problem with Freedom of Movement is that its spell text includes a non-exhaustive
list. The spells and conditions listed in FoM’s description are known effects the spell works to
ignore, but if it also applies to other spells, it’s up to GM discretion which ones that includes.
I’ve read some arguments on the Paizo forums where people take an expansive view on the
spell, saying that it works on nearly anything that can take away actions, and others counter that
death takes away movement and actions, but it’s absurd to think FoM counters death. You’re
going to need to go to your GM and work out with them beforehand just which spells FoM
applies to. Most of what I’m saying here therefore becomes more of a list of arguments your
GM may or may not accept.
● You can derive from the way that grapples specifically are banned but no other maneuver
(including tripping or bull rushing) is mentioned, that forced movement in general is still allowed,
FoM merely bars restricting voluntary movement by the target. Reducing someone’s movement

16
 by 15 feet or pushing them back 15 feet can have the same impact, but FoM doesn’t bar the
latter. Likewise, a FoM flier can be forced to fall if they can’t make a fly check in high winds.
● Many types of effects can remove the ability to act without directly impeding movement, itself.
Slow as a spell is barred from the spell, but the text doesn’t say “the staggered condition” the
way that paralysis as a condition is banned. (Remember, having 0 HP causes staggered, too,
so if FoM ignored that, it would be dipping its toes into “immune to death because it impedes
movement” territory.) This means that there’s good reason to believe that conditions that
remove actions that are not directly the result of physically impeding movement the way that
entangled does, such as conditions like dazed, stunned, and nauseated can all remove the
ability for a character to act. These conditions don’t physically bar movement, it’s just that
movement takes actions, and this takes away their actions. This potentially makes your best
defense against FoM creatures a dazing spell that can be aimed at fliers.
● Similarly, many illusions or enchantments can cause effects that make it hard to move in a way
they want to without physically restricting their movement. A condition like confused can cause
a character to move at random against their will, which wastes their movement, but isn’t actually
restraining their movement. Burdened Thoughts makes a character feel too heavy to move,
even if that’s all in their head.
● No matter what, FoM doesn’t allow you to walk through walls. Cast a (solid) wall spell, that’ll
stop ‘em!
● On a similar note, summon beasts just physically standing in their way stop advances cold.

On Attacks of Opportunity for falling or other involuntary movement

Remember that fliers still provoke AoOs for moving out of threatened tiles unless they have an ability
that says they don’t provoke. (And those abilities usually only protect them for one tile of movement, so
they may provoke if they spend more than one tile in threatened reach.)

Movement provokes AoOs even if the target did not intend to move, or is involuntarily moved. This is
especially important if you make a flier fall all of a sudden, as falling provokes AoOs. (For those who
need a reference for their GMs, Core Rulebook p. 180 says, “Two kinds of actions can provoke attacks
of opportunity: moving out of a threatened square and performing certain actions within a threatened
square.” and “Moving: Moving out of a threatened square usually provokes attacks of opportunity from
threatening opponents.” There is no exception for involuntary movement. Granted, that’s vague (it’s
from 3e language and Paizo didn’t clean it up to get the vagueness out), but there’s supporting
evidence a couple pages later to help with that: Core Rulebook p. 183 says, at the bottom of the chart
when talking about AoOs, “1 Regardless of the action, if you move out of a threatened square, you
usually provoke an attack of opportunity. This column indicates whether the action itself, not
moving, provokes an attack of opportunity.” (And note that on that chart, “no action” is a listed type of
action, for those who want to argue that it takes a type of “action” to trigger an AoO.) To see further
rules, Aquatic Adventures p. 43 (which is not posted online as copyrighted material, but if you own it,
can reference it) under “Buoyancy Speed” also reinforce this is the intent in all contexts, as sinking or
rising from buoyancy, “This movement provokes attacks of opportunity as normal.”

As the rules note, however, AoO rules are basically more exception to the rule than actual rules. Many
common methods of moving targets involuntarily (like maneuvers without the greater maneuver feat)
specifically mention they do not provoke AoOs. (And the sheer number of these convince some people
this is the normal rule, but it is not.) If, however, there are no rules in a spell stating there is no AoO
from movement that the spell causes (which often is the case in wind or water current-based spells),
those spells provoke AoOs, which is often an under-appreciated aspect of spells like Blast of Wind or
Control Winds.

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Law VII: The lair of The Wolf is his refuge.
Nature Bond is perhaps the most powerful and defining power that a druid gains. Provided you don't
take an archetype that makes the choice for you, you have three choices of what to do with your nature
bond: domain, animal companion, or herbalism.

Domains
Domains are the same thing that a cleric gets, except that you only get one of them, which means you
get a domain spell slot of every level, but your only choice of what you get to cast with these domains is
what domain you take, and your list of domains are also pretty limited. Originally, only seven cleric
domains were available (animal, plant, weather, and the four elements), but Ultimate Magic adds a
larger set of terrain- or animal-based druid domains more specific to them. There is nothing that
specifically says one way or the other whether druids can gain subdomains to change out some of the
spells, but it helps a lot if you can.

In general, as much as I love casting, I find domains an underwhelming option tripped up by many spell
levels having no real ability to use the spell slot you gain due to poor domain spell choice, especially
compared to the raw flexibility of animal companions. Often, you’re just forced to upcast a lower-level
spell to even use a spell slot, and if the SL 1 spell of a domain is bad too, some spell slots are just
worthless. Make no mistake, it’s still strong, just… frustratingly not as strong as it really should be.
Domains weren’t a choice in 3e, so Paizo seems to have added domain choices as a way to let players
who just feel overwhelmed having another character under their care (or if your GM bans animal
companions) to have a consolation prize for not getting the ability to take a second character with them.

There would be a review of each of the domains here, but that’s already in the other Iluzry druid guide,
so read up there. That said, animal domain deserves mention as the cheeky “why not both?” option,
since you get an animal companion at -3 effective druid levels, which boon companion can fix (and
leave a level of wiggle room for dipping a level of martial artist monk for wis-to-AC bonus) to gain a
spell slot per spell level at the cost of a feat, even if most of the domain spell choices are pretty
situational and redundant with what you can already cast. If you can take subdomains, both feather
and fur subdomains are worthwhile, either for better flight, perception and initiative bonuses, or else to
get a swift action move speed bonus that works on polymorphed forms while trading away more
situational spells for more evergreen ones. (Beast Shape I can be cast upon your animal companion.)

Animal Companions✰
What’s better than turning into a dire tiger and mauling a monster’s face off? Having a pet dire tiger to
tag-team the enemy with you as a “class feature” so you don’t even have to split experience with them!
That said, you can split your cash with them, because not only can animal companions equip magic
items, Ultimate Wilderness added a RAW list of what they can wear. Animal companions are one of
the big reasons why druid is potentially the best class if you ever had to “solo” an adventure. Because
a druid is never alone!

Animal companions gain levels as a ¾ BAB creature, and while they don’t gain many “class features”,
they are otherwise able to advance like a normal character, including gaining feats and Ability Score
Increases (ASI). Giving your animal companion a 3 in intelligence should be a priority choice for ASI,
as this allows your animal companion to gain access to the full roster of feats, as well as gain the ability
to understand (even if not speak) a language, which means that your companion should be considered
a full character (if dumb by human standards) no longer needing handle animal tricks or “pushing”
because it is sentient enough to understand your words directly. This is why handle animal’s tricks say
you can have 3 tricks on a 1 Int animal, or 6 tricks on a 2 Int animal, but nothing about 3 Int animals -
they don’t need tricks at 3 Int, you just use diplomacy to talk to them. (GMs will vary on if this is a RAW
effect of Int becoming 3, as it does for all other animals, because they feel animal companion rules

18
override intelligence rules. Many GMs hate tricks, anyway, so will gladly take up the excuse to let you
just do what your.) Your animal companion can wear barding, use an amulet of mighty fists as a
“magic weapon”, take feats, and generally behave like you when you wildshape without casting… but
there are downsides. For one, your animal companion starts off with 2 HD when you’re at level 1, but
only advances at 3/4ths the rate you do. (Which means they get 3/4ths 3/4ths BAB, or 9/16ths BAB
compared to other characters!) Also, it’s like a martial with no bonus feats, so it tends to lag behind the
party martials. (And I’m sure it would cause a lot of grief if a fighter was weaker than the pet of the
druid on top of the druid being able to cast from the back row…)

However, that’s not really the point of this section in the guide. We’re talking about animal companions
in the spell guide because we want to talk about how your animal companions interact with the spells…

One of the most potent of these special abilities is share spells, which allows you to cast personal-
range spells (with a target of “you”) upon your animal companion, which will be mentioned frequently in
the spells section. (Unless you took a companion archetype, almost all of which give share spells
away, almost like Paizo was desperate to get rid of it when they realized how little they understood their
own rules…) Druids (and clerics and other “gish” classes) are not naturally better than fighters in
melee, but they can cast spells on themselves to improve their abilities up to par with fighters, at least
temporarily. Guess what - now, you can make your weaker animal companion gish, too!

Among other things, this means you can, for example, polymorph your animal companion into another
type of creature, in particular fey using the Alter Self and Fey Form spells! This means they can gain
hands to hold weapons, speak, or even blend into a crowd. With 3 Int, an animal can know a language
and be at least barely smart enough to hold a conversation. If morphed into a humanoid form with Alter
Self or a similar spell, you basically have a cartoonishly dumb and inexperienced humanoid. This may
not be the most combat-effective thing to do, but it can certainly be funny to turn your tiger into a
beastborn tiefling so they can enjoy coming into the tavern with you, throwing back some ales, and
enjoying the beef stew. In fact, if there’s wanted posters out for your arrest, consider turning your tiger
into a human, wildshaping yourself into a horse, and having your animal companion ride you. (They’ll
never see it coming!)

Also, the rules for polymorphing are based upon the assumption that anyone who polymorphs will be
humanoid-shaped. Thus, an animal companion like a horse wearing chain shirt barding that is
polymorphed into a human with Alter Self is now a human wearing barding that is shaped to fit the
human, RAW. Likewise, the saddlebags or any other carried equipment doesn’t meld. (Maybe they
turn into a backpack?) Meanwhile, if you cast Beast Shape III (from animal domain) on your animal
companion to turn your horse into a horse, well, those shapes are just totally different, so all their
equipment melds. Inversely, Fey Form will allow you to keep your equipment, because Paizo assumes
you’re going from a humanoid form to an at least roughly humanoid form. So, if you wildshape into a
horse, your equipment melds, but if you cast Fey Form on yourself to turn into a wild hunt horse, your
equipment doesn’t meld, because that shape is just the same as a humanoid’s, and you can
presumably continue using your humanoid-shaped armor or even hand slots, RAW! Needless to say,
this is all pretty silly and go against the intent of the rules (especially the 3e rules where they basically
just told you to ask the GM on a case-by-case basis instead of making a broad declaration based on
types, assuming all fey have humanoid shapes, while no elemental can have humanoid shapes), so
ask your GM whether they want to run things RAW for consistency’s sake even when it has stupid
results, or if they’re going to make case-by-case judgements on whether equipment melds based on
their judgment call. If the latter, this isn’t a total loss for you, however, it means polymorphs that turn
into animal-like shapes (like Vermin Shape) might be more viable for your animal companion.

Here’s the big pitfall, though: The (polymorph) subschool has a section on how, if you start as a large
creature, you take penalties to get you “back to medium size” before those polymorph bonuses apply.
Hence, if you want to polymorph your large creature into a large creature using something like Vermin
Shape II, well, then, your +4 Str, -2 Dex is counteracted by having to take -4 Str, +2 Dex, and -2 Con,

19
for a net -2 Con for your polymorph. Hence, you want to choose your animal companion specifically for
being a creature that is suited to polymorphing, which means having the best ability scores possible
while only being medium size. (Although some large-size creatures have stats so much better than the
medium sized ones, you still come out ahead losing 4 strength…)

Similarly, if you’re making a polymorph-focused animal, you might want to think about feats and
equipment it can use. If you plan to have an animal companion you cast Fey Form on frequently,
consider something that could plausibly carry weapons all the time, like a chimpanzee or devil monkey.
(Remember that one of its feats will need to be to gain weapon proficiency, although martial weapon
proficiency has no prereq, while simple weapon proficiency gives all simple weapons.) Check the spell
sponge feat in particular, as a feat the companion takes that is a free extend spell on “target: you”
spells you cast on the companion, including polymorphs. Also, when looking at animal companions,
note that the polymorph subschool does not actually say you lose natural armor when you change
shape, so a form with high natural armor can get another form’s natural armor bonus on top of their
own natural armor. Cue the unsettled arguments over whether natural armor is a feature based upon
shape, and counter-arguments that a dragon turned into a mouse still has most of the strength of a
dragon thanks to how Paizo rewrote the rules to have most attributes not be changed along with shape.
Ultimately, this one comes down to your GM, so talk it over with them, and if they allow you to keep
natural armor from the base form, put a premium on that when picking an animal companion type, too.

On that topic, note that the rules for replacing animal companions are actually pretty generous. It’s
totally free, and you can basically replace a companion you don’t need anymore (or one that’s dead) if
you have a week of downtime. Many animals that are great after their Pokemon-like evolution at level 7
are extremely weak at levels 1-6, so it can make good sense to have an “early game companion” that
starts off strong but has a tepid evolution, like the horse, and then release them to get an evolved
companion at level 7, when you’re also starting to get the sort of spells you need to really use some of
the strategies in this guide, like polymorphing. Many players treat replacing animal companions as a
grievous role-play sin (and there’s even a special Raise Dead just for companions so you can keep the
same animal) and part of the reason I love companions and familiars so much is that I love to role-play
as them, but it is an option if your table won’t treat you like a deadbeat parent that just abandoned their
child.

Also, there are several feats that further expand your options for animal companions, like beast speaker
granting you creatures like a basilisk with ✰at-will petrification powers✰(!!) at the cost of two feats,
as well as beast rider, curious companion, and a few other feats that expand your options.

Remember that you really want 3 Intelligence on your animal companion so that you can unlock the full
list of feats, as well as so that they have comprehension of speech and can understand complex plans
without needing to bother with tricks and pushing your companion, while things like vermin companions
are going to be quite difficult to get that smart.

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Spell Categories
So normally this is my spell gender section, which is a funny joke because genders are fun, and the
word gender is basically just type, but lets not get into that. What we should be getting into is the type of
spells you expect to pull out on a daily basis.

● Control: Control people's movements and positioning on the battlefield! Limit options
and create advantages by manipulating the environment
● Buff Spells: Spells that make you stronger or get you new abilities!
● Debuff Spells: Spells that make your enemies weaker or take their abilities!
● Blast: Spells that do HP damage and are meant to hurt people effectively!
● Heal: Spells that help you recover from damage or statuses dealt by your enemies!
● Summons: Spells that create minions or allies, either by making facsimiles,
constructs or calling them from somewhere else! Will be taking a lot of cues from Why
work when others can do it for you - a guide to Summoning
● Utility: Provides us with some other use that is outside of the described areas of
expertise, like teleportation, item creation, contingent spells, telekinesis, information
gathering spells, spells that remove ailments and so on and so forth. If I can’t put it
anywhere else, but it’s worth talking about, It’ll likely go in here.
● Protection: Spells that keep you from dying or taking damage/debuffs in the first
place!
● Beastmaster: Spells that are made to work with your animal friends. Why does this get
its own category? Because we have a surprising amount of animal only spells or spells
that are made to use on creatures with natural attacks
● Information: Is useful. These spells give you more of it.

21
 Druid Spells by Level

1st Level Spells

● Burning Sands: SR/No, Save/No difficult terrain that hurts you. What's not to love? This is the
best SL1 dazing spell candidate, as even 1 damage can trigger the metamagic’s daze effect.
● ✰Entangle✰: INSANE RADIUS spell with difficult terrain, and entangle debuff at level one. This
is your GO TO control spell and will be for many levels to come, even as you get evolved versions
of Entangle that do even crazier things. It requires “plants” in the area to work, although in
Pathfinder, fungi and mold count as plants, so you can argue it works in natural caverns, maybe?
Remember that entangling stops all movement if the entangling item is rooted to the ground…
like most plants. That said, you might be able to cheese plant availability by bringing your own
potted berry plants or evergreen seeds and having the rogue throw them at the enemy before
casting this spell in barren landscapes or paved roads. Oh, and it’s not 40’ radius on the ground,
just “plants in a 40-foot-radius,” meaning that if you’re in a forest, the trees can be difficult
terrain for fliers up to the height of the treetops or edge of the spell’s radius.
● Expeditious Construction (utility): Quickly lock down a hallway with insta lego powers.
Remember, whatever you make is real and permanent because it's an instant creation spell.
Very nice, very versatile.
● Expeditions Excavation (utility): While this spell’s utility powers are rivaled by a mundane
Control

shovel, as a combat spell, this spell has easily overlooked features. First, the movement on a
successful reflex save is specifically mentioned not to trigger an AoO… but the falling on a failed
reflex save does not have that distinction. Second, uncontrolled falling causes a creature to land
prone, and unlike Create Pit spells, the creature here is still only 5 feet down, so they are prone
while within melee reach of anyone in an adjacent square, giving a +4 to attack rolls made by
adjacent characters. Standing up from prone also provokes another AoO and takes a move
action. Third, they are now on an elevation below the surrounding terrain, so allies now gain a
+1 to attack for having the high ground (for a total of +5 against a prone foe). Fourth, trying to
climb out of a pit requires both hands be free and any shield to be stowed (so no shield AC and
disarmed) with the character losing dex to AC while climbing (meaning a rogue that readies an
attack against the target climbing gets a sneak attack). This is a lesser Grease type of effect, but
it can still be worth using against medium or smaller enemies at low levels. You generally don’t
want to use this spell to create concealment (which prevents AoOs) when trying to trip an
enemy, but it also works to just dig a hole next to your buddy to create instant concealment if
you need a distraction.
● Obscuring Mist✰: Toss down a smoke bomb to escape with style like Batman. Combine with
ashen path to make your enemies blind and your allies unstoppable. Alternatively, just fuck over
anyone doing things from long range. Be aware that, unlike Fog Cloud, this spell also has a
vulnerability to spells like Fireball.

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 ● Aspect of the Falcon: Okay the bonuses might seem small, but there aren’t a lotta ways to boost
your crit multiplier, and it lasts for minutes per level. If we are an archer, we need every bonus
we can get!!!!
● ✰Blend✰: Hide in plain sight, but you have to move slowly. The main benefit? You only break
stealth if you attack! Not if you cast spells!!! Woot! Enjoy casting all your wack bullshit and not
getting caught. This alone makes it worth putting points into stealth to become untargetable.
Wildshaping into smaller animals grants a massive stealth bonus, with tiny creatures getting a
+8 bonus to stealth - turn into a ninja rabbit (for ground speed), monkey (for climb),
archaeopteryx (the only flier whose base speed matches fly speed unless your GM lets you get
away with a hawk flying 30 feet/round), meerkat (to burrow your way to the enemy), king crab
(to swim), or velociraptor (if you don’t have Beast Shape II forms from wild shape yet so you
need a fast small form), and snoop or fly into the middle of a crowd of enemies and change into a
combat form in the surprise round to give them a hello from melee range. Win initiative with
Heightened Awareness, and you can start combat with a full attack on a flat-footed enemy. As a
personal spell, you can also cast it on your animal companion.
● Blend With Surroundings: Blend, but you can cast it on the rest of the party, and they have to
stand still for it to work. You can’t aggressively go hunting, but if you’re setting up an ambush,
the entire party can look like random shrubs if you’re using spells like Mirage, or just look like
random coat racks and chairs if you’re hiding in a house to stage a surprise party, I guess.
● Cheetah Sprint: Swift action ZOOOOMMMMM. Great for later game forms or if you want to get
in/out of combat as fast as possible. Seriously, moving 300 feet in a single round is terrifying.
● Face of the Devourer: An extra primary natural attack that doesn’t require anything more than a
SL 1 is pretty good, even if bites are relatively common. Animal companions and martial PCs
alike won’t say no to extra attacks and damage, and this can benefit from their natural strength
scores to add notable damage. Anyone going for an intimidation build will enjoy a +4 buff from
the Halloween mask effect, too. Well, it does come from Rovagug, but in custom settings, it’s
worth asking your GM if it can be repurposed in their campaign. Just note that it’s a polymorph,
so when you’re at the level you can just Fey Form your animal companion, that’s nearly always
better.
● Feather Step: Hey you know how you are constantly making difficult terrain, such as with
Entangle or Stone Call? Make that everyone else's problem! MWAHAHAHAHA evil!
● ✰Frostbite✰ (Blast/Debuff): It ain’t just for magi! Some might laugh at “just” 1d6+CL damage,
but did you know that you can use natural attacks to deliver touch spells? (CRB p.183, under
Buff

“touch spells in combat - holding the charge”.) You can’t do the “free action delivery” for casting
on your round and use the natural attack, but instantaneous touch spells last until you discharge
them or cast another spell, so you can just cast Frostbite before battle, be in bear form, and now
you can put the “bite” in “Frostbite!” Add 1d6 + your level nonlethal cold damage on top of your
natural attacks, no action required. (Depending on reading, the spell may only be “held” in one
natural attack, and it’s possible to accidentally discharge on other objects if you, say, put the
spell on your claws and tap the ground with the claws while walking.) Oh, and you can put this
in a spell storing weapon so your friends can get in on this. Oh, AND it can inflict fatigue too.
Nonlethal damage is as good as normal damage in most cases besides undead and constructs,
and if need be, get a lesser elemental rod for acid or fire or the like. Once you’re at mid-levels,
any wild shaping gish druid should have this spell going basically any time you expect enemies
that aren’t immune. This is what you stockpile Pearls of Power 1 for! Or don’t leave it a SL 1
spell, and put metamagic on it, like rime spell to inflict entangle with your bite! Sickening spell
and frightening spell work, too, but you can get cherry blossom spell for more consistent ability
score damage than most spells actually meant for such things, or add in dazing to make a
stunlock build for your druid! Seriously consider magical lineage for this spell if you’re planning
on being a polymorph brawler.
● ✰Heightened Awareness✰ (Utility/Information): A perfect target for pearls of power 1 or
simply a scroll or wand, this spell can increase perception (so you spot battles coming, don’t get
ambushed and let the enemy goes first) and then be dismissed for +4 initiative so you are more
likely to go first. You are a full caster. If you go first and prevent the enemy from being able to
act with your control spells, you can win battles without even taking damage! Cast this spell and
use it for the initiative bonus every battle! If you don’t have enough pearls, take it as a wand, and
share it with UMD. It’s personal, so give it to your animal companion, too. +4 initiative is
absolutely worth 15 gp per character per battle.
● Longstrider: Have a higher base speed for hours per level! This may seem like a small thing, but
that 10 feet will matter, and likely when you are most annoyed by it. As a “target: you” personal
spell, your animal companion can benefit with share spells if they need a speed boost to reach

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 ● Faerie Fire: Okay this may not look like much but its anti blur/displacement AND invisibility
with NO save. That shit will save your life one day, if not make a lot of fights WAY easier. Keep
scrolls to have it handy, as you likely won’t know ahead of time when you’ll need it. 25 gp to
negate a possible nightmare encounter where you have to constantly toss chalk dust around
trying to find the enemy is worth it.
● Mudball: Depending on the GM reading, this spell seems intended to not offer a save until the
creature’s next turn, being a single-target ranged touch attack SR:no that causes blindness that
Debuff

only grants the reflex save on the creature’s turn. Remember that a blinded creature cannot
AoO, treats all creatures as though they are invisible, and the rogue gets to sneak attack
them.Ranged touch attacks are usually pretty easy to make, so this can be worth your action,
setting up an easy takedown. It’s not as good if the GM declares the ref save applies at the same
time as your touch attack, as well, because the functional no-save initial effect is really key in
such an otherwise marginal effect.
● Touch of Bloodletting: Single-target will save negates with SR:yes should take an enemy out of
the fight. Bleed is utterly worthless in combat because of the shortness of battles, so you’re
doing this for a -3 to attack, damage, and AC, plus removing charges, which is inconvenient, but
not taking them out of the fight.

● Snowball: No save, SR:no basic ranged touch attack. With intensify spell, it even scales a little bit.
Better on magi, but you can still use it. At low levels, this is often enough to delete an enemy
Blast

outright. If your GM says the original version of the spell from People of the North is still valid,
this is purple for also adding on a round of staggered to your damage. Due to the lack of save, a
wand of Snowball up-leveled to CL 5 only costs 3,500 gp, and can serve as an emergency “ranged
weapon” for druids with no other options when their spells run out.

● Cure Light Wounds: It’s a baby heal, but it’s a classic for a reason. Keep this as a wand so you
can keep casting it as much as is needed, but keep in mind that Infernal Healing can be a more
Heal

affordable option, and boots of the earth is basically a permanent healing solution
● Remove Sickness: Okay so you don’t actually want to memorize this spell… but there are
precious few ways to remove nauseated, and this is one of them. Keep scrolls of this spell at all
times.

● Summon Minor Ally: Summon a bunch of tiny but dangerous animals. Not to be
underestimated!!!! At higher levels, they don’t even qualify as combatants, but they still occupy
space, block charges, and require actions to (ludicrously over)kill, so they can still possibly
Summons

justify the round to summon them in actions the enemy takes going around them.
● Summon Nature’s Ally I: Okay so! The baseline druid (And many of its good archetypes) keep
summon nature’s ally and can turn ANY spell into SNA. This is important, because for those
druids, you should never prepare the spell…because you basically always have it prepared!!!! All
future reviews will be assuming you do not have spontaneous SNA. At low levels, consider
Summon Minor Ally. At higher levels, these summons are so pathetically weak they won’t slow
the enemy down enough to justify the casting time unless spammed in bulk… and Summon
Minor Ally exists because this spell can’t.

24
 ● Air Bubble: Water breathing on the cheap! Keep a scroll as an emergency “life preserver”.
● Ant Haul: Improved carrying capacity! Look you don’t always need it but when you need it, you
REALLY need it. Cast it on the stong person to make them ridiculous. Alternately, cast it on a
pack mule to have them carry enough to fill a semi truck.
● Brightest Night: This spell doubles the vision range of most characters in dark areas, where you
need to rely on torches or Light spells. Even if they already have low-light vision, it’s now twice
as good. Possibly worth taking as a wand if you’re going to be in dark dungeons all the time and
your GM uses the light rules as written.
● Deadeye’s Lore: As a druid, some of the big things you’ll be asked to do is feed the party, keep it
from getting lost on long overland journeys, and occasionally track down monsters in the
wilderness. This spell directly improves all those things. If your GM disallows potted berry
plants and demands you find new berries to turn into Goodberries every day, this is a good way
to do that at little cost.
● Goodberry: This is your primary food spell, and essentially is a level one spell to negate the
entire concept of survival gameplay. Note that the berries are not components, but targets of
the spell, so a component pouch or eschew materials does not help here. Bring your own potted
berry plant (several if you throw them for Entangle, too) and you can pick some berries as you
need them. Note that this spell does not care what kind of berry you cast it on - poisonous,
underripe, overripe, inedible - just that it is “fresh”, which is vague, but where the description
text indicates that means “has just been picked”. No matter what it used to be, it is transmuted
to being nutritious now, so have some nice fresh holly berries! (No word on the taste, though…)
You can probably easily use these as bargaining chips for herbivorous animals you want to wild
empathy with, as well. It also technically heals, but the cap of 8 HP makes it basically pointless
for healing past level 1 even before you consider the logistical hurdle of feeding even mid-level
parties the thousands of berries they’ll need to heal.
● Ironbloom Sprouts: Goodberry for Darklands campaigns. The 1 gp material component is
annoying, but the Darklands can be harsher about forageable food and travel times, and these
can be lighter and cheaper than normal rations if you use the doubled 2d4 version that doesn’t
heal. Like with Goodberry, it overwrites what kind of mushroom it is, so you can now eat
poisonous ‘shrooms, and there’s no requirement of freshness, so you can eat dehydrated
shrooms. Eschew materials allows you to negate the 1 gp material component cost, but don’t
get that feat just for this spell.
● Lucky Number: Have a reroll spell! Totally worth just burning a spell slot on it so everyone gets
a random advantage token. GREAT buff to just keep on hand at later levels.
● Monkey Fish: Emergency mobility spell. If you remembered to put at least one rank into swim
and climb, this shouldn’t be a big deal for you, but your animal companion very likely can’t swim
or climb, and you might want them to start doing so at some point, especially before you have
Carry Companion always on tap. Remind the limp-wristed wizards to take a scroll of this, as
well, because they’re always failing climb checks or drowning without some help, but it’s
personal-range, so they need to read the scroll before they jump in the water…
● Nature’s Paths: In a hex-grid campaign, this negates the penalties to moving on unpaved
wilderness, being just another way druids dominate low-level overland travel before teleports
Utility

run the show. If overland travel times matter at all, counting as on a road doubles your speed
through forests, for example, at the cost of a level 1 spell every day.
● Pass Without Trace✰: This spell serves two purposes. One, it makes the rogue or other stealth-
users negate the advantage of scent, which can otherwise immediately spot even invisible
creatures. Don’t overlook the power of scent! The other is it prevents creatures from tracking
you back to your camp. There are often times you hit a dungeon, can’t beat it in one go, and
need to retreat to camp and refresh your spells. If the monsters there are intelligent creatures
like hobgoblins that will hunt you down for revenge. Using this spell is a way to throw revenge
parties off from a night-time ambush. Time when you cast it for after you started down a wrong
trail leading to something more dangerous before doubling back for extra fun for any pursuers.
This can also be a spell to “lower the encounter rate” during overland travel depending on how
the GM rationalizes such things. The value of this spell varies heavily by how your GM plays,
from an OK spell to nigh-mandatory.
● Restore Corpse: Normally useless to druids, this spell is intended just to allow you turn skeletons
into zombies. In order to ensure that you don’t use this just as an infinite meat exploit, Paizo
included a line about how the meat is “slightly rotted” so it was inedible… wait… rotted? Doesn’t
Purify Food and Drink remove all rot? Looks like meat is back on the menu, boys! Go to a
butcher, buy a whole pig skeleton, then Restore Corpse, pull the muscles and organs out, Purify
Food and Drink, rinse and repeat. (You’re sadly limited to medium creatures, so no feasting on

25
 ● Endure Elements: Not always necessary but when it is, you'll love that you have access to it.
● Ice Armor: Druids mage armor! Gives you the same defenses as breastplate without having to
worry about that pesky metal problem.
● Liberating Command✰: Immediate action, verbal only escape artist check, which can be used
when a friend is in the jaws of a beast and about to be swallowed whole, or just being pinned by
Black Tentacles. Skip it at low levels, but come high levels, where there are tons of creatures
Protection

that will be swallowing you whole without it, this spell is 100% mandatory at all times!! The
victim has to make a concentration check to cast even an immediate action, no-somatic spell
while grappled, so you want to have someone else cast the spell on the victim. It should be
memorized by more than one caster - give the martials scrolls to UMD if you need to, everyone
has to have the ability to cast Liberating Command, because it’s basically the only thing standing
between you and the game becoming a vore fetish. Don’t skimp on ranks in escape artist, either.
● Stone Shield: Immediate action earth bending is far more useful than you think! If you play 5e,
this is their version of Shield, for +4 AC.
● Windy Escape: Immediate action crit negation WILL SAVE YOUR ASS and early on, dr10/magic
will be hard as nails to pierce.

● Acid Maw: Adding 1d4 acid damage isn’t huge, but SL1 slots aren’t in high demand at higher
levels, and this is damage you can reliably add to the total that isn’t likely to be overlapped the
way Magic Fang will be.
● Call Animal (Summons): You are literally full of spells that make animals bow to your will and
become your helpful servants. All you need is some servants to command! OH LOOK! A CALL
BUTTON! WHAT FORTUNE.
● Charm Animal: No, really, we’re friends now! This is only single-target, but dinosaurs and dire
Beastmaster

animals can go up as high as CR 12, and even high-level ones have poor saves and poor Cha.
Some animals may be too ornery or hungry to listen to Wild Empathy alone, and this is an
alternate option for speed-friendship. Remember, charm isn’t enough to get a creature to
willingly die for you, but they might let you walk through their turf unmolested or convince
them someone else is encroaching on their territory, and you’ll “help them defend their
territory”, making the odds seem better to an animal than they actually are...
● Enlarge Tail: Personal and technically made for kobolds, but not marked as such, so you can
share spells with your animal companion. A diplodocus with two tail attacks loves getting
hours-long reach, attack, and damage bonuses for just an SL 1.
● Magic Fang: Make your beasts hurt more! We’ll get a better version later, but for now, this’ll do
fine.
● Shield Companion: If you are a casting druid, your animal companion probably has some hit
points to spare!!! Use them!

26
 ● ✰Commune with Birds✰: Birds give you the lowdown based on the surrounding area up to a
mile away. They have a literal birds’ eye view and even if they don’t understand humanoid
concerns, they can spot every large, dangerous creature (like humanoids) in the area. You can
easily use this to spot encounters coming, find fleeing enemies, or find safe camping spots. Pro
Tip: Talk to the ravens. They know shit.
● Detect Plants and Animals: Okay I know this is silly but sometimes you need to look for
something specific and this gives you a huge range for finding plants and animals, which are
useful for your unique abilities. Ask your GM if casting this can help you find specific rare,
valuable herbs.
● Detect Aberration: You generally don’t need to worry about spells like this, but if there’s an
Intellect Devourer on the loose playing a game of Among Us in your campaign, this is faster than
Information

a blood test for rooting out the headcrab zombies. (And make sure they remove any lead-lined
hats they may be wearing. I have been informed that it is, in fact, not a halfling custom to carry
thin sheets of lead everywhere.) It has the same range as Detect Plants and Animals, but
aberrations are going to be inherently hostile around 90% of the time, so if you suspect any may
be in the bushes, but not behind 3 whole feet of trees, it’s worth rooting them out, and this can
reveal shapeshifter types fairly easily.
● Read Weather: Level 1 druids are more effective than modern meteorologists… Most GMs forget
about actually modeling the weather, but if you have one who remembers weather exists, this
spell is one you should cast daily if you can find any way to fit it in. Weather effects can have a
huge impact on your campaign, and you need to know whether to pack an Endure Elements
tomorrow morning. Also, if you see a tornado and didn’t predict it, that lets you know it’s one
caused by magic, and thus, likely another druid.
● Tears to Wine (Buff): Incredible buff to your ability to know things, which is very very useful.
Moreover, you don’t have a lot of things that make you good at knowing things, so this is super
useful.
● Whispering Lore (buff): Bonus to knowledge based on environment! Knowing things continues
to be useful!

27
 2nd Level Spells

● Cloud of Seasickness: Like fog cloud but it includes a debuff. Well, the duration and range are
much shorter too. The sicken effect is [poison], so if you use both Delay Poison and Ashen Path
on your martials, you can drop the cloud on top of the front line and your side’s immune. Too
bad sicken’s nowhere near as good as nauseated, but as a combat spell durations above rounds
don’t matter, so only the very limited range make this in any way worse mid-combat than Fog
Cloud.
● Euphoric cloud: Like fog cloud, but includes a distraction; if you make sure enemies are deep
enough in the cloud they can’t see out, not much will break the fascinated condition. Short
duration so you likely can’t cast in advance of combat.
● Fog Cloud✰: Shut down line of sight anywhere on the map. Ashen path combos with it very well.
Use spells like Entangle to ensure they can’t get out of the effect and become able to see again.
● Ice Slick: Grease a level higher and it does some damage now… but Grease isn’t on your spell list,
so this might have to do. At least you can use Winter Grasp to boost its save. Note it only does its
damage once, so it’s not useful for dazing.
● Sickening Entangle: Entangle, but failing a save now means they take -2 on their rolls to save
against your other spells. If they have ranged attacks, they’re less likely to hit with them, too.
Delay Poison makes your allies immune to the sickened, (and arguably, the whole spell is
[poison], so if they’re immune to [poison]...)
Control

● Soften Earth and Stone: You need the right kind of floor (soft dirt) to cast this on, but what
better way to bog down walkers than an actual instant bog, just add spell? A kind of “mass
Grease” that creates a 10-foot-square of ref save or suck per level.
● Stone Call (blast): It does damage too, but this is mainly no-save, no-SR massive area difficult
terrain to bog enemies down and buy time for more spells. Barbarians will hate your total area
charge denial. Entangle is better, but you can use this even where there are no plants if you
can’t spare the action to throw some seeds or a potted plant. Also (Mass) Feather Step lets your
allies totally ignore the effect, which your barbarian may greatly appreciate, alongside Ashen
Path and Fog Cloud to disable enemies without slowing your own martials down any.
● Winter Grasp✰ (blast/debuff): This can be anywhere between OK and amazing, depending on
your level of coordination. This is a low-level no-save SR:no AoE saving throw debuff that also
improves the often sadly low acrobatics checks creatures need to make to not trip in spells like
Grease, Ice Slick, or Sleet Storm. It’s also treated as ice, which doubles movement cost which is
not the same as difficult terrain, so it stacks. Ask your GM whether using a lesser elemental
metamagic rod changes what element to which the saving throw debuff applies (turning it into
“Autumn’s Rot” that is a -2 on saves versus [acid] spells if you make it acid, for example.)
Otherwise, use a lesser elemental metamagic rod (cold) to turn Burning Entanglement into
Freezing Entanglement, and now it costs four times the movement to go a single tile, they are
taking up to 5d6 cold damage per round, and have a -2 on saves versus the entangle. Coordinate
with other control casters in your party so your Winter Grasp makes their Grease or Sleet Storm
or dazing metamagic spells more likely to work. I’ve seen druids and (winter) witches built
around this one spell.

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 ● ✰Ashen Path✰: Use this with Fog Cloud or Obscuring Mist to make your enemies functionally
blind while your whole party can see them perfectly. Unlike Invisibility, Fog Cloud doesn’t
disappear when you attack! Use Delay Poison and Stinking Cloud to make a zone of blindness
and nausea while your side is immune, negating most ability for the enemy to resist.
● Invigorating Poison: Invert a poison into an alchemical +4 buff. Essentially only alchemists
normally get those, so this has use to the end of the game if you can set it up. Wildshape into
animals with poison (or use Vermin Shape) and milk your own poison (or just bite yourself after
casting this), or raise some pet centipedes and sea urchins to gain +4 bonuses to all sorts of
things. Look up the Ultimate Wilderness rules for manufacturing your own poisons. The short
Bu duration (usually only 1-3 minutes of actual poison duration) is the big downside, but if you’re
the one setting up meticulous ambushes instead of being attacked, this hypothetically stacks
ff with all the belts and headbands for a +2 to everything for the whole party. With Full Pouch, it
gets easy to supply poisons for this spell.
● Owl’s Wisdom: Pretty much only useful for making your headband easier to make, this doesn’t
last long enough to be worth the slot. Use it if you are low on equipment OR funds.
● Harmless Form: This is a very long-duration polymorph if you can make use of it. You can turn
your midget allosaurus into a horse you can ride, or turn your wolf into a hawk to let it fly.
● Pouncing Fury: As a personal spell, you can cast this on your companion, too. If you have rake or
an unusual number of claws, this can be useful, but those types of shapes often already have
pounce. The rounds/level duration mean you’re likely delaying entering combat unless you’re
just casting it on the companion and letting them fight for you.

● Aboleth Lung (Utility): Touch save or die; a shame it’s so slow. In a more tactical sense someone
holding their breath is going to have a hard time casting spells. Also it’s water breathing a spell
level lower, with an annoying limitation. Note the lack of (D)ismissability unless you take
fleeting spell metamagic on it.
● Burdened Thoughts: Flying enemies are a HUGE nuisance to a control druid, flying over all your
Entangles and other area-denial spells. This spell gives a save and SR, but if they fail, they’re
grounded. As it is technically mental, this may arguably be one of the few speed reduction spells
to actually impact a creature with Freedom of Movement, as well. This might be your only
defense against proteans at low levels besides Pale Flame.
● Burst of Radiance: No save minor damage and save-or-blind, over an area with a decent range.
Debuff

Also an aggressive form of detect evil.

● Pox Pustules: This is a -4 Dex penalty and gives the enemy a choice between sickened or
staggered. Remember that they will choose the one more beneficial for them, so martials will
just take -2 on their rolls, while staggering casters doesn’t impair them much. It can be as much
as a -4 on some rolls, but this doesn’t actually cripple anyone, and it’s too obviously hostile for
using outside battle. It’s annoying, but this isn’t the best use of your actions, especially as it’s
single-target, fort save negates, and SR: yes.
● Sickening Strikes: if you have enough attacks the chance of a target failing their save against this
approaches unity. Wild shape can give you many attacks. Rounds/level duration makes it
questionable whether sicken’s mere -2 is worth spending an action during combat to cast this
spell, however. Note that the sickening spell metamagic applies do SL 1 spells (like Frostbite)
can accomplish something similar, and that can be cast before battle, although it may not apply
to all natural attacks.

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 ● Aggressive Thundercloud: It’s Flaming Sphere, but for electric damage coverage.
● Flame Blade: There are whole builds based on this spell. You don’t get strength damage, but this
makes your melee attacks target touch AC while also having the functionality of a scimitar.
Feats that benefit scimitars benefit this spell, including dervish dance, which arguably allows
dex-to-damage (GMs may ban this), and thus the only major downside. As a spell, you can
theoretically even use this while polymorphed, although it has to be a shape you can convince
the GM is able to wield a weapon.
● Flaming Sphere: Mainly a way to use your move action productively while casting better spells.
The thing is, unlike wizards, druids often use their move action, so this is not the benefit it is for
wizards. Want to summon? That takes full-round casting. Want to push your companion or
handle any non-companion animals? That’s a move action. Want to wade into combat? You
definitely want your move actions there. The slow 20’ speed means enemies can out-walk your
sparky ball, but if you Entangle them and keep them from shooting back with Fog Cloud, the
enemies might have to just sit there and take it. Also a hypothetical chassis for dazing spell, as
Blast

an SL 2 ref save spell, but you can only target a single creature.
● Gozreh's Trident: Essentially, Gozreah’s bootleg Flame Blade with the serial numbers filed off,
but with less exploits and lightning flavored. There is no RAW support for what happens if you
throw one of these, in spite of the fact that it’s a throwable weapon.
● Pale Flame: Although it has limited “ammunition”, this is a no-save option that can take
advantage of full attacks as a ranged touch fire spell, meaning Haste adds more attacks per
round. It can be a “backup ranged weapon” if your dex is poor or you don’t have anything but a
sling. Alternately, it can be used as a melee touch attack, which means it works like Flame Blade
but without feats that specifically make this fire a better weapon, yet having better base damage
and still allowing natural attacks to be secondary attacks. It’s also arguably usable in more
wildshape forms. This can also start fires for traps or Pyrotechnics with a collaborating wizard.
A lesser extend rod doubles your “ammo”.
● Whip of Spiders (Summon): For those who wanted Flame Blade, but grosser, shorter duration,
and based on a whip. There are a lot of whip-related feats you can take, but that can be a
detriment to a class that does not gain bonus feats. Theoretically, you can build around whips
and make this good, though.

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 ● Delay Poison: This stops poisons you can’t cure easily from killing allies, and you might want to
have a scroll (written by a hunter so it’s only SL 1, and even upleveling it costs less) of this spell
for that purpose, but the big benefit is that you make your allies (temporarily) not feel the
effects of your own [poison] spells, like Stinking Cloud. If the party doesn’t mind sudden nausea
when this eventually wears off, it’s practically a gas mask for your fighter to go into the Stinking
Cloud. Being invulnerable to your own spells makes indiscriminate AoE control magic much
more fun. You can also use this if you are anticipating poisonous monsters as a prophylactic and
prevent poisons from ever mattering. Be sure to use heal checks to give your allies bonuses
against them, or just cast Invigorating Poison to turn it into a buff.
● Healing Token: You can spend a spell to spend an action and a spell to make a heal check from
range. It makes you casting a cure spell an immediate action, but the other character has to
spend a standard action activating it. This is a grossly inefficient spell, but technically, there is
no range limit once cast so you can hypothetically use it to track status or heal a creature you
split ways with.
● Recentering Drone: Emergency condition suppression. It takes concentration, so you’re out of
the fight if you use this yourself. It’s vastly preferable to make a scroll and hand it to the
Heal

wizard’s familiar or a cohort or anybody else to UMD so they can use their actions on it while you
focus on winning the fight.
● Restoration, Lesser: You will encounter a lot of ability score damage in Pathfinder. This is one of
the only readily-available spells that removes ability score penalties and damage on your list
until Heal, which you’ll need to wait until level 13 to unlock. Take potions, scrolls, or even wands
of this spell, and you’ll thank me when you encounter shadows or other ability-score-damaging
undead. You can also cure fatigued, which a barbarian might need at some point. Look out for
the three round casting time. Potions are notable for being consumable as a standard action,
herbalism druids. Also, be aware that druids do not get the other Restoration spells! You’ll have
to UMD scrolls if nobody in the party can cast it for things like negative levels and ability drain.
● Soothing Word: This is an emergency scroll spell - pass them out to several party members who
can UMD it. You probably won’t like leaving your allies sickened or shaken, but it’s better than
them being utterly useless while nauseated or frightened. A more specific scroll of Remove Fear
and Remove Sickness is better (and cheaper) if you’re able to remember all the “remove” scrolls,
however. Remove Paralysis can remove staggered but not stunned, however, so this spell may
be the only useful “remove stun” spell. Recentering Drone can do this, but only to suppress the
effect, and if you reduce nauseated to sickened, Recentering Drone suppresses the whole effect,
but leave that sort of thing for familiars to concentrate upon while you do serious casting.

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 ● Alter Summoned Monster: Used as intended, this is a moderately useful spell for switching
tactics mid-battle at the cost of a standard action and a spell, but this spell works on any
summoning spell, even ones that last for hours/level… like Aquatic Cavalry. Turn them into
small earth elementals that can earth glide and spy out the whole dungeon for you, or air
elementals that can scour the skies and report back any monsters. Heighten spell metamagic or
higher-level summons like Eagle Aerie let you summon real threats for very long durations so
you can pre-buff summons or use fey summon creatures for utility spellcasting. Also remember,
this means that all of your summon nature’s ally spells? Can be exchanged for summon monster!
Basically a straight upgrade.
● Aquatic Cavalry: Bizarrely, druid lacks Mount or Communal Mount, the typical wizard target for
Alter Summoned Monster, but they get this spell which has a similar duration. Technically, the
change in duration from this spell’s description after the hippocampi attack shouldn’t matter as
Alter Summoned Monster changes the spell it actually is, but ask your GM to make sure. This
spell doesn’t require water in any way, so just plot them out on land and tell them to suck it up
as you start Altering the ones you want to use.
● Summon Swarm: Rats are tiny, and thus will be attacked, AoO’d, and likely killed (with 16 HP)
before they can do damage. Spiders and bats are diminutive and thus immune to normal
weapons. If you’re fighting something that can’t cast and is trapped in a pit or Entangle, you can
Summons

gradually gnaw them to death with this. Bats being fliers may keep them out of your death
traps. Concentration means it can last almost indefinitely, and you might just get on a horse and
ride away while concentrating, but you need to get creative about ways to herd your ravenous
bat swarm towards the enemy, and not you. This is likely better as a scroll or spell used by
someone else if you can Control Vermin.
● SNA II: The exciting thing at this level are small elementals, which are the first summons that
can really tank hits without dying instantly or have very notable extraordinary abilities. Earth
elementals are the best tanks at this level, and can earth glide to scout through walls or ambush
enemies. Air elementals have stupidly high flight speed and can interrupt air movement with
whirlwind. Water elementals work the same underwater. Note that “elementals” can include
more than the four basic elements like lightning elementals, which have a bonus to attacking
enemies in metal armor. Mud elementals can earth glide, entrap, and bog down enemies. Ice
elementals ignore icy surfaces (like Winter Grasp) and stagger with their basic attacks. Magma
elementals can also earth glide and create damaging difficult terrain. Aether elemental’s
telekinetic throw is a ranged attack if you need it, or can be used to throw medium and smaller
enemies (fort negates) into your control spells. All of these abilities are very weak now, but just
get more powerful as you get through larger elementals. For a non-elemental choice, squids are
grappling powerhouses in the water, but otherwise, take an elemental. You also can just
summon 1d3 SLA I creatures, with eagles being the best attackers just for having 3 attacks and
ponies being the only creatures that might possibly survive being hit even at this level. Mites are
dubiously useful for controlling summoned vermin swarms (like spiders) using their racial
empathy.

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 ● Beastspeak: Communication is useful, and prevents you being ignored in wild shape. Having a
seat at the table when plans are made avoids being assigned to something you consider a suicide
charge, and tactically letting people know what you’ve noticed or thought is important. Not a
substitute for natural spell - few druid spells lack a S component. A ring of eloquence makes this
spell redundant, although you might want your ring finger back for another ring.
● Elemental Speech: Feyspeakers may be faces but few other druids are. Still, it’s useful to be able
to talk to NPCs (not just elementals, either; most creatures with a non-land move speed), and
this spell also mostly substitutes for speak with animals. If you don’t bother putting points into
linguistics to learn all the elemental languages, this is a means of speaking terran with your
hours/level earth elemental spies from Alter Summon Monster when they report back the lay of
the land in the dungeon.
● Hanspur’s Flotsam Vessel: A surprisingly powerful and often overlooked overland travel spell.
If you use extend spell (as from a lesser extend rod) or just cast it multiple times, this is a spell
that can let you travel up to 336 miles per day (28 12-mile hexes, which is often the whole
campaign map’s length in a hex crawl) any time you can get near water through the power of 24
hour movement that ignores all penalties to travel speed. Since you ignore hazards, you can
technically sail up rapids that would stop normal boats. With spells assisting, this raft can be a
better ship than some actual sailing ships. See the daily spell discussion thread on it for more
details.
● Full Pouch: Game-breaking utility. If you’re using poisons with Invigorating Poison, you now
make all your poisons cost 1 gp per dose after you manage to make/buy a single dose. Your
poisons and alchemical items also now use your spell save DC. Print infinite money. The
options for abuse are nearly limitless, just see the daily spell discussion post on it. This is even
more stupid with an herbalist druid if your GM doesn’t recognize the danger and immediately
Utility

banhammers it, as you can just duplicate high-level spells with an SL 2 spell. The only bad part
of this spell is figuring out how to manage not to have it banned while reaping as many rewards
as possible.
● Grasping Vine (Utility): Do a whole lot of stuff at 20’ range. Touch spells, triggering traps,
possibly dirty trick combat maneuvers. It may be limited to vine leshies by their biology but
you’re a druid, biology is something you control. Note that all actions with the vine take a
standard action, even if they wouldn’t normally, like merely opening doors or touching things.
This is awful action economy, so it’s more of an out-of-combat utility spell.
● Spider Climb: A poor druid’s fly spell. In the right situation (like inside a cave or other enclosed
spaces), it can be nearly as good as flying, it is a spell level lower, and it lasts 10 times as long.
● Warp Wood: Very funny in naval campaigns, when you can break an enemy ship so they can’t
sail away fast enough to escape. This can also be a “lock” on a door if you want to camp in a
dungeon and want to at least make the enemy spend enough time bashing the door down to give
you time to prepare. It also serves to “unlock” doors now that Knock requires a caster check.
Note that unattended items get no save, so you can use this from a scroll or wand if you need to
“unlock” a lot of wooden doors without a rogue. As an offensive spell against enemies, warp all
the bows and crossbows so the enemies stuck in your Thorny Entangle can’t try to shoot you
now that they can’t move, but they do get a save for attended weapons. It’s a very versatile spell,
and can work well with Wood Shape.
● Share Language: It’s like Tongues, but lower level, and 24 hours if you need to communicate
with some alien creature that only speaks a racial language. The target gets one of your
languages, so it can now speak common and let you fade to the back as the face takes the lead. It
even works on any Alter Summon Monster you create that isn’t an elemental. Remember that
sharing druidic results in being exiled from the druiding association, so don’t share that one. It’s
harmless and has a non-scaling duration, so you can scroll this one safely, although the arcane
scroll (by a bard) will be cheaper if you can UMD or get the wizard to read it, instead.

33
 ● Barkskin: A classic druid buff, and part of why druids are such good buffers. Note the “existing”
means it stacks with other natural armor for your animal friends. I routinely pack several of
these, and it’s a good target for a pearl of power 2 so you can share it with all your friends.
● Ironskin: Barkskin with 1 or 2 more AC, but it has 1/10th the duration and it’s personal-range.
You can still cast this on your animal companion with share spells. If hit with a crit, dismissing
the spell negates it - I’d usually rather keep the AC, but if the spell’s nearing the end of its
duration, you might as well.
● Resist Energy: A ubiquitous buff basically every full caster gains, so divvy up who has to cast it
based on spell slot needs. When you see enemies focused on a specific element, like an ice cave
Protection

full of ice monsters with cold-based attacks, this is a way to negate a huge amount of damage,
and it lasts a very long time. Bring pearls of power 2 unless you think you can get by with
Communal Resist Energy. Fire or cold resistance can also negate environmental effects like
fatigue from heat.
● Spindrift Spritz: It’s pretty limited in what it affects, and you need to actually memorize the spell
to use it as an immediate action, unlike most condition-countering spells that can just go on a
scroll, but you might need to prevent an ally from getting hit with Slow.
● With the Wind: Usually wind is only an issue when someone casts Control Winds or similar. This
is a partial counter to a much higher level spell but doesn’t work if they use the really powerful
windspeeds; you may want to quicken it or keep it as a potion or scroll.
● Wild Instinct: 8-hour duration makes this an “all day spell”, useful for overland travel.
“Perception checks in the surprise round” are essentially code for “who gets the surprise round”
with most overland random encounters.

● Alpha Instinct: When Charm Animal’s single-target nature is too restricting, this is a mass
version that only improves attitudes one step, but that may be enough to get the animals to
listen. Talk a herd of aurochs into stampeding for you. This also works as a lazy druid’s food
option, or for if you have many mouths to feed.
● Carry Companion: When you can’t lug a 600 pound lion up a rope, carry companion is there for
you. Also useful for bringing your tyrannosaurus to the King’s ball.
● Control Vermin: You don’t always see major vermin threats, but when you do, this is a potent
spell to turn what would otherwise be an enemy into an ally you can potentially crash into
another enemy. Control animal checks are move actions, and ride checks can be free actions to
just guide a giant scorpion you’re sitting on. I’ve also used this spell to turn a drow priestess’s
own spider swarm minions against her. Combine it with Summon Swarm (cast by someone
else) so you can actually control the swarm.
● Lockjaw: Grapple is a debilitating condition, especially against a caster. If you’re mainly using
Beastmaster

your animal companion as the front line tar pit to delay the enemy from reaching you or the
wizard, grapple kills movement dead. You can also use it as a way to add another grab attack on
a creature that is already able to grab, like adding grab to the tail of a crocodile so it can get two
chances to grab and do a death roll.
● Natural Rhythm: An escalating damage bonus like the hammer the gap feat, but it doesn’t end
when the round does. At low levels, you or your animal companion may not hit often enough to
really make use of it, but at higher levels, they may be able to make solid work of it. Natural
attack barbarians will be very interested in this, as well. It makes a useful potion being a touch-
range spell; druidic herbalism says hi.
● Sea Steed: Druid lacks Mount, but gets two different spells this level to make sea horsies and
Hanspur’s Flotsam Vessel! Rather than summoning, this one converts a normal horse into a “sea
horse”... or “sea lion” as the case may be. Technically, if you can sit on it, it’s a “mount”, right?
Use this when your 2-ton warhorse, or maybe 3-ton tiger animal companion is too heavy for
your Flotsam Vessel, but you don’t want to just Carry Companion in case you get into a fight and
you want to give Mr. Fluffy an amphibious option so your tiger can still charge-pounce those
sharks. It’s lower-level and longer-lasting than other polymorphs that might let you turn your
animal companion into a squid, so this is a viable way to keep your animal companion with you
in underwater adventures so long as your GM doesn’t call BS on your claims dimetrodons make
great mounts.

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 ● Eagle Eye: It’s like Commune with Birds if for some reason you can’t get birds to talk to you (or
your GM makes the birds only give worthless information). The minute-long cast time even
reduces any benefit from not having to wait 10 minutes for the birds to report in. If you need to
spot a ship when so far out at sea that no birds are nearby, this could be useful. Note that
nothing about the spell says the sensor moves once cast, so it can also be cast while sailing or
otherwise continuously moving to see if anyone is trailing you.
● Detect Magic, Greater: The lower level version is a cantrip that you can cast just on the suspicion
that it might be useful. Greater DM you need to plan about a little, but being able to recognise
individual spellcaster’s signatures or find traces days old can be useful in intrigue settings
where you need to CSI together how a magic-assisted heist took place.
● Insect Scouts (Situational): Not to be confused with Insect Spies, which is a general-purpose
Information

scouting spell, this spell is for detecting “structural flaws” and “alarms”... basically, this is a spell
for intrigue or heist scenarios that lets you reroll botched rolls during a stealth section by
retroactively having knowledge you didn’t actually role-play gaining. I dislike spells that
overwrite narrative with mechanics this hard, but it may be the difference between an easy job
and being wanted dead or alive and not being able to show your face in the city again. Since it’s
personal, you need to get the rogue to UMD a scroll of this spell if you want them to make the
disable device check. At least you make the cheapest scrolls…
● Lay of the Land: A +3 to +5 bonus on a couple of skills is nice and being insight-typed it stacks
with most other bonuses. Unfortunately it only applies to rolls to avoid becoming lost, which if
you’re pumping survival, you should almost never be at risk of doing. See if your GM will allow
it to work on other tasks, like finding landmarks if you’re using exploration gameplay or
charting a course at sea so it has some use.
● Seed Spies: It’s a type of “lesser Arcane Eye”. The seeds are easily killed if anything spots them
and finds flying seeds suspicious or notices a seed stuck in their fur, they’re very slow if they fly
on their own power, and they can only hear, but this is a very low-level spell for autonomous
scouting if you aren’t abusing Alter Summoned Monster.

35
 3rd Level Spells

● Aqueous Orb: Sweep up your enemies and clean the floor at the same time! No dependence on
terrain which is nice for a druid control spell, but it still won’t affect flying enemies. Being
entangled and underwater, and unable to leave the orb is a thorough debuff.
● Ash Storm: It’s Sleet Storm, but fire-flavored. It’s also much more easily described in terms of
being “ash” for Ashen Path to negate it if your GM disagrees that applies to sleet, and Feather
Step negates difficult terrain, so your allies can be immune to this spell while it shuts down the
enemy.
● Burning Entanglement✰ (Blast): Considering the time it might take to escape, and the smoke
preventing targets doing much to those outside the area, this is more lethal than the 4d6
damage/round might suggest. Be warned that this looks like an excellent way to start a forest
fire which as a druid you might rather avoid. A dazing spell version can basically eliminate any
chance of escape after a single failed save. If your allies have Resist Energy (Fire) on and Feather
Step, note they can be relatively safe to wade into this one.
● Ice Spears: At CL8+ against a large or larger enemy this is a surprisingly reliable trip, especially
in icy or snowy areas. The spears remain after the initial damage/trip and can provide cover but
this isn’t often useful.
● ✰Plant Growth✰: Only usable in limited terrains (until you have an Evergreen Seed Pouch), but
when it works Overgrowth just shuts down enemy movement without offering spell resistance
or saves, while boosting Entangle and Wall of Thorns DCs to boot. Very crippling when paired
with Ash Storm or Sleet Storm. Make sure to use Freedom of Movement to avoid affecting allies.
● Shifting Sands: It’s a larger area than Aqueous Orb and not limited by target size, but the effect
isn’t as strong. It is essentially like a smaller Entangle combined with a larger Grease. Still handy
when you have a lot of enemies to sweep away.
● ✰Sleet Storm✰: It’s a massive-area combination of the best effects of Fog Cloud and Grease in
one. This is one of your best means of shutting down any ability to make ranged attacks or
move out of the area while you set up further nasty surprises for the enemy. This is a gold
Control

standard of control casting at mid-levels.

● Spike Growth: Difficult terrain is great, but it can’t stack extra difficult terrain on top, and what
self-respecting druid accepts merely halving enemy speed? If the enemy steps on Spike Growth,
they get halved movement speed, which is not the same as/stacks with difficult terrain. Against
creatures with 30 move speed, quartering means “becomes 5 feet as a move action”. Ouch,
indeed.
● Thorny Entanglement: It’s Burning Entanglement for druids that don’t want to burn the forest
down, or are facing something that resists fire. The 15-foot range (from the edge of the already
huge radius of Entangle) gives this spell an absurd battlefield footprint reaching out 110 feet in
diameter. They need to make attack rolls, so this is not as capable of damage, but this spell
technically can also shoot down fliers if you have a low ceiling. Dazing Spell can technically
make this either a ref save or will save depending on whether the attack roll had to be made to
do the damage, but with 3 rounds of daze, anything that fails one save probably won’t survive
making three saves in a row to try to escape.
● Wind Wall: Say no to arrows, no save or attack roll required. Your own spells aren’t affected for
the most part, so this is how to win an archery duel. Also keeps out swarms, flying fairies and
other nuisances, and can be used to do the famous Marilyn Monroe shot. If you don’t need to
blow a paper out of someone’s hand, there isn’t much but duration that depends on you casting
it, so consider getting this as a scroll from a hunter to save cash if you can to keep a means of
blocking all ranged attacks off you so you can summon without concentration checks from being
pincushioned.
● Woodland Rune: Boobytrap the area about your home; it’s permanent and has no material
component, so you can spam this with impunity during downtime days to create a control
minefield that doesn't take up your spell slots on days when you actually fight. 10 minutes is too
long to cast it in combat obviously but it can be used to prepare an area - notably it doesn’t
require pre-existing vegetation and doesn’t suggest the vegetation it creates goes away, so this
can prime the area for Entangle or similar. Ask your GM if Feather Step counts as close enough
to woodland stride to ensure your animal companion or other companions don’t accidentally
trigger your minefield.

36
37
 ● Animal Aspect, Greater: A selection of minor buffs to choose from. If you want a climb speed or a
swim speed or +20’ land speed, or some minor skill bonuses you can cast this spell to get them
without losing your hands or voice. Competence bonuses can be gained from skill-boosting
magic items, so this may not stack. Spells like Spider Climb and Touch of the Sea can give
movement modes at lower level. This is really only useful for if you can’t get the competence
bonuses otherwise or versatility in a single slot. This is a polymorph so it doesn’t stack with
wild shape.
● Carrying Wind: At 5th-9th level this is a very weak fly spell or a weaker version of Greater
Longstrider (which is the same level and on the druid list too). Later on the bonus to your fly
speed increases to 20’ or even 30’, and it lasts longer than haste.
● Channel the Gift: If one character has to cast a lot of spells that aren’t on your list, this can be
useful, like a spell-slot based pearl of power 3. Note that this spell can be cast from a scroll if
you need to cast several spells that benefit from a high caster level or save DC it can apply to,
while this spell’s caster level doesn’t matter, and a scroll is much cheaper than a pearl of power
3 if you aren’t going to need it that often.
● Cleromancy: A good combo for the fate’s favored trait. Adding a floating set of bonuses to any
d20 roll can be useful in a huge range of situations. As a personal spell, you can technically give
this to your animal companion, as well.
● Collaborative Thaumaturgy: Save top-level spell slots while casting high-powered spells at very
high levels, when your SL 3 slots don’t matter as much.
● Feather Step Mass: For if you want all your friends to walk through the difficult terrain you
cause, and one SL 3 spell is less valuable than several SL 1s to you.
● ✰Fey Form I✰: Do you like using your scimitar or other weapons? Like the idea of
polymorphing, but don’t want to lose all your items? Did you take an archetype that gives away
wildshape entirely? Why not turn into an Erlking (to fly), Ijiraq (for natural attacks), or boggle
(to get +2 dex instead of strength for being small)? Better yet, why not turn your animal
companion into something else, because it’s a personal-range spell? This is the start of the
serious polymorph options for your animal companion, and due to their inherent high stats but
low number of natural attacks or usable abilities, polymorphing them can add a wide range of
new abilities to your woodland friend.
● Free Spirit: Freedom of Movement (or as I call it, “Freedom from Druid Spells”) is a powerful,
terrible spell to be on an enemy. It negates the majority of good druid control spells, which are
often focused on terrain. Still, unilateral disarmament is not wise. The penalties here are bad
Buff

for martials or gishing, but anyone just casting is going to ignore most of them.
● Longstrider, Greater: +20 land speed or +10 to any type of speed, and it lasts for hours. Personal
range means you can also cast it on your animal companion. When you’re higher level and don’t
need SL3s for control spells as much, this is a solid spell to put on your pouncing animal friend
or yourself if you need to charge-fly to pounce.
● Plant Growth: This is an instantaneous spell, which means the plants are non-magical after
being cast. The rules for undergrowth are technically different from difficult terrain, and can
provide cover (for stealth and mitigating ranged attacks) while possibly stacking movement
costs. Because they’re permanent real plants, you can cast this on a totally different day than
you expect a battle and not have the slot consumed on the day you fight. With Green Caress, this
spell is murder.
● Scale Spikes Greater: Note that spiked armor counts as a manufactured weapon, so if you use
this, your natural attacks (or your animal companions’) become secondary natural attacks and
take a notable penalty. You also need to use TWF to use these, yourself, if you polymorph into a
form with scales and where you use a weapon.
● Vampiric Hunger (healing): So, OK, this is either stupid or completely broken depending on how
much you’re willing to cheese it. Using this as a mid-combat spell is stupid, it doesn’t help you
actually pin anything and the trivial amount of HP you can recover isn’t worth the action to cast
this spell mid-battle. Using this as a debuff on your enemy is also stupid, it doesn’t really hurt
them at all until minutes later, by which point the battle is over, and there are MUCH better
tricks to use if you’re going through the hassle of trying cast social engineering spells on an
enemy and then stalk them. Using this pre-battle as a way to heal your allies to full and give
them up to their max HP in temporary HP (AKA doubling their HP) right before a big fight is a
pretty good buff. You just need… sacrifices you are willing to make. Fortunately, the spell
doesn’t specify much about valid targets, so if you don’t have some helpless peasants or took
prisoners in your last battle, you can just use a wand of Mount to create horses with 17 Con you
can drain ~7 times before they poof away, giving your allies about 35 HP or temp HP each horse.
Since you can make the horse accept the bite, they don’t have to have any feats in grappling for

38
 ● Heatstroke: Tap someone once and they are fatigued at least. Tap them twice and they are
exhausted. Fun way to make someone’s day awful. You can put this in spell storing weapons, as
well. Just remember that exhausted on its own is not going to win fights, you need to either
completely drop an ability score to 0 to knock them out, or you should look for a more crippling
debuff.
● Nauseating Trail: If you don’t have an arcane caster in the party to cast Stinking Cloud for you,
this is the next best thing. Get something fast whose actions don’t matter much, like a small air
elemental, to run rings around the enemy or zigzag down the path they have to take to reach
you.
● Sheet Lightning: It’s dazing spell a level earlier than you’d get with metamagic. Too bad it only
lasts one round, you really want rounds/level, even if they get a save every round. Dazzle is a
terrible consolation prize for a successful save, and it does basically no damage. You can do
Debuff

worse than a round of daze with your control spells, and it works on flying monsters some of
your spells can’t reach, which can force several of them to fall. Being instantaneous, your allies
also aren’t likely to be blocked off by your spells.
● Spit Venom: Ranged touch, 1 round of blindness no save on a hit isn’t terrible, and poisoning an
enemy on top of that (Fort negates) can be well worthwhile. It’s a SR: no spell as well (though
many creatures with SR are immune to poison). As an SL3 touch attack spell, this can arguably
be used with a spell storing weapon to inflict no-save blind on a hit. A rogue will love a spell-
storing weapon that does that.
● Spotlight: You can shut down a shadowdancer pretty hard with this spell, but the fact that you
need to target a creature to hit it with a spell that prevents stealth means their stealth wasn’t
good enough to start with, or they already launched their surprise attack…
● Thunderstomp Greater: This is good for druids that wild shape to huge and put feats into
maneuvers. Except, those druids are probably going to have higher strength than wisdom,
anyway…

● Bone Flense: If sawtooth sabers or Red Mantis assassins aren’t available, you can always Vermin
Shape yourself and/or your animal companion into a giant mantis. Does this spell’s damage
apply to every attack by a mantis claw for rounds/level, doing CLd6 each hit?! That seems like it
has to be wrong, but that’s what it seems to say. Just be aware a single-target fort save negates
is rather unreliable, but a full attack on someone who fails the save will render them into a fine
red mist.
● Flashfire (Control): Terrible as a pure damage spell, this spell is great as a chassis for dazing
spell. It’s round/level damage over time based on reflex saves where you target specific tiles to
inflict the damage without too much risk of including your allies in the blast or the massive
Blast

amount of risk of your allies being entangled by Burning Entanglement. Spending concentration
on the spell lets you spread more daze to hunt down any survivors with pinpoint precision. Its
low damage means Resist Energy can stop accidental fire spread from dazing them. And hey,
I’m sure the forest needed a good “controlled” burn. It’s healthy for the forest, honest!
● Iron Stake (Debuff): Only worth using on DR/cold iron enemies as a means of sickening and
possibly preventing annoying SLAs. As a damage spell, this is simply substandard, even if it has
no save. Not to be confused for Iron Spine, a vastly better spell that sadly isn’t on the druid list.
● Swarm of Fangs: Not actually a summons - more a flaming sphere/aggressive thundercloud
which does untyped damage, and takes 1 round to cast. Unlike Flaming Sphere, this one doesn’t
give a save to negate damage, and it moves twice as fast so it’s harder to out-walk.

39
 ● Accept Affliction: Know how druids gain venom immunity, which makes them immune to all
poisons? Know how Delay Poison doesn’t cure poison, it just keeps it from impacting the target
until the spell runs out, but the poison is still there? Notice how this spell merely transfers the
poison to you, and doesn’t have a clause saying effects you are immune to you still impact you?
If your buddies are hit with a bunch of poisons to the point where you’re worried they might die
before you can do much about it when Delay Poison finally runs out, this is much better than
Neutralize Poison on a druid with venom immunity, because there’s no caster level check, here.
If you have immunities to anything else (possibly through spells), the same trick works. It’s
instantaneous and SL 3, so there may be lower-level cures for most of the things on this list,
Heal

however. Keep a scroll of it if you have venom immunity, though.

● Delay Poison, Communal: If you are using Delay Poison to grant immunity to your allies against
spells like Stinking Cloud your wizard is casting, you probably don’t need the full duration, so go
ahead and split the spell to cover the whole party in one shot. That said, consider an SL 1
hunter-made wand of Delay Poison, instead, and save the spell slot.
● Reinvigorating Wind: Many of these conditions can be cured by lower-level effects, and
fascinated can arguably be ended just by screaming threats at someone, but stunned is generally
a deadly condition that is hard to directly cure while only lasting 1-2 rounds. A scroll of this
spell (as written by a shaman so it’s SL 2) can be useful for your utility belt of bad condition
removal scrolls.

● Callistria’s Guardian Wasps✰: Despite the name, this isn’t actually restricted to Callistria
worshippers, it’s just a spell she made. This is another swarm spell but with a huge difference: It
can be cast days in advance of being triggered, while other swarm spells have durations
measured in rounds. In fact, there is no special duration for the swarm, the swarm lasts for days
or until killed! Like with any spell that you can cast and still have in effect more than a day later,
this is basically free magic in spell slot and action economy terms! What’s more, while it’s “as
Alarm”, it is not an abjuration spell, so you can stack overlapping swarm traps on the same tiles
for a ludicrous ambush that is basically guaranteed death for any non-caster. Note the lack of
(D)ismissability; you may prefer to make it a fleeting spell or prepare Control Vermin so you
don’t have a rampaging plague of wasps in town after the actual target of your “sting operation”
is dead.
● Leshy Swarm: It’s based on a rat swarm, which is the bad version of Summon Swarm at SL 2.
Hence, you shouldn’t bother unless you need something immune to electricity, poison, or other
conditions they are immune to. If you use elemental spell to create Electrified Entangle out of
Burning Entangle and the wizard tossed Stinking Cloud over it, you can send in the leshies to
gnaw the victims to death a little faster.
Summons

● Mad Monkeys: More hilarious than necessarily practical, this is a fairly potent swarm with 2d6
no-save damage, but being tiny means that the enemies can AoO them before they get in range,
and they don’t have too many HP, so they’ll die fast if the enemy isn’t nauseated by the
distraction ability. The steal maneuver is based on your stats, but the much more critical
distraction save DC is a flat 14. Great at lower levels, but the lack of scaling makes this one taper
off in utility as everything starts to be able to just ignore their damage and AoO them to death.
● Pocketful of Vipers: The intended use is an amusing anti-pickpocket spell, but as a druid your
perception is probably high enough that pickpockets aren’t an issue. As a trap it’s not especially
effective against real enemies, more a threat - if I got into your home and trapped the breadbox,
what else could I do to you? Consider using Guardian Wasps for a much deadlier surprise.
● Rain of Frogs: The save DCs are a little sad, but a refluffed centipede swarm doing Con damage
poison is dangerous enough that few enemies will ignore it, while being quite hard to take out.
● SNA III: Leopards get pounce and rake for five attacks. Crocodiles have good defenses, and can
grab and death roll with their bite. The alternative summon option (if allowed - it’s meant to be
for Erastil worshippers only,) grants you rare celestial summons for SNA, and are solid ways to
smack down fiends in a round by using smite evil to bypass DR. Of course, summoning multiple
small elementals to have more speedbumps the enemies have to waste actions running over is
also a good use of the spell. If you worship one of the fey Eldest and took the option to summon
fey instead of elementals, leprechauns offer significant utility with major image and fabricate at
this level.

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 ● Aversion (Situational): One of many weird social engineering spells in the enchantment school
you typically use to mess with the behavior of commoners. Like most enchantment spells, the
effect is ruined if you are seen casting it, so maybe be wildshaped when you do it. (“It was the
crow, I swear!”) Hypothetically, keeping someone away can be useful for plotting or hiding a
crime, but this is single-target, so you either need to cast this a lot and both have every target fail
and never get caught casting it, or you need to be keeping people away from a place only one
character would ever bother visiting…
● Daylight: Sometimes you need bright light to hit a monster where it’s vulnerable, and daylight
does that for you.
● Lily Pad Stride: Unless you are leading a very large following, this spell is just inferior to
Hanspur’s Flotsam Vessel, which not only lets you move over water, but negates water hazards
without requiring acrobatics checks and is lower level. Or just wildshape into a creature that
isn’t bothered by water if you’re on your own, maybe? Hypothetically, you can use it to create
plants on the surface of water. (Although technically, algae might already be there?) If you use
Create Water to make a small pond anywhere, this is potentially a way to set up Entangle in
barren environments if you have the time to prepare the field, but you’re spending a SL 3 and
need to have time to cast several spells to do it, while that evergreen seed pouch just works
automagically. Greensight can allow you to create concealment you can see through if you’re
hiding in the water as a shark or something.
● Mirage: A weirdly restricted spell that seems like a lesser Mirage Arcana. In spite of the spell’s
name implying it works in deserts, it works in all sorts of places so long as the location of the
spell is flat, and the image doesn’t give a save until they get close enough to spring your ambush.
(Consider Blend with Surroundings to hide near it.) You can’t make buildings like a golden
treasure dome, but you can make a fake version of a landmark your targets are looking for, like
the entrance to a famous cave.
● Raven’s Flight: As a druid, even if you don’t have Fly, you have the ability to just turn into a
raven for more than one round. It’s a swift cast, but you need to spend your standard action just
flying, so it might as well be a standard cast that moves you. There is no protection from AoOs
other than taking the withdraw action, so this is really a weaker self-only version of Phase Step.
● Share Language, Communal: For when you meet a tribe of alien creatures with a racial language,
and you can’t just appoint one to be their ambassador to translate for you.
● Spider Climb, Communal: Fly is actually on tap at this level, but if you want to save spell slots, or
are in tight enough spaces you can’t maneuver anyway, this can work.
Utility

● Stone Shape: The lifeblood of sculptors that need to undo a mistake, this spell has some utility to
adventurers as a means of creating instant walls or exceptionally sturdy barricades on the fly.
Crenelations can give ranged combatants improved cover for +8 AC if you need to fortify the end
of a hallway, or just block it off entirely to avoid the fight. Fine detail isn’t possible with this
spell, but you might still use it during downtime to create rough shapes you can chisel down for
RP purposes with a craft skill. You can cast it several times to create individual pieces of
potential moving parts that can then be assembled together with a little work. You could fit a
stone chest into the wall and floor by drilling holes in the wall and floor, having pegs the chest
secures itself into the holes with from multiple directions, and then you can attach a hinge after
sculpting a separate piece for the lid to create an immovable treasure chest, for example.
Construct individual components to elaborate traps with this and Wood Shape. Like many ill-
defined legacy spells, this one has few obvious uses, but hundreds of less obvious ones a player
willing to spend enough time on it can apply to great effect.
● Sylvan Hideaway: If you don’t have a wizard to cast Rope Trick, this spell is a solid replacement.
It can get to 8 hour duration before Rope Trick does, and the door is absurdly resilient with 10
hardness and hundreds of HP, many monsters may be completely unable to break through, and
the door may be tougher than the mountain it is put into, so you can use this as a fallout shelter.
Its interior size and furnishing is undefined, so work with the GM on that. Just because it has a
bad perception DC for the door with its “camouflage” doesn’t mean you can’t put it in a location
nobody will look or actually cover it in camouflage netting. This can be your home away from
home for many adventures.
● Tail Current: Tailwind for in the water. Arguably, boats and rafts (like Flotsam Vessels) are
“underwater” enough for this spell if they aren’t sail-powered, but if your GM disagrees, there’s
always Tailwind.
● Tailwind: This is a long-term speed buff for overland travel. If you can get this to last 8 hours
(easy with a lesser extend rod as soon as you get the spell), you can gain 16 more miles per day
of travel using this spell, or up to 48 miles (+4 hexes) if you can keep it going all day for a vehicle
that can travel 24 hours a day. For naval campaigns, this is a way to guarantee your ship always

41
 ● Cloak of Winds: Moderate protection against ranged attacks, but as an untyped penalty, this
stacks with any other AC bonus, including cover. This is powerful protection against swarms of
tiny creatures, however, as failure to save will fling whole swarms of tiny creatures significant
distances away.
● Protection from Energy: Resist Energy is better as a general protection spell, but sometimes, you
don’t need to survive several rounds of constant elemental attacks, you need to survive one
Protection

huge blast. Note that since you are immune to elements this protects against, as long as this
spell lasts, it also protects against non-damage effects of elemental spells, such as sonic
immunity giving immunity to [sonic] spells that inflict status effects like stun or paralysis
instead of damage.
● Resist Energy, Communal: At higher levels, this spell is a staple. You need to cover the whole
party in resistance, but you probably wind up with more duration than you need per person
with the single-target version.
● Vengeful Comets (Blast): Sort of like a delayed scorching ray spell which lets you spend
immediate actions to take revenge on enemies who affect you with spells. It’s probably better to
just blast enemies or to cast a real protection spell, but there’s cool value.

● Anthropomorphic Animal: If you want your animal companion to pass for a skinwalker or
something, here’s a way. There may be other advantages to turning your horse into a furry but I
really don’t want to know about them. It’s not harmless, and the animal form is pretty weak, so
this is potentially a really weird debuff on animals? Put it in a spell storing weapon, and turn an
enemy cavalier’s horse into a horse-man, dumping the rider in the dirt? Maybe turn a cat that
witnessed a crime into a talking witness so the jury doesn’t just have to take the druid’s word
that’s what the cat said?
● Bleed For Your Master: Technically it’s cheap and easy to replace an animal companion in PF1,
and this spell takes full advantage of that. Improved evasion and improved cover as an
immediate action is a lot of defense when you need it. Possibly best for a packmaster druid.
● Companion Mind Link: Depending on how your GM deals with animal companions, especially
ones with 3+ Int, the ability to bypass the need to push your animal companion can be a relief…
or redundant because your GM just lets it understand a language like the rules say.
● Dominate Animal: Dominate is a final word in “I want you to die for me” spells, and you get this
earlier than Dominate Person on other creatures. Animals don’t tend to have those important
Beastmaster

social structures where controlling one high-ranked member can grant a ton of power, but if you
are just recruiting tyrannosaurs to toss at the enemy dragon as a meat shield, this is a way to do
it. It’s overkill if your GM lets you just talk a pack of dinosaurs into working for you at the cost of
meat or Goodberries, though. Call Animal -> Dominate Animal. Pity it lacks that day/level
duration of Dominate Person.
● Hunter’s Friend: Give your animal companion a grab-bag of useful druid or ranger class features.
Sadly, you need the feature yourself, so no giving them swift tracker to use their scent ability
with it, or to get a class feature early, but you can have your animal companion get outright
venom immunity, not just Delay Poison, or hours/level immunity to difficult terrain with
woodland stride. (I guess that’s one way to make your animal companion immune to your
Woodland Rune minefield…) This can have a lot of weird interactions with archetypes if you
traded away any of the class features on the list and the GM doesn’t ban it. For example, cave
druids can give their animal companion a +2 bonus to resist abilities of oozes and aberrations.
● Magic Fang, Greater: If you have a special purpose amulet of mighty fists, or if your animal
companion lacks a neck item slot, this is a solid, long term buff. Even without those criteria it’s
cheaper than an AoMF. In the event that your GM is okay with your finding a 20th level druid
and a 9th level wizard you can get them to cast permanency on you for a huge buff, at least until
some bastard enemy casts greater dispel magic your way. Just keep in mind that overcoming DR
is potentially even more important than otherwise to animals, because you can’t just trade in
your claws for cold iron claws. If you’re abusing Alter Summoned Monster, however, this might
be a fantastic buff.

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 ● Create Treasure Map: Basically a plot hook in a can, for better or worse. This is almost entirely
up to the GM, so coordinate with them before you pull it on them.
● Insect Spies: This is essentially Arcane Eye for druids, and you get it a spell level early.
Unfortunately, beetles are not as invisible as the Arcane Eye, and their stealth checks are not as
fantastic as you’d really think a literal bug should have. That said, unless they can detect magic,
most creatures aren’t going to respond to a simple bug by drawing their greatsword and trying
to cleave. You can hypothetically buff their skills or just cast Invisibility, however. They need to
survive the trip back to relay their knowledge unless you just Scry on the beetles to start with,
so try to use them cautiously. I had some get repeatedly eaten by spider swarms while trying to
reconnoiter what turned out to be a drow base once.
● Pack Empathy: A more vague version of cleric’s Status spell, this spell doesn’t affect enough
creatures to really throw it on all your animal scouts, but you can use it to convey very basic
Information

ideas long-range, like whether they are under attack or if you are anxious for them to return and
report back.
● Spectral Scout: Can it turn the candlelight off? Glowing seems like a poor choice for a spy.
Otherwise, the fact that it has any skill ranks the subject has seems like a useful ability for a
created creature. Base it on the wizard’s familiar, what with all the skills that tiny animal can
possess, and make a long-duration skilled operative. If it’s incorporeal, it should be able to pass
through walls.
● Speak with Plants: King Charles III wants this. Besides that, there’s plants in many places who
can spy for you. As Ultimate Intrigue puts it, criminals may try to silence witnesses, but few
criminals expect the potted fern in the corner to be used as a witness against them. Remember
the difference between “plant” and “plant creatures” (which include things like vegepygmies or
leshies) - the instructions about not improving attitude or terse or cunning creatures apply to
plant creatures, which can often communicate without this spell, anyway. Also, remember
“plant” includes fungi and molds in Pathfinder terminology. A typical plant is at least implied to
be able to hear and smell by other spells, but what is within a plant’s awareness is extremely
GM-dependent. This can be awful or amazing in an intrigue game, depending on how the GM
feels about willow witnesses.

43
 4th Level Spells

● Blast of Wind: Knocking prone your enemies, fort save negates, is fun but maybe not worth a 4th
level spell. Throwing them around a bit is more fun if you can set up a good trap. Either relies on
the enemies being small enough for the desired effect which threshold varies by caster level. Per
the Core Rulebook, p183, you get an AoO for movement out of threatened squares regardless of
action, even forced movement, so this can be a way to trigger an AoO on critters that are small.
● Gravel Vortex (Blast): This is Stone Call with a smaller radius at twice the spell level for just a bit
more damage, which was never the point of Stone Call.
● Ice Storm (Blast): This is essentially an inferior Stone Call that just does a little more damage. It
even gives SR for some reason. Don’t get it confused with the much better Sleet Storm!
● Volcanic Storm (Blast): This is Ice Storm, but fire-flavored.
● Obsidian Flow (Blast): It does a little damage, but is mostly a grab-bag of control. Needing to
pass a strength check to remove entangle implies it is the kind of entangle where they can’t
move at all without spending an action to remove entangle - that’s spending your action to make
several enemies lose actions and take damage. Acrobatics penalties on their own are not terrific,
but combine it with a spell that makes a creature have to roll acrobatics to not trip while
moving, like Sleet Storm, and this can shut down the concept of walking entirely. The acrobatics
penalty might stack with Winter Grasp.
● River of Wind: Like blast of wind but not size-limited. It only applies at the start of a target’s
turn, don’t count on it working twice despite the round/level duration. Sane enemies just won’t
let it work twice and a 5’ wide line isn’t that hard to avoid. Forced movement and standing from
prone can waste enemy actions and give your side AoOs, so there are uses for this, but you’re
Control

unlikely to get more than two creatures in a line, and fort save negates the only effects we’re
really after.
● Rising Water✰: How do your enemies feel about fighting underwater? Let’s find out! Fantastic in
rooms with typical 8 foot high ceilings. No save, no SR, no hope for non-swimmers. Even if they
can cast, good luck with verbal components underwater. A 20’ radius cylinder of ‘guys in plate
armor with greatswords suck’ definitely has its uses. Combine this with Freedom of Movement
and Air Bubble for your martials or polymorphing your animal companion to something with a
swim speed. Block the enemy in with bodies or using wall spells if you have to.
● Rope Tornado: Probably the best of the air blast spells at this level because it’s a reflex save
rather than fort, but it doesn’t move enemies if that matters. It does have a chance of taking poor
flyers out of the sky, but they have to also fail the ref save.
● Thirsting Entanglement (Debuff): Unless you really want to leave your enemies to slowly drain
to death, or you can stack it with Thorny Entangle, you can basically get the same effect out of
just casting Thorny Entanglement.
● Wall of Brine: If your GM allows use of racial spells, this is potentially a one-way door to those
creatures that have no inherent swim speed. The one-way nature of the spell makes this
effective for throwing out summons or waiting for damage over time spells to do their thing.
● Spike Stones: Essentially a slightly improved version of Spike Growth, this spell’s ability to do
damage per square moved through can potentially do absurd damage to an enemy stubborn
enough to force their way through, and they halve their movement speed just for trying. With a
20-foot square per level, this can cover a huge amount of terrain with hidden spikes to thwart
large numbers of walkers from ever reaching their target. That said, except for the amount of
damage and ability to be used on root-less terrain, Spike Growth is a lower level spell that fills
the same role over the same area.

44
 ● Concealed Breath: Inferior to life bubble in all situations.
● Absorbing Inhalation: Cancel a range of cloud-like effects. You won’t have this spell prepared
unless you have a reason to expect those, but it’s effective enough if you do. But… dispel magic
would be almost as good, possibly even better if there isn’t somewhere convenient to exhale the
cloud.
Buff

● Baphomet’s Blessing: Give your animal companion a gore attack with a +2 enhancement bonus.
This is presented as a debuff, but we all know single-target save negates SR: yes touch spells that
give a melee powerup to your melee-range enemy would be a bad idea, right? Against a
humanoid wizard/sorcerer/arcanist/witch only, this can be a poor druid’s Feeblemind because
fort save is better against them specifically, but otherwise, use Moonstruck from a distance for
this kind of thing.

● Moonstruck: The best effect of this spell is that it causes the target to be unable to cast or make
other actions that require patience or concentration, as per rage. This means it can shut down a
mage… that fails a single-target will negates. You can target a dumb brute type from a distance
(maybe from ambush) because they’re more likely to fail the save, and hope they attack the
mage, instead, but it’s leaving the mage the chance to try to dispel it… You really should avoid
using single-target save negates spell at SL 4.
● Slowing Mud: Slow is a solid debuff that isn’t crippling, but few things are immune to. You don’t
get Slow, but you do get Slowing Mud. This is Slow, but now it’s a fort save, it’s also blinding, and
Debuff

there are ways to remove the debuff. If the target wants to spend their actions undoing a spell
whose only purpose is making the enemy lose actions, they’re welcome to try. It’s not as all-
purpose as Slow, but this is a crippling debuff if it works. This spell is targeted and not an AoE
control spell, so it works on fliers.
● Zone of Foul Flames (situational): A weird “you have activated my trap card” spell you need to
prepare ahead of time (but only minutes ahead of time) and hope the opponent won’t notice.
Also, hope they didn’t do something like give themselves immunity or at least Resist Energy for
fire. I guess you can surprise a Fireball specialist sorcerer or a pyrokineticist? You might be
able to use this once in your whole career? Can you use elemental spell metamagic to make this
affect other elements?

45
 ● Aggressive Thundercloud, Greater: Oh boy, a single-target spell that doesn’t just give one save
and SR to negate, but a second to remove the stun that is the only reason to cast this spell over
Ball Lightning! It is still so slow monsters can easily outwalk it, and flying enemies are becoming
more of a problem at this level.
● Ball Lightning: Multiple balls with a ref save that has a -4 penalty to the save make this a good
chassis for dazing spell delivery against humanoids wearing armor, or against fliers since this
can reach them while Flashfire cannot. The balls are still too slow to actually chase anything,
however.
● Caustic Blood: This can be a lot of damage if some enemy with a bunch of attacks gets cornered
into attacking you. Like, enough to burn through a protection from elements (acid) spell.
● Explosion of Rot✰ (Debuff): A smaller-radius Fireball’s worth of damage that comes with 1d4
rounds of stagger to justify it being SL 4. Goes to 15d6, so it’s like it’s already intensified
Fireball, and if you intensify this one, it goes to 20d6, and also the damage is untyped so you
Blast

don’t have to worry about resistances. Maximize it to get a 90-damage, 4 round stagger spell.
Maximize intensified for up to 120 damage at level 20. Druids aren’t the best blasters, but this is
as straightforward as blasting gets for a druid.
● Flame Strike: A smaller-radius Fireball’s worth of damage that does not do anything to justify it
being SL 4. Doing half damage from divine source is not really as useful as Paizo seems to think,
as the objective is to avoid having any damage resisted. Try using elemental spell to find a lack
of resistance, or just use Explosion of Rot, instead.
● Flaming Sphere, Greater: Like Aggressive Thundercloud, there’s little reason to put all your eggs
in a very slow-moving basket that can be avoided by a ref save and then out-walked before it
gets another chance to be used.
● Geyser: Dazing spell can make weak blasts look good, and geyser’s low damage over time to a
potentially large area looks really good when it comes with daze for 4 rounds each time it does
damage. It’s concentration, so you can hypothetically keep it going for indefinite periods of time,
especially if you made a (very expensive) scroll for a familiar to read. Without that there’s not a
lot of reason to use geyser.

● Cure Serious Wounds: 20-something points of damage healed isn’t enough to use in combat, and
it’s inefficient for most uses out of combat, but that’s not to say there’s no use for it. It’s just very
situational.
● Reincarnate: The lowest-level version of resurrection. This one comes with the fun-fun
gameshow element of a random creature you turn into. Sing along, now: “Wheel of Karmic
Rebirth, spin-spin-spin! Give us a new body to live in!” Great fun for humans that put their racial
+2 ability score into a mental ability. Try to get some neat racial abilities while keeping the feat.
Due to the way that death is mainly a hit to the wallet in Pathfinder, if you get a “bad roll” on
Heal

your reincarnation, your buddies can afford a “reroll” via slitting their throats and having you
cast this again with all the money you save on this one compared to Raise Dead. You also get to
keep any mental bonuses from old age, but physically return to young adulthood to negate the
penalties. “Immortality” is just a death away with a druid around! Check the notes on staves to
see a discount way to keep being reborn…
● Spindrift Spritz, Mass: There’s wide area fear effects where it may be useful to stop shaken
before it stacks to frightened. If possible it’s still better to use CL 1 Remove Fear in advance, by
scroll or otherwise. A reroll on saves vs. staggered is harder to replicate, but also less often
useful. Scrolls can’t be used for immediate actions, and SL 4 is where scrolls get really
expensive, anyway, so this is something you need to actually prepare.

46
 ● SNA IV: The thing SNA gets that Summon Monster doesn’t at this level is the satyr, who’s mostly
notable for some SLAs. You can get at-will Suggestion if you have need to spam that, and the
save DC is good enough for commoners, although not as high as yours. Tigers are the best direct
damage option at this level, with a much stronger pounce than leopards from SNA III. A pack of
leopards can out-damage a single tiger, however. You get medium elementals at this level, as
Summons

well, which are significant upgrades if you’re using them for combat. Earth elementals are tough
and can move through walls to scout out dungeon rooms ahead of you, while air elementals
have phenomenal flight speed for scouting, although for pure scouting, consider getting 1d3+1
air elementals to go in different directions.
● Flame Steed: Phantom steed with energy resistances, allowing you to use it in difficult
environments; it probably won’t last long enough in a fight to use its little breath weapon. Of
course druids don’t get phantom steed at all so may use it directly for overland speed. Then
again, druids can turn into migratory birds for hours on command, so this isn’t as impressive to
them, and you really want Phantom Chariot to move the whole party at once. It’s (creation), not
(summoning), so you can’t use it for Alter Summoned Monster.

47
 ● Air Walk: Flight which doesn’t take the fly skill, and which lasts for hours. Yeah, clerics and
druids have an edge over their arcane counterparts here.
● Animal Ambassador: Make a singing bear telegram service. There’s a large amount of
cultural/GM variance in how an intelligent goose knocking on the door and asking if Mr. Jones is
in will play out. Consider less tasty-looking animals for this mission. This spell can be useful
purely for communication for the total hermits who are known in the local area for
communicating by messenger moose, but it is a little too conspicuous to use talking bears for
intrigue missions. Hypothetically, you can have intelligent messenger pigeons deliver secret
messages only to the right recipient in a city without raising too many eyebrows, however.
● Cape of Wasps (Summon): If you can’t decide whether you want flight or revenge on those who
attack you, you can cast Cape of Wasps rather than Air Walk or Caustic Blood. It’s much weaker
than either as is the case with most dual-use spells however.
● Claim Identity: Hours/level alter self without the limit on imitating real people is pretty good.
For when you can’t just turn into a bird to spy, and need to really look like you belong there.
Knock out the enemy before use and it probably doesn’t give a save.
● Dispel Magic: There are a bunch of higher level druid spells which are actually cleric spells with
a spell level penalty. They’re usually among the better cleric spells so you still cast them… but
you don’t feel good about it. You can cast it if needed, but try to get the casters that get it as an
SL 3 to use their slots if you can. Dispel Magic can reverse the vast majority of bad effects that
hit your friends unless there’s a line explicitly saying Dispel Magic doesn’t work. It has a caster
level check, but this is still one of the better spells to spam outside battle. Get a significantly
upleveled scroll (like CL 30 written by a cleric) if you can for emergency bad stuff removal in the
late game to handle some of the dispel checks you otherwise can’t handle.
● Echolocation: Blindsight is a very powerful sense, allowing you to accurately target creatures
you otherwise cannot see, making spells that negate all light such as Deeper Darkness useful, or
just staying inside the cave floor and stabbing people up through their feet with Flame Blade if
you use Earth Glide without the miss chance for being blind while being immune to
Utility

counterattack. 10 min/level means you can have this as a ring of continuation spell.
● Earth Glide: You move very slowly, and you only get rounds/level, but you can move through
solid stone, not just burrow like many of your animal shapes. If you’re not trying to go through
solid stone, use wildshape for something with burrow, instead. It’s hard to beat “inside the
floor” as a hiding place, and you can bypass chunks of dungeon by just walking through the
walls. Remember that you’ll need to find a way to get the rest of your party back to you,
however.
● Grove of Respite: Creating a good campsite and including a couple of low level spells as well
(goodberry and alarm) may be worth it at later levels, if there isn’t a wizard handy. Kind of
obvious in the wrong environment however - expect to attract attention in the Abyss. Sylvan
Hideaway is a better hidden bunker in dangerous areas, so only use this if you’re in a relatively
safe area and want to watch the stars.
● Shield Speech, Greater: IME groups who want to do something like this arrange for an obscure
language shared by the party, but an actual counter to scrying might be useful in some
campaigns.
● Cloud Shape: Gaseous form isn’t generally useful, but this could work for hiding out among real
clouds while you Call Lightning down on the enemy. That’s a tactic likely to irritate both the GM
and the other players however. A sylph-only spell by default and it’s not a good enough spell to
be worth pushing the point.
● Warp Metal (Debuff) : It’s Warp Wood, but for metal stuff. It can do all the same things Warp
Wood does, like “lock” and “unlock” doors (or “doors”) with the added benefit that a steel slab is
a lot harder to bash down than a wood barricade, and massive iron gates can be annoying to
beat down. You can warp metal weapons, but the targets get a save, and you only inflict -4 to
melee weapons, which is likely not worth the action unless you’re facing a truly overwhelming
number of opponents. You should logically also be able to warp metal armor, however. The
spell doesn’t really go into the idea because it’s just copying Warp Wood, and the writers of that
spell didn’t consider wood armor, but if you use the rules for breaking objects, that should halve
the AC bonus of the armor and double the ACP. If you’re up against a bunch of knights, making
them all suddenly unable to make acrobatics checks on your Ice Slicks and reducing their AC by
5 is worth something..

48
 ● Life Bubble: If you’re tossing around spells where simply using spells like Delay Poison and
Ashen Path aren’t enough, or you want to survive in the vacuum of space or the depths of the sea
for a while, Life Bubble is a comprehensive way for a party to survive nearly any environment.
● Freedom of Movement: Also known as “Freedom from Druid Spells” for how many of your best
control spell effects this spell negates. This spell protects anyone in its effects immune to a huge
Protection

list of effects. At least by casting it on your allies, you can make them immune to your control
spells so the barbarian can finally go have fun charging monsters in your Burning Entanglement
after getting their layer of Resist Energy (fire).
● Master’s Escape (Summons): Handy for getting away from cunning enemies who got past your
wall of summons, but you need to have set it up in advance which severely limits its use.
Alternately, charge-pounce as a dire tiger, then swap back with your summons that fell behind
so they can full attack, and then charge them again on your next round. Druids are otherwise
light on teleportation spells so you might want Master’s Escape anyway. Nothing restricts
distance after you cast this spell so long as the summon is still alive, so you can have your Alter
Summoned Monster small air elemental scout run for it while you distract the threat.

● Atavism: It’s a hefty buff but losing all tricks other than attack would be awkward for some
animal companions. If animals have intelligences above 2, such as with ASI on an animal
companion or it’s an Awakened animal, they can be smart enough that this restriction might not
matter, and Altered Summon Monsters that are animals don’t have tricks to lose. It’s not
polymorph, so you can stack advanced template on top of polymorphing.
● Giant Vermin: By the level this is available, insects like these are completely useless as actual
combatants. At best, these are speed bumps that exist solely to make an enemy waste an action
attacking because they occupy a square they cannot walk through otherwise. Even at the higher
levels, it’s questionable if you can get an enemy to waste more actions splattering your bugs
than you spent spreading and then creating them. Spiders are notable solely if cast as a
“downtime” spell because their webs are permanent, non-magical speedbumps that can last past
Beastmaster

the duration of the spell and bog down a creature with repeated entangles if they don’t waste
actions swatting the webs away.
● Sea Stallion: For most druids wild shaping into something aquatic and casting Sea Steed or
Water Breathing on their animal companion does all of this spell and more. There may be some
nature fang druid who wants Sea Stallion, but for the average druid this spell may as well not
exist.
● Phantom Hunt: This says “hunt”, but +40 foot move speed for hours/level for you and your
animal companion can be used for far more than just tracking. Flying pouncers love this. This
allows for blistering overland speeds with other druid buffs. Of course, if you’re tracking
someone, this spell is practically unfair to whoever you’re hunting, allowing you to follow them
at twice the rate they can run…
● ✰Strong Jaw✰: You are capped at only one “real” change in size and one “effective” change in
weapon size, and most spells only give one size change at a time. This spell giving two
“effective” weapon size upgrades, essentially doubling damage, makes it a notably more potent
spell than most of its type, even if natural attacks on their own are not the most powerful. This
spell works on every natural attack the target has, however. This includes you while in wild
shape, remember. Get freaky with polymorphs, and this can stack a lot of damage.

49
 ● Ancestral Memory (buff): Failure means you “merely” get a +5 Int-based skill bonus. Generally,
spells that add more information are justification for being able to reroll failed knowledge
checks if you need to know important details related to the quest’s plot, and this comes with a
hefty bonus. If the percentile roll is successful, however, the spell basically amounts to the GM
giving you an extra hint on the current problem, although how helpful that is depends on the
GM.
● Forest Sense: Scrying, but as a standard action and you don’t need anything more than a
footprint to target someone. Since you can hear normally in the area as with Clairaudience, a
high perception score means you can target a different creature nearby and just “happen to
overhear” the target you want. Plus, if they succeed at the save, you can try again without
waiting 24 hours. It works well as a way to learn more about a target for future Scrying.
● Scrying: It’s probably the most iconic knowledge-gathering spell, allowing players to spy in on
nearly anyone. (And being one of the spells that GMs actually reliably use against players to
Information

justify BBEG knowledge of PC actions.) Druids lack Teleport to perform the classic “scry and
fry”, but this still can provide quest-solving information if you know the right person to spy on.
● See Through Stone: Concentration required limits the use of this spell severely, but it does have
some use in seeing through a wall without either putting your nose where it can be seen and
alerting enemies, or using a possibly low-perception disposable scout summons to do the same.
Use it to set up your plans for kicking in the door if your scouts reported a big threat, or to just
position earth/magma/mud elemenatls to earth glide ambush the enemy.
● Traveling Dream: An arcane eye that you can only use when you’re asleep. Oh…kay. Greater
Insect Spies is directly better but also a couple of levels higher; Traveling Dream is useful in
those places where invisible spies who can’t deal with doors are.
● Watchful Animal: How to use your animal companion or familiar as an effective scout, and know
when they’re in trouble. This spell doesn’t on its own help you do anything to save the
companion or familiar, but it does at least let you know you should do something.
● Aerial Tracks: Being able to track flying creatures is a neat trick, especially when enemies think
they’ve done something really cunning by taking to the air and don’t bother with other
countermeasures. It should also give enough data to target Faerie Fire on enemies which are
both invisible and flying. (GMs, remember this when a wizard thinks Greater Invisibility and Fly
are the best combo ever…)

50
 5th Level Spells

● Cave Fangs; Cave Fangs creates a useful trap and is reasonably cheap. It’s best when you’re
laying an ambush - the cost could mount up fast if you’re trying to protect a camp every day, and
while it can be cast during a fight there’s better 5th level spells if you’re not taking advantage of
its duration. It’s not clear what ‘pinned to the ground’ means, but it seems to indicate that you
can’t move but have the entangled rather than the pinned condition.
● Hungry Earth: Cool effect but let down by a CMB which is below par at 9th level and only going
to get worse from there. Maybe you’ll get lucky with it and steal the enemies’ next standard
action, but probably not.
● Wall of Fire; A hazard which you can ping-pong enemies through with the right spells or combat
maneuvers is fun. It doesn’t do enough damage that making enemies go through it once is
worthwhile, but with the right setup once is only the beginning. 2d6+CL may not be enough
Control

damage to be worth the actions you spend on it unless the summons are the ones doing the
ping-pong.
● Wall of Light: A poorly written spell from an adventure. I think you can close your eyes, move or
5’ step away then reopen them to avoid blindness, but maybe not. It’s unclear how long the
blindness for passing through the wall lasts - maybe 1d4 rounds, maybe not. In any case flying,
teleporting and maybe even jumping over a 10’ wall is very possible at this level and you can’t
count on Wall of Light to do a lot.
● Wall of Thorns: A wall which you can pass through unhindered, with enough volume to fill some
battlefields and control many others isn’t bad. I suspect it blocks line of sight or at least provides
concealment (because I can’t see how this many thorns wouldn’t) but the description doesn’t
mention it. In any case, moving through the wall or damaging it is slow enough that enemies
more or less have to go around it or dispel it. If your GM doesn’t say it blocks sight, just cast
spells through the wall while it blocks movement through it to escape your damage over time
hell. This is what all walls should be.

51
 ● Aspect of the Wolf: In the wolf domain this is a 3rd level spell and it’s great at that level. In
general use, you may not be excited about +4 enhancement bonuses to Str and Dex and a swift
action trip all of which you can’t use in wild shape, at character level 9+.
● Blessing of the Salamander (Heal): An odd combination of buffs; fast healing, fire resistance and
a bonus to CMD is going to be useful to someone (maybe a grappler who drags enemies through
a wall of fire repeatedly) but seems oddly specific. Note that unlike positive energy, fast healing
works on any valid target, so everything but a golem with spell immunity or things immune to
polymorphs (including undead or non-golem constructs) can be healed by this, and fast healing
5 is enough to not be crazy for out-of-combat healing if you need it to be fast. If you want it for
healing, use extend spell on it to get 100+ HP from it.
● ✰Fey Form II✰: Like Fey Form I this lets you fight without losing the use of your magic gear,
now with more weird options and better numbers! Fastachees have 30’ reach while being size
tiny, Ankous are still flying terrors if they’re actually druids (most of their attacks are secondary
anyway, and their primary attacks are claws, so if you’re going to just use a scimitar, you’re not
dropping your offensive power with the other natural attacks anyway), Nuckelavees are similar
being horse-men with weapon attacks and secondary natural attacks, Whisperers are all-seeing
ghostly tentacle monsters that are technically legally distinct from Slenderman. Their six
tentacles are reach 3d10 touch attacks, but don’t benefit from strength.
● Fickle Winds: Wind Wall without needing to worry about enemies getting past it, and being able
to move around without losing the effect is pretty good. It’s possible your GM will read ‘cylinder’
as being a hollow cylinder and allow shooting straight down at you by enemies above; there are
ways around it. If there were more ordinary archers shooting at you by the time you can cast 5th
level spells it’d be better, but a lot of ranged effects at this level will be magic which Fickle Winds
Buff

can’t stop. If you are fighting ranged humanoid combatants regularly, your archer or gunslinger
will love having immunity to return fire, and unlike Warp Wood, they can’t save against the
wind.
● Hunters Blessing✰: Something very like the base level of favored enemy and favored terrain
doesn’t sound like much but it’s a +2 sacred bonus to lots of things, lasting hours/level. Just pick
your targets wisely. Commune With Birds to find out what you might find. In a “themed”
dungeon, like a castle of ice giants where nearly all encounters are the same thing, this is
basically a party-wide day-long buff to most of what you’re doing in the day. Sacred bonuses are
pretty uncommon so it stacks with most things, and a ranger can also stack this with their own
favored enemy so they don’t feel left out.
● Invoke Primal Power: You don’t usually want to start wild shape in combat, but if you do so this
spell can give you some odd buffs if you cast it as a swift action as you wild shape (so quick wild
shape won’t work with it, sadly). Trampling or tripping or some other things. IPP also gives Con
and natural armor bonuses, which are less odd but still useful.
● Stoneskin: It burns money which rubs some the wrong way, but stoneskin has been a standard
defensive buff for many editions. DR 10/adamantine for 10 minutes/level is enough to be
noticeable, even if it won’t fully stop any attacks at this level. The real reason to avoid this spell
is druid gets it a spell level late, so try to get the wiz/sorc/arc to cast it instead of you if one’s
around - you have plenty of other good buffs to give with your spell slots.
● Threefold Aspect: Bonuses that last longer than 24 hours are considered permanent, and this
spell lasts 24 hours. If you use Extend Spell, you can get all the benefit of permanent bonuses to
int and wis, including bonus skill ranks. If you cast it each day, you will have a “permanent”
bonus from Threefold Aspect the next day. In addition to that, casting it on your animal
companion can boost its int score by up to 4, which will pretty much settle all doubts about
whether your animal companion is truly intelligent.

● Baleful Polymorph: A save-or-suck which can be close to a save-or-die spell; losing your mind
and body at the same time doesn’t leave much. It has plenty of weaknesses (it’s a single-target
Debuff

save negates with SR at SL 5, some enemies are immune to Fort save effects, others can
shapeshift out of it, and close range isn’t good) but it is still a scary spell. Possibly better for
turning commoners that displease you into newts than as a combat spell.
● Pernicious Pranksters (Summons): Random effects aren’t good, and on top of that this spell has
random targets. The CMB is acceptable at least.

52
 ● Fire Snake: Something like a fireball with intensified spell and selective spell may sound alright,
but in practice it’s underwhelming. Take Explosion of Rot instead.
● Whip of Centipedes (Summons): The first whip summons, Whip of Spiders isn’t bad but Whip of
Centipedes hasn’t scaled up enough to justify the 3 extra spell levels. No one cares about DC 13
Fort saves at this level, or even about a 2d6 damage whip with no enhancement bonus.
● Wind Blades: In order to take as much damage from this spell as from a 1d6/level spell the
target needs to move 85’+ at the lowest level you can cast it, which is unlikely considering it’s a
Blast

touch range spell. If there’s serious wind in the area, possibly from a Control Winds spell you
cast, this gets better but even 5d8/round from an actual tornado isn’t that much per round - the
effects of the tornado will matter more. Slashing damage is subject to DR too. If you’re playing
flyby attack tag you can use this, assuming you’re playing a sylph or have talked the GM into it
but usually once you reach melee movement slows right down. Oh, and it’s single-target touch
save negates with SR, so even if this spell was amazing, the fact that it’s so likely to fail would
make it dubious. Also, the spell description is wrong - Gust of Wind does last for a full round. A
lot of the problems with Paizo spells boil down to Paizo writers not knowing the rules they’re
trying to modify…

● Cure Critical Wounds: 27ish damage healed isn’t a good amount for a standard action in combat
Hea

at this level either. Nothing much is until Heal arrives from this point.
l

● Insect Plague: Once a great if awkward spell in AD&D, but this version is terrible enough to
never be worth casting - multiple swarms fixed in place just aren’t going to help ever. Even if
you could completely immobilize the target, you have much lower-level spells that do 2d6
damage per round.
● SNA V: The options for summons are opening up at this level. Besides the large elementals
(which now have DR 5/-) there’s cyclops with their 1/day automatic roll of 20, dire lions for
pouncing damage, manticores that are basically dire lions that trade pounce to fly and have a
four ranged attacks so you can stop fliers, and ankylosaurs with their stunning tails. Those who
Summons

gain access to non-standard summons can do weird stuff with remaceras, shambling mounds
and more.
● Entice Fey: There’s a lot of fey with 12 HD or less. I’m sure you can find something effective to do
with a nereid or shadow collector to do your bidding and PC buff spells on them, and there’ll be
more I haven’t thought of. Expensive, and you’ll need to buff your own know (nature) or
perform before casting, but effective if you do it right.
● Release the Hounds: A swarm of medium size animals with no resistances or immunities aside
from partial swarm immunities is going to get cut to pieces by AoOs before it can do anything
much.
● Snake Staff: Like the Giant Vermin spell, this creates a bunch of I-can’t-believe-they’re-not-
summons which aren’t close to being level appropriate. Their attack bonuses are +5 or less.
They’re not even useful roadblocks, enemies can ignore their AoOs.

53
 ● Air Walk Communal: If you can spare a 5th level spell slot more easily than multiple 4th level
spell slots, this gets the party aloft.
● Control Winds: See the wind speed chart to see what this actually does. Cease all ranged weapon
fire. Deny the enemy the skies. (Inflict a penalty of as much as -16 on fly checks, which you can
then cast spells that require fly checks to keep flying, like Rope Tornado or Throw small
creatures around. Cause huge amounts of property damage. Or, I suppose, you could stop this
happening from some other magical or natural effect. Control Winds beats the 4th level wind
spells quite handily if there’s any moving air to work with, and does so over a far larger area for
a far longer duration.
● Hallow / Unhallow: A very weird legacy spell with a ton of unique rules that make it hard to
adjudicate - ask your GM how spells not normally used as an AoE work when put in a Hallow
AoE. Instantaneous means the area isn’t even considered “magic” and you can’t dispel it. An
Unhallow put on a Hallow doesn’t even dispel it, so the world is inevitably converging on 100%
saturation of Hallow or Unhallow. Pick a side, we’re at war! Protection from Good/Evil blocks
out fiends or celestials, plus compulsion spells from good/evil creatures. Hallow prevents
creation of undead, but Unhallow doesn’t do anything to undead. Druids don’t get the channel
bonus when they cast it, but you can still attach a spell for a year. You might be able to cast
Utility

several of these if you UMD a scroll? Most of the spells you can attach are for cleric, not druid.
Semi-permanent Dispel Magic that recasts it every time you enter the area can be a useful way
to wipe off curses and other bad magic, while Dimensional Anchor can be useful for a trap where
someone can teleport in, but not out. Maybe? Again, how this works is weird and needs GM
arbitration.
● Sturdy Tree Fort: Paizo thought every wizard camping spell needed a druid equivalent. Druids
get to boast their version of Secure Shelter is a cool tree fort, no goblins allowed! As a camping
spell, Sylvan Hideaway is all you need if you just don’t want an encounter, so this spell only
makes sense if your GM says Sylvan Hideaway is too cramped to do downtime activities or you
want to use this as a tree fort, and take advantage of improved cover during an ambush. If
treated as a no-save +8 AC buff, this is a potent combat spell if you have the minute to pre-cast it.
● Tree Stride: Limited teleport for druids and fey critters that get it as an SLA. The Eurocentric
writing only anticipates common European trees, and when this spell was written in AD&D, it
came with options to customize druids to the specific environment not preserved in this spell, so
talk to your GM if you want a tropical druid that focuses on baobab trees or something. Personal
range means druids can’t share it with their party unless the druid goes first and the wizard just
scrys on the druid. Personal range does mean you can cast it on an animal companion, though.
It’s not nearly as good as Teleport at the level wizard is getting that, but you can have your
animal companion hide inside a tree and suddenly jump out to snag someone, so that’s
something. Otherwise, sit tight and wait for Transport via Plants.

● Death Ward: This used to be 100% mandatory at all times back once you hit high levels in 3e,
but now that most of the death effects were nerfed to not actually being instant death, it would
have been less so even if this spell itself wasn’t nerfed from “immunity to instant death” to “+4
to saves against death-flavored blasting spells”, which is much less exciting. At least it actually
Protection

grants you immunity to level drain that otherwise has no save (for the initial damage) from
creatures like spectres. It’s also immunity to antipaladins that focus on touch of corruption
nonsense. You only pull this out when you’re expecting undead or divine casters like that now.
The cleric and some other casters like witch gets it lower level, so if you have one in the party,
try to get them to cast this one.
● Die for Your Master (Beastmaster): An upgraded version of Bleed for Your Master for the
exceptionally callous druid, packmaster druid, or possibly a BBEG druid. This spell forces an
animal companion to do a Secret Service dive to protect the caster.

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 ● Animal Growth: Druids who aren’t using other polymorphs like Fae Form on their animal
companions will have been waiting so, so long for this spell. +8 strength is at least as much as
some of the best polymorphs, and will add a lot of damage, as will the functional “Enlarge
Animal” aspect of this spell. It’s not specifically targeting your animal companion, so you can
cast this on your Awakened animal friend, or any other friendly animal to try to keep them
relevant, although even dinosaurs are going to have trouble surviving helping you in combat at
this level.
● Awaken: Give an animal human-level intelligence and potentially give it class levels and a reason
to work with you. Instant ally NPC, just add 2,000 gp of herbs and oils! It’s hypothetically
power beyond what’s on your character sheet. There’s a lot you can do with this spell, and the
fact that the spell assumes an animal or tree will be friendly and enjoy being human-smart,
rather than lonely or weirded out. A lot of the implications of this spell are RP-dependent, and
there’s a whole section of a Pathfinder Companion guiding how to RP different animals but you
Beastmaster

could easily use a spell like this to create some powerful allied NPCs that you can leave behind to
assist you or defend your home. Note that GMs may say that powerful NPCs like awakened
creatures gain a share of the XP if they assist in battle. Depending on how your GM treats this, it
is either a waste or amazing.
● Companion Transportation: This can be great if you can get your animal companion immune to
staggered somehow (or have a wizard’s familiar to UMD Remove Paralysis before the
companion’s turn). A feyspeaker or other relatively fragile druid can simply swap places with
their animal companion when in trouble. You might also use this to get your animal companion
in somewhere they can’t go, whether socially or physically, but Carry Companion can handle
that in most cases. There are few places a druid with wildshape can’t reach an animal
companion can, but some archetypes give up wildshape.
● Master’s Mutation: Summons die too fast to worry about spending actions buffing them too
heavily. At the level you get this, just spend the slot summoning more monsters, not improving
existing ones. Using this on an Altered Summon Monster is not appealing either because of the
rounds/level duration. It can be situationally useful, like adding constrict and rake to a summon
that already landed a grapple, so you know it will get some use from it, or if enemy spellcasters
make your summons suddenly need to fly, but this is a high-level spell slot to spend on
situational uses.

● Replay Tracks (situational): CSI: Pathfinder spell gives you a blurry CGI replay of what
happened wherever there are tracks, extrapolating more information than you could possibly
gain from tracks naturally, and letting you reconstruct crime scenes. Personal range means you
can technically get your companion to do this if they sunk all their skill points into survival and
you didn’t, but you’ll need a means for them to communicate what they find. You get this at
twice the level of hunters, so maybe keep it as a hunter scroll?
nformation

● Jungle Mind: This spell is misleadingly named. This spell is actually an animal radar, where you
learn about general animal population, then select one vaguely-defined “type” of animals to
track, and know where every single one within a mile is currently located, and you even get a
relationship bonus with them. Use this with wild empathy and possibly Alpha Instinct to
assemble an army of animals like dinosaurs to stampede when you need to really cause chaos.
● Commune With Nature: Gain knowledge about the area within a mile radius. You will notice
most of what you can gain knowledge about, like animal populations or presence of dangerous
predators, are things birds would know about. Even if you get three questions, this spell is SL 5,
and Commune With Birds is SL 1. Commune With Birds is amazing. Still, for the few things
birds can’t help you with, like if you’re in an underground area, or looking for specific people or
trying to find minerals, this spell is a no-save method of gaining a wide array of knowledge.

55
 6th Level Spells

● Jatembe’s Ire: This is a powered-up version of Black Tentacles, which is especially fun for druids
because they didn’t get Black Tentacles in the first place. The radius is so stupidly huge that
aiming it may be a problem, but it only attacks based on alignment, so you might not need to
care. It’s useless against fliers or non-evil enemies, but this spell can win some fights all by
itself. Like Black Tentacles before it, the CMB doesn’t scale hard enough to keep up with CMD as
you level up, so it eventually becomes incapable of helping even when fighting enemies it will
attack, but this is an amazing spell when you first get it.
● Roaming Pit: Strange that you only get Pit spells now, after they’re already past their prime. The
big problem is that you’re fighting many enemies that are either too large for this spell, can just
fly, or otherwise negate falling. Like Burning Sphere, it’s 20 feet of movement that takes your
move action, so don’t cast this unless the enemy is already stuck in the tar pit. Since ref saves
mean the target moves, this can be a backdoor method of repositioning enemies for other allies,
and if an ally bull rushes an enemy to the pit, they auto-fail the save. Move fallen enemies into
existing damage over time zones. Depending on what you’re fighting, this can be fun or
frustrating.
● Gravity Sphere (Buff/Debuff): You need to consult the planar traits rules for gravity to
understand this one. Really awkward to use, as it’s basically either a buff or debuff depending on
mode, but it’s too large an area to reliably avoid accidentally buffing the enemy, while too small
to reliably keep an enemy in the debuff zone. High gravity halves ranged weapon range and
Control

increases Pit spell damage by about 50%. Low gravity theoretically increases ranged weapon
range, but that only matters if you have someone with short-range throwing weapons or pistols.
No gravity screws with non-fliers and lets you dunk on non-fliers with ranged attacks… but so
does just flying, and flight spells have been available since at least SL 3. This is way too high
level for this kind of actual mechanical impact.
● Gravity Well: Most GMs don’t track weight on most enemies and Paizo made flight
maneuverability completely meaningless, so this only matters against really clumsy fliers that
can’t make a DC 25 fly check. It’s fort negates, and a skill check with a DC the target can auto-
succeed against is even worse than a save. Against non-fliers, you’ve had no-save options to
halve movement speed since level one.
● Wall of Stone✰ (Utility): It’s instantaneous, so it’s a real, non-magic, non-dispellable, no save
slab of stone. Like all walls, you can cut the enemy encounter in half to pick them off in smaller
chunks at a time, and they can’t simply dispel real stone. You can use this out of combat to build
bridges, dams, aqueducts, terraced agriculture irrigation, or even walls for your own castle. Like
many legacy spells, this has a surprising amount of utility for non-standard uses if you’re just
using it for building material along with Stone Shape and craft (stonework). Tap your inner
dwarven engineer.
● Tar Pool: At this level, you could be casting dazing Burning Entanglement, instead. Outside of
the higher initial damage, this spell’s entangle is worse than dazed and entangled, Burning
Entanglement covers twice the area, and the ongoing damage is similar. This does work where
there are no plants if you GM bans the potted plant trick, and you can cast this if you never got
dazing spell, but seriously, get dazing spell if you want to control cast as a druid…

● Fey Form III: You unlock huge fey at this level, but there’s only one of those - the tunche.
Fortunately, it’s absolutely absurd with five attacks (plus rend) and a poison that inflicts Wis
and Con damage, plus nauseate. It also has DR 5/cold iron. This is a fantastic beast to turn
Buff

yourself or your animal companion into, especially combined with air walk. The only thing it’s
missing is pounce… Also a few abilities are unlocked on smaller fey, most notably faster flight
and a quickling’s supernatural speed (constant concealment), and you can become a tooth fairy
if you want to be diminutive in size.

56
 ● Blazing Rainbow (Buff/Blast/Control): This is two spells. One gives you bow proficiency if you
somehow wanted that and hadn’t picked it up already. The longbow is not listed as composite
(but maybe your GM will take pity on you for casting this?), so it’s just 1d8+1 damage, although
it does ignore armor, shields, and cover. Unless you have archery feats already, this is probably
not worth it, and if you do, this only beats your normal bow if you just can’t hit AC without it
(which might be better solved buffing your archery, not getting a new bow). Dazzled is a
worthless condition, and Faerie Fire doesn’t matter much if you can already target them outside
of negating Blur. The other spell is a bridge that comes online several levels past long-term
flight spells. If you can trick an enemy dumb enough to stand on a magic bridge, it debuffs their
CMD, but you could also just cast it as a fleeting spell and dismiss it for a better effect when
they’re over a chasm.
● Binding Earth Mass: It does damage between Spike Stones and Spike Growth, which are
available at half this level, aren’t targeted, have a huge area, and target a better save. Use those
spells, instead.
● Source Severance: This is a selective version of Antimagic Field. You technically have a choice,
but casting a spell to negate your own (divine) magic is almost always going to do more harm
than good, while negating all arcane magic within 5 feet of yourself while you can potentially
cast without restriction (so long as you can make the concentration checks) is a fantastic
advantage to hold. If you cast this after your main buffs, you don’t have to roll concentration for
those spells, either, and there’s no concentration check if you’re already in combat wild shape
and just mauling people. The only problem is that most monsters are going to be using SLAs
that aren’t affected, so this is specifically for fighting spells from arcane caster class levels, and
useless against the bulk of enemies you are likely to fight.
● Sirocco: Damage over time that can knock prone, and hypothetically swat fliers from the sky.
The problem is that DC 15 is a laughably low check for this level where you’d need to find
Debuff

something with a negative flight skill to reliably keep grounded. It has no-save fatigue and
exhausted if you can keep them in the blast, but this is otherwise fairly similar to Burning
Entanglement from SL 3 except that it can hit fliers. It might work well as a “topper” spell to
stack more damage and conditions on creatures already bogged down in a Burning
Entanglement to finish them off, but it’s hard to see too many creatures actually being caught in
this spell without using some other spells to pin them in place, first.
● Plague Storm (Control): This is an escalation from Cloudkill’s mustard gas to biological weapons.
Unfortunately, diseases have effects on intervals measured in days, and you’re unlikely to be
reaching a ceasefire so you can wait out the time it takes for the disease to do its damage once
you’re hitting NBC rungs of the escalation ladder. Also, creatures at this level that matter
enough for the GM to bother tracking them past a fight will have easy access to Remove Disease.
It does have an immediate onset, but even then, this is a small AoE 50% chance of blind if they
fail a save with the best effect on this list. 1d4 or 1d6 ability score damage is not moving the
needle at this level without a method of more concentrated ability score damage, and you can’t
stack the same disease twice. Many creatures are also immune to disease or have fantastic fort
saves by this level, as well.
● Primal Regression: It’s like a temporary mass Feeblemind for casters that don’t get Feeblemind.
Will save negate spells that inflict penalties to will saves are generally worse than just casting
the spell that wipes the enemy out twice if they make the first save, especially at such a high
spell level. It can theoretically shut out casters, but they tend to have good will saves, and how
often do you fight more than one caster within 30 feet of each other? It has a suggestion of RPing
the victims as “bloodthirsty”, but that’s entirely in the hands of the GM. The spell really needs a
Confusion effect (or I guess, to just have someone else cast Confusion) after throwing this spell
out there, as there’s nothing directing the “brutish anger” you just inspired and you otherwise
just buffed someone you took a hostile act against and now they’re out for revenge, and there’s
no reason for the targets to fight each other. Like a lot of enchantment spells, this is really more
of a social engineering spell that you would cast from hiding (along with Confusion) on a crowd
of NPCs to start a riot rather than a combat spell.

57
 ● Fire Seeds: A ranged touch attack doing 10d4 fire damage would need some extra buffs to be a
worthwhile use of your standard action now. If you happen to have humanoid mooks it’s useful
perhaps. Maybe if you can convince some (possibly Awakened/upleveled) monkeys to throw
Blast

them for you from the treetops? The holly berry firestarters aren’t going to be useful at all.
● Whip of Ants: If you’re casting a 6th level standard action buff it needs to be awesome. Whip of
Ants doesn’t qualify; 3d6 damage isn’t as good as you might think when it’s your only attack and
there’s no enhancement bonus. The DC 15 save on distraction isn’t worth having at this level.

● Cyclic Reincarnation: Reincarnate which doesn’t destroy the mental image of your character is
nice. It also fills the role of Resurrection for druids, being able to revive those longer dead, or
killed by a death effect, or who were reanimated as undead then destroyed. It costs 5K to cast
Heal

which is half the cost of Resurrection, or as much as Raise Dead. They also only gain one
negative level, which means only 1k gp on Restoration and not having to wait a week to cast
Restoration the second time… although you need either to UMD a scroll or have someone else
case the Restoration.

● Eagle Aerie: Giant eagles fly fairly fast at base 80’, and just flying is useful to bypass obstacles. If
you need to travel and can’t just teleport this is decent until Wind Walk becomes available next
level. The eagles aren’t useful in a fight (CR 3) but if your GM doesn’t have conniptions the Alter
Summoned Monster spell makes Eagle Aerie awesome.
● Liveoak: Treants aren’t awesome in a fight, but a spell you don’t have to cast on the day of the
fight is almost like a free spell. Unlike Changestaff, nothing in this spell says it’s not a real treant
and that it can’t control trees. Don’t send your treant in directly, just have it constantly control
more trees and throw them into the woodchipper.
● SNA VI: Dire tigers with their 5 +18 attacks on a charge rule here. Well, the 20’ reach and 8-9
Summons

attacks on a giant octopus have a place, but +11-12 and much lower damage on those attacks
mostly relegate it to the aquatic environments it prefers. Followers of the Eldest can call up
escorites which have a hefty amount of magic to bring to the fight. These options are likely
better than multiple lower level summons unless you just want meat shields.
● Summon Giant Ally I: Standard action summons (which are actually summons and all your feats
like augment summoning apply) are far more convenient, and the ability to order your
summons about (possibly even in Common) is more convenient still. It’s not like a stone giant is
a match for a dire tiger in a fight but convenience is good.
● Summon Flight of Eagles✰: Like Eagle Aerie but the duration is poor for overland travel, even
more awesome for Alter Summoned Monster.
● Swarm Skin; Standard action ‘summons’ and easy ordering them around are still convenient but
this spell has the twin drawbacks of leaving you helpless, and being underpowered for the spell
level. 3d6 damage per round just isn’t worthwhile at 11th level.

58
 ● Dispel Magic Greater: Magic rules, removing magic removes the enemies’ right to rule. Greater
dispel magic can affect an area or remove all the buffs on the magicked to the gills gish you’re
fighting, or all the usual tricks of basic dispel magic. Also, you get this one at the same level as
everyone else - equality makes it go down easier.
● Enlightened Step: The [meditative] spells are expensive and unwieldy even if they can give
strong effects. You need to prep it the day before; simply UMDing scrolls of Fly can be cheaper
and more flexible; a druid that needs long durations of flight can also just turn into a bird; you
can also just cast Air Walk directly and it already lasts hours. Still, if you for some reason need
to fly for very long periods of time in non-bird form, or have reason to need bursts of high flight
speed as a swift, not standard action for exactly one battle in the day, this can deliver high
performance at the cost of practicality. Oh, and it’s personal range in case you wanted to give
your animal companion day-long flight - they can probably get more use from it since they can’t
turn into a bird so easily.
● Ironwood: You can carve yourself a wooden breastplate if you’ve somehow not been able to
afford a dragonscale breastplate by this point. You just need to recast it every week, hopefully
during a downtime day. It’s technically possible, but you should probably have a better solution
to armor than this, like dipping a level of monk or wild dragonscale armor, by the time you’re
level 11+. Also, it still melds when you wild shape if you aren’t using Fae Form. If you’re
Utility

starting a one-shot campaign at high levels and say it was cast the day before the campaign
starts, it can work, though.
● Move Earth: Instantaneous reshaping of the land. Druids should probably be opposed to this
kind of thing, at least except to “reverse ecological damage” or something, but you can use this
with things like Wall of Stone to outright terraform the land if need be. Make hills, carve out
new river basins, make the landscape of your dreams! It’s fantastic for games where you build
up a single town or kingdom, but impractical for campaigns focused on travel except as a way to
dig trenches ahead of a battle.
● Transport Via Plants: Like with so many other spells, druids get their own tree-flavored version
of Teleport a level later than the wizards do but with some perks on top. Unlike Tree Stride, you
can actually take your friends with you this time, it has unlimited range, and it doesn’t have a
failure chance, so it can kind of be Greater Teleport if you don’t mind only jumping to places
with living trees. A surprising point where a druid can one-up the wizard, and maintain
domination of overland travel (so long as you don’t need to go into a barren desert or
underground… although giant mushrooms do count as “plants”...)
● ✰Spellstaff✰: This is practically a class feature. Don’t you know that at level 11, druids get a free
extra spell of whatever level they want with their special spell stick?! It’s utter nonsense, but it’s
legacy nonsense, so take your pseudo-free bonded object and enjoy. It probably still consumes
spell slots on the day you recharge the spell stick, but if you adventure sporadically, this can be
perfectly acceptable.

● Antilife Shell (Control): Theoretically, you can block off a passage with this. Primarily, however,
this is a way for a caster to sit still and cast without the big, scary monsters eating their face. For
example, when you are doing a lot of summons and need to avoid failing concentration checks
for damage. Depending on how they attack, huge creatures can reach weapons past the shell,
non-living or outsider creatures aren’t affected, and it doesn’t do anything against ranged
attacks or spells, but in the (sadly increasingly rarer at this level) case that you’re fighting a
Protection

melee natural-attack-only encounter, this is an invincibility field. If you have a ranged or reach
build that extends past the shell, you can grief some monsters to death.
● Dust Form: While it seems similar to something like Cloud Shape at first glance, you retain
basically all your abilities besides doing full damage with physical attacks. Diminutive (three
categories less than medium) is able to squeeze into only six inches, which is pretty big for dust,
but otherwise, incorporeal is a severely annoying ability to fight against, but fantastic to benefit
from. Natural attack druids won’t use it (it’s a polymorph that competes with their own shape
changing), but casters or Flame Blade combatants can essentially use this to halve or possibly
negate incoming damage. The rounds/level duration is the huge downside, making it hard to
cast before battle.

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 ● Bite The Hand, Mass (Summons): Hypothetically, if you’re up against a known annoying (squad
of ) summoner(s), this could turn the tables on them, but… this spell only works on actual
Beastmaster

“summon” spells or SLAs, and the use case for this spell is if your GM is actually going to flood a
hallway with a solid wall of summon spam against you. Most tables will never see that use case.
Otherwise, just dropping a Greater Dispel Magic to wipe out the one or two summons you might
see most GMs pull on you and also wiping out enemy buffs at the same time may be a safer
choice of spell memorization. At least most Summon Monster summons are low-level enough to
generally have poor will saves, but fiends can summon other fiends that might have high enough
will saves and SR to cause problems.

● Find The Path: Unless you need to find your way through a maze this spell doesn’t obviously do
much. The main issue with this spell outside the Maze spell is that it’s extremely up to GM
interpretation how intelligent the magic satnav actually is. This spell might just tell you to take
a road, or this spell might give you enough knowledge to know which tree to use Transport via
Plants upon to get to your destination the fastest. If “the physical actions to take” include things
like bashing down doors, casting spells to make bridges, or outright teleporting, this is a great
spell for finding paths to places you don’t know well enough to get to without an overland
journey. If your GM only believes it works for plodding one foot over the other, it’s garbage.
● Insect Spies, Greater: This is a really good spying spell. Fleas and similar are really hard to spot,
Information

don’t trigger invisibility alarms, most people don’t just instantly go for the kill even if they see a
fly, and you get actual information rather than just rerolls or secondhand info relayed through a
flea. You can use it like a multitasking Arcane Eye, swapping insects as they need to do things
like fly to the other end of a hallway, and explore down multiple routes at once.
● Stone Tell / Speak with Waves: Very few places are entirely lacking in either stone or water so
you have security cameras everywhere but on salty seas. Providing you’re specific enough in
your questions (rocks may not know who the local lord is, but they can provide ‘complete
descriptions’ which you should be able to use) you can get a solid picture of what happened at
most locations. Using this on rivers to understand everything that happens upriver without a
stated range limit is an exceptionally difficult method of spying to prevent, and a spymaster
might want to try that on rival nations…
● Unerring Tracker: Once you’ve found and identified a track, this spell lets you skip any further
skill rolls to follow it. You’d think this should be a much lower level spell, but it’s possibly useful
anyway.

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 7th Level Spells

● Scouring Winds: This combines effects of a few lower-level spells. Blind enemies like Ash Storm
from SL 3, it causes windstorm winds like Control Wind (although this negates your own side’s
ranged attacks), and does 3d6 no-save piercing damage per round. The thing is, 3d6 isn’t very
Control

much damage at level 13+ (and increasingly common DR may negate it), and it lacks the
movement-negating abilities of other spells. (Presumably because you can move it 30 feet as a
move action, but you’re being given a lot of spells that take a move action by now.) The
windstorm does at least penalize fly checks, so you might try a spell like Rope Tornado to try to
shoot down some fliers into your quagmire of DoT control spells. Otherwise, you’re probably
better off with a dazing version of a lower-level spell for the kind of spell level we’re reaching.

● Form of the Exotic Dragon I: Form of the Exotic Dragon gets good, but you don’t want this
version, whose effects are just worse than your wild shape or Fae Form options at this level.
Druids get this a spell level later than wizards, and it’s terrible for them at the level, too!
● Legendary Proportions: If you just want an improved version of Enlarge Person for someone
you can’t give polymorphs to, or who doesn’t want to change shape, this is a decent option, but it
Buff

may not be competitive for a SL 7 slot. The stat bonuses aren’t fantastic compared to what other
polymorphs can give, but it essentially rolls Stoneskin and a decent amount of natural armor in
with the improved Enlarge Person, and 200 gp material cost is relative pennies at this level. It’s
best used if you have a target that absolutely doesn’t want to polymorph, like your fighter ally
who’s built around their specific weapon, or if you have a large animal companion like a tiger
that loses too much if you polymorph them.

● Baleful Shadow Transmutation: This is an SL 7 single target spell with will negates and SR:yes.
(It has a fort save, but that only applies if someone else tries to polymorph them again, and you
should absolutely kill the target before that might happen.) A spell this likely to fail had better
do something amazing if it succeeds, and… well, this spell can be amazing. Make the target think
they’re a puppy, and they’ll wag their tail and try to play fetch for you. Also, they’ll somehow
Debuff

forget what they are so hard they physically lose things like immunities, regeneration, and
immortality. This is technically a way to permanently kill the Tarrasque or Cthulhu, as in spite of
the name, it’s only a [shadow] illusion spell, not transmutation, a polymorph, or even [mind-
affecting], so the Tarrasque and Cthulhu are not immune to it. I’m not sure anything is.
Someone at Paizo screwed up. This spell bypasses all the guardrails that normally protect end
boss creatures. It’s risky and complete overkill on anything that isn’t otherwise nearly
impossible to kill, but if you have to kill a god, this is a will save away from making them just
some guy who thinks they’re a puppy and eminently stabbable.

● Fire Storm: It’s yet another fire-based CLd6 spell, but this one has extremely selective targeting.
You get to control whether or not you burn plants, and get two cubes of effect per level to target
directly on the enemy. (Why do druids get so many plant-burning wildfire spells, anyway?
You’d think they’d have more lightning that goes around trees or something…) Just keep in
mind that SL 7 is a high level for a blast, and you could use this spell slot for a maximized
Explosion of Rot to do up to 90 untyped damage, so you should only use this spell when you
really need its ability to blast many, many things at once with precision rather than just “a blast
Blast

spell”.
● Sunbeam: Brings vampires Final Death. This spell is not worth the actions if you aren’t using it
on something like a vampire that is weak to daylight and undead, but hey, you can vaporize a
vampire, dread wraith, or banshee per round. Cathartic after how traumatizing incorporeals can
be at lower levels.
● Morning Sun: I suppose if you’re fighting an entire horde of light-vulnerable undead like wraiths
and spectres at the same time, this is better than Sunbeam, but… if this is happening, your GM
hates you or only added that encounter because you memorized this spell, because that would
be a TPK in most cases otherwise. Otherwise, this is just a stupidly-expensive lamp.

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 ● Cure Moderate Wounds, Mass: Oh boy! I get to spend a spell slot and action that should win
fights in one round healing about 1/4th the damage a single typical monster does per round!
Mass cure spells have always been astonishingly worthless.
Heal

● Heal: Finally, it’s the good HP-restoring spell. It can actually outpace damage in (although you’re
going to burn spell slots fast if you try), and more importantly, it can clear a huge swathe of
negative conditions and ability damage all at once. It can also blast an undead for pretty
considerable damage. Druids just feel bad because they get it a spell late like all the other spells
everyone else gets.

● Changestaff: You can create a treant and… wait… isn’t that what Liveoak did last level? And that
was good because it lasted days/level while this lasts hours/level and can’t control more trees.
The only reason to pick this over Liveoak at all is that you aren’t capped at one at a time.
Technically, you might be able to flood the area with treants you summon ahead of time, but SL
7 is an expensive level to spam your spell slots before battle for disposable meat walls.
● Creeping Doom: 4d6 damage is better than Swarm Skin last level, but HP is advancing, too, and
this just isn’t enough. (Burning Entanglement could do 4d6 damage a round to creatures that
failed its save at half this level.) You also have to concentrate to move the swarms, which only
move at 30 feet a round (but technically, you can double move them, and RAW, swarms do
damage at the end of each move action, although most GMs ban that.) Hypothetically, casters
can fail the save and be distracted, but the concentration check DC doesn’t scale as fast as
concentration bonus does. The best thing to say about this is just that it’s four blobs of 60 HP
you summon with a standard action, and if enemies try to kill them, they’re wasting actions, but
just summoning HP with a 1 round cast time and not using standard actions to control them
seems like a better plan to me.
● Elemental Bombardment: This one allows you to hilariously use your earth elementals as
pseudo-meteors. Don’t be fooled by all the extra rules about fall damage, this spell is still
(summoning), all your summoning feats still apply, they still get to act immediately after being
dropped on your enemies, and they’re even the same sizes of elementals you’d get from SNA VII!
If you have superior summons, you can summon 3 huge earth elementals while doing 12d6
Summons

damage with each one and then they get to take their turn and be a normal elemental, although
they do start prone. They stop you from slamming the elementals into more than one target
each, but they don’t say anything about slamming all your elementals into the same target,
especially if they’re bigger than medium, and each elemental takes a corner for a no-save, SR: no
36d6 (~126 damage) plus surrounding the target with summons who still get to act
immediately. If you go smaller, you even get more elementals than you’d otherwise get with one
SNA spell. If you have a greater rod of giant summons, you can summon 5 giant large elementals
that are now huge, so they fall on people for 12d6, too. (~210 damage if you can manage to
drop them all on the same target.) Decide whether it’s worth standing and losing a full attack
and provoking an AoO or just flailing while prone at the enemy with a -4 to attack. They do have
half the duration, but if it’s a combat summon, so what? Do you expect this combat to last more
than 6 rounds, anyway?! Only the fact that this is a round-long cast and there are standard
option casts keep this spell from being an all-star.
● SNA VII: Greater elementals come online now, giving DR 10/- and triple-digit HP, letting them
really soak damage. Gargantuan animals like tyrannosaurs and dire crocodiles are now in play,
able to swallow enemies whole to just wipe them from the board. Brachiosaurus can literally
walk all over the enemy with greater overrun with trample. For raw damage, however, consider
just flooding the room with dire tigers.
● Summon Giant Ally II: Frost and fire giant are already on SNA, but hey, standard action
summons! Greater ice and fire elementals will outcompete them in raw stats, but you might not
be able to fit huge combatants in the dungeon, and hey, now they’re standard action summons!
Getting 1d3+1 giants if you have superior summons makes this much more attractive. The lack
of “summoning sickness” in Pathfinder means that your summons can full attack as soon as they
appear, so surround an enemy with stone giants before they can react.

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 ● Plundered Power: You really have to go shopping for an ability worth using this on. The obvious
option of sacrificing an efreeti for Wish is barred by the material component limit, and the
summon universal monster rule most fiends have isn’t duplicating a spell. “Altered” spell-like
abilities includes things like maximized SLAs, which can be fairly useful. The best bid here is to
go for spells not on spell lists your party otherwise has. For example, if you somehow subdue a
balor, you can get Dominate Monster or Implode early. If your party can actually restrain itself
to non-lethal damage, you can potentially take a target down non-lethally, and this spell can be
kept as a scroll for when you come across a chance to use it. I recommend extend spell being
put on it to maximize the value. It’s just that you’re really unlikely to be able to choose good
times to use this spell, so it’s a big gamble that will very likely not pay off. But then, it’s just a
game, and unlikely events make great stories! Also, it’s [evil] if you follow a good deity.
● Control Weather: Control Winds is three spell levels lower, and this takes 10 minutes to cast, so
Utility

you’re not doing this in combat, although you may be doing quite a bit of harm. You can use this
spell to create wide-scale devastation on the scale of a chunk of a city by summoning tornadoes
or a small hurricane, and that’s definitely what people focus on, but it’s probably more often
used in the background (both in-universe and by players) during downtime days just canceling
out bad weather (if your GM remembers weather exists outside spells) so your herb gardens can
get ideal sun and rain.
● Wind Walk: Try not to confuse this for Air Walk. This is a mass flying spell that gives you car-
like speeds for a “sky road trip”. At the level a druid gets it (an SL later than clerics), provided
your GM says being flown by the wind doesn’t fatigue and you can travel for more than 8 hours a
day, you can take up to four other characters with you (plus Carry Companion) up to 780 miles
or 65 hexes in a hex crawl map in a day, which is usually larger than most maps. Only its very
high level, and the fact that you just got Transport via Plants last level dulls that. I guess if you
need to go to the middle of a desert, you could cast Transport via Plants, then this to get where
you need to go

● True Seeing: This is a very powerful spell, which is why you will bitterly complain about clerics
getting it four levels before you do. Illusions are very powerful spells in the right circumstances,
but “when someone cast True Seeing” is absolutely the wrong circumstance. Also, this spell lets
people see your true form while you are wild shaped, which might be exceptionally freaky if
you’re polymorphed into a tiny form contorted in a way that a human doesn’t normally bend,
like a coiled snake.
● Tectonic Communion: It’s “Commune With Continent”. You have a void of knowledge where
“civilization” exists, but otherwise, you’re asking questions about an area of at a minimum a
2,600 mile diameter, which is nearly enough to cover the entire continental United States. Get an
instant census of the entire wild animal population on a continental scale. The way that cities
are “dark blots on your awareness” implies you are aware of everything else, not just getting
responses from some entity, which should be the amount of knowledge that fries a mortal brain.
Map out the entire Darklands cave system barring cities. Instantly know where every logging
Information

camp on the continent is, and who is hurting the trees. Find every deposit of precious minerals
on the continent, and go mining for spell components like diamonds. Instantly know about any
person you can ask a question about who isn’t in “civilization”, and get the knowledge to Scry on
them for more. At level 20, with a greater rod of widen spell, a 4,000 mile radius lets you ask
how the planet’s core is feeling, or if you somehow can cast this spell in the center of the core
without dying, the entire planet is in the spell’s radius. (Presuming an Earth-sized planet.) Also,
Commune with Nature doesn’t say anything about space stopping it, so you can use this to check
for the location of any satellites in orbit on your half of the planet if cast from the surface
(although manufactured ones are just “dark blots”).. This spell is bordering on Omniscience, and
it’s really only limited by what your GM is willing to let you get away with, as how specific a
question you’re allowed to ask (as in, asking for details about people meeting specific criteria or
trying to find a specific person somewhere in the current radius not in civilization) isn’t clearly
defined.
● Scrying, Greater: Scrying without the hassles of a long casting time and with a duration long
enough to do some serious snooping. If you want to wait until the BBEG hits the toilet before
you drop in and ruin their day that’s doable, providing they don’t notice the scrying sensor.
(Although unless he poos in the woods or likes very big potted plants, this may be something to
ask a character with an actual Teleport spell to do, instead, as Teleport Via Plants is otherwise
not a great ambush spell.)

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64
 8th Level Spells

● Reverse Gravity: No save, no SR battlefield control. Flyers still laugh at you though and there’s a
lot of those at this level. It’s probably also effective property damage if you want that - few
buildings are designed to handle gravity being reversed on them.
● Wall of Lava: It’s a very shapeable wall (you can choose individual 5’ squares, which not all walls
allow - you can even make it two or more squares thick to force enemies trying to force their
way through plow through even more wall) which is hard to get through without teleportation,
or else high fire resistance/fire immunity and a burrow speed. The erupt feature probably isn’t
worth doing though. It’s not clear which 5’ squares are eliminated when the wall’s size is
reduced by damage or by eruption and you probably do want to check with your GM before
casting whether it’s random, your choice, GM’s choice or what.
● Vinetrap: It’s like a super-Entangle. In fact, it doesn’t require any plants in the area, so you
might use it in a massive cavern to create plants you can cast Thorny/Burning Entanglement on
which also fill up 90 feet into the air to slow fliers. (Entangle affects plants in a radius without a
Control

distinction that they be on the ground, so Entangle is now difficult terrain for fliers.) Most peer
threats at this level can just teleport past your tar pit nonsense, it has a save, and allows SR, so
this is really more a high-level godcaster spell aimed at single-handedly turning the tide of a war
mostly fought by low-level nobodies than taking out end-game threats. Swift vines are probably
the better option if you’re casting Thorny Entanglement unless you need to beat DR - noxious
vines’ DC 15 save is a joke.
● Earthquake: An 80’ radius spread is quite a lot of destruction. If you want to break an army this
is a solid spell for the job. Even against more normal targets it’s pretty good underground or
next to a cliff as being pinned under rubble can take enemies out for the duration of the combat.
Those are some pathetic save DCs where they save for half damage, but this is not a damage
spell - creatures under a cliff or underground are buried alive regardless of the save! That’s right,
this is no-save, SR: no, BAYBEEE! Being buried takes a DC 25 strength check to escape from by
yourself, and nat20s don’t auto-succeed on ability checks, so casting this in caves is basically a
no-save-just-die against anything with less than 20 strength, and even if they have more, this is
basically a Mass Maze spell where a few will pop back out one at a time for the martials to chop
up. You can’t use this everywhere, but in the right terrain, this is hands-down one of the best
control spells a druid could dream of.

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 ● Fey Form IV: You don’t get new sizes (and therefore different ability score bonuses or new
forms), and this costs 2 spell levels higher than Fey Form III, so the new abilities you gain really
better be worth it. Nereids if you want to be so pretty that people have to save or stare at you
(plus a bunch of other defensive abilities), or shadow collectors for claws which do 1d6 points of
charisma damage are highlights here. Whisperers, mentioned under Fey Form III are also good
as they gain more defensive abilities than the earlier spell gave.
● Form of the Exotic Dragon II: Fey Form IV is better in all ways if you have armor. The only
reason to cast this is for the image.
● Frightful Aspect: If you don’t like being full-attacked in melee and your current enemies aren’t
immune to fear then this is the spell for you. Making your enemies frightened as soon as they hit
you will prevent them from continuing a full attack. Frightful Aspect also comes with a slew of
Buff

other bonuses including spell resistance.

● Heart of the Mammoth: The +8 enhancement bonus to Str and Con doesn’t stack with items
which you will certainly have at this level, but still gives some bonus. The immunity to fear and
+4 morale bonus to other Will saves is probably new. Also this is a touch spell you can cast on
any of your allies, and isn’t a polymorph so it stacks with other buffs including wild shape. The
round/level duration really kills what could otherwise be a good immunity buff.
● Animal Shapes: Beast Shape III on up to CL allies covers your party and then some. You have
other ways of giving out flight, but this may be useful for mass swimming or burrowing. I can’t
imagine that you have enough people wanting to fight in animal shape to get full use out of that
however. You can use this on your animal companion to finally be able to polymorph your
animal into a different kind of animal, but since it’s not personal, you might also apply it on
Awakened animals, the paladin’s mount, or just any general big, tough animals you got on your
side with wild empathy.

● Death Clutch: Save or die and they’ll need resurrection, or regenerate + raise dead to recover.
Pretty nasty, and even if they don’t die they’re staggered for a round. Best used when there’s
someone handy who can figure out whether the prospective clutchee has 201+ hp or not, but
even on a target who can’t be killed instantly 1d4 Con damage and 1d4 Con bleed is going to be
effective. This is one of the better spells to accompany with evil laughter. Speaking of which, it’s
[evil], so if you worship a good deity, they won’t let you do it. Killjoy. This is for style, anyway,
as you really don’t want single-target SR:yes that only staggers for one round on a fort save
nearly anything that is a real threat will be able to reliably make at this level.
● Euphoric Tranquility: A 1 round/level duration even at this level isn’t enough to do anything
Debuff

much out of combat. Euphoric tranquility is a combat debuff, forcing the enemies to do nothing
if they’re not attacked, and to make a save each round that they are attacked to do anything
much. Genuinely crippling - the big selling point here is the fact that the initial effect has NO
SAVE, the target only gets to save if attacked, so it’s like Maze for non-wizards, a no-save time-
out corner for enemies while you murder their friends. (Smart enemies will attack the monster
themselves, however…) If the enemies are dumb, they fail will saves anyway, or you just prevent
them from hitting their friend, this is better than Maze because you can preposition your guys
and delay actions so you can all full attack while flanking just after the target’s turn and play
“will it blend?” with the target before a will save to break the spell will matter. It still has SR, but
druids really need all the no-save spells they can get at higher levels, where saves balloon out of
control.

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 ● Stormbolts: A soft 30’ range limit (although you need an expensive widen spell rod to increase
the range) means you can’t use Stormbolts in every situation, and a Fort save makes it easier for
many to make the save, but being able to not harm allies and the round of stun on a failed save
keeps it a solid blast. If you are in a flying form, consider flying into the middle of enemy ranks
before casting this spell. At this level, however, you may get more out of stacking metamagic on
lower-level blasts, like a maximized Burst of Rot.
Blast

● Sunburst (debuff) Druids are supposed to really dislike undead so it’s nice to see a good anti-
undead spell on their list. Obliterates an entire cabal of vampires in one shot, but you could do
that with Morning Sun last spell level? I guess this doesn’t have a material component, but is
500 gp worth worrying about for an instant win? Against others, 80’ radius save or blind
(permanently), possibly from 1000’ away, is not the worst debuff. Just be aware that against
non-undead targets, the damage is pathetic for the level so you’re just blinding them, a save
negates, and it has SR, so expect to only really snag a quarter of the targets at best.

● Cure Serious Wounds Mass: No, this is not a valid use of your standard action at this level. Let
Heal

alone an 8th level spell slot. Put reach spell or maybe intensify spell on Heal if you want a
healing spell in an SL 8 slot. Or better yet, finally realize druid is not an HP healer class.

● Summon Giant Ally III: You’re still basically trading down to a weaker creature in exchange for a
summon that can fight on this round rather than next round. This is still generally worth it mid-
battle, as action economy is everything, and what’s the point in summoning a creature next
round when combat could be ended this round? Summoning several lower-level giants is still a
better option than one higher-level giant. That said, at this level, expect enemies with 30+ AC, so
if you don’t have a high-level bard whose inspire courage that can buff them passively, a +14/+9
iterative attack (although a rod of giant summons to make a giant giant still helps) ain’t gonna
cut the mustard, so getting 1d3(+1 with superior summons) of the SNA VII-tier giants are
potentially better. Fire giants with a +21/+16/+11 4d6+15 damage attacks will definitely put
out the most damage if there is no fire resistance to worry about. While desert giants’ scimitar
TWF is interesting, each hit does less than half what a fire giant’s swing does. Ash giant is
Summons

weaker than a fire giant and cloud giant is roughly equivalent, so 2-4 fire giants will stomp one
cloud giant every time.
● SNA VIII: There aren’t any bigger cats to escalate to but summoning 1d4+1 dire tigers is a valid
move. Elder earth elementals get a +26 compared to greater earth elemental’s +21 slams and
about 30 more hit points, but otherwise, elder earth elementals are mostly just +2 more for
most of their stats, making this the SNA spell that you should definitely consider summoning
multiples of lower-tier summons rather than any of these unless you think you can make some
of these maneuvers they have, but with a lot of high-level enemies having 50+ CMD, even the
elder elementals are likely going to only hit with maneuvers on nat 20s, so going for numbers,
bulk, and survivability may be better strategies. That said, if you love maneuvers and have a
greater rod of giant summoning, purple worms are gargantuan (colossal with the rod), have a
burrow speed, and can swallow whole. With giant summons and augmented summons, that’s a
respectable +44 CMB on the grapple check, and ain’t no method of shutting down an end-game
caster quite like dropping a hungry sand worm on him! Tell the worm to burrow, and even if
they get out, they’re ejected underground and are buried alive.

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 ● Entomb: The druid’s answer to create demiplane, this makes you a safe and pleasant hidey-hole.
I feel like a druid could do this as a compromise to preserving nature while having a city form
nearby. Put the nature in an always-sunny preserve belowground, and then have a city above.
Can you bury the same tract of land twice to drop it even lower underground, then cast Entomb
back up on the surface again, creating stacked layers? Put a farm in the middle layer for food for
the surface city, and the nature preserve in the lower layer. Better yet, go dwarfy, and make the
city be a complex multi-layer affair with sunshiney subway streets and houses in the bedrock
while having wilderness above. Can you perform multiple Entombs side-by-side to create an
ever-widening whole forest in a vault? Likely no combat value, but these are the kind of cool
spells I love seeing at top-end spellcasting that you can plan around, but never actually seem to
get to do in real games… In spite of how it says things are displaced safely, if you actually stack
layers of city, farm, and nature over one another, this would become a nightmare if it were ever
dispelled. This is the kind of spell you’d make into a staff so you can spam it constantly. A 10-
charge cast staff with no other tricks costs 14,600 gp, and with an arcane battery, you can add a
new set of squares to the underground every 5 days without additional cost besides your time.
● Word of Recall: Escape the current encounter back to your home/other safe place. You get it 2
SL/4 character levels after the clerics, to say nothing of a wizard’s Teleport. Or for that matter a
druid’s Transport Via Plants; if you’re willing to lug around enough ivy you can do this at spell
level 6 just like a cleric, and ignore the higher level version. The one neat thing is it brings you
Utility

back to wherever you memorized the spell with unlimited range besides no planar travel, so if
you memorize this in a desert, it does create a “warp point” for you so long as you never empty
that slot, although that’s so limited in use that it’s almost certainly not worth it being SL 8.
● Wandering Weather: Control Weather that you can drag along with you, or more importantly
with your ship/airship; it doesn’t take long to leave the area of a Control Weather spell on a fast
ship. You probably have a better way (like Tailwind) of keeping your ship sailing than this by SL
8, but you could blow a whole navy forwards with this one, or try to use it selectively creating
tornadoes where the enemy ships are located during a naval battle. If you wanted to be a true
avenger of nature, you can walk or fly all around a city with multiple tornadoes touching down
everywhere to flatten the whole city with one cast, rather than having to do it in chunks. (Just
have a method to keep yourself safe from your own doom weather.)
● Fey Gate: Unlike the Gate spell this doesn’t have a summoning function. It exists to have a gate
that can take significant numbers of people through rather than just the handful that can plane
shift together, and to give druids a means of planar travel at all. Taking large numbers of people
to the First World seems like a way to just fill up an eldest’s mansion with more slaves, though.
Or to allow a fey army through to the Prime Material. Villains like doing that, but most PCs
should think twice before leading an army of lower-level scrubs into an inherently dangerous
place. If you have any other caster, you’re better off having them Plane Shift you, or just UMDing
scrolls of Plane Shift rather than waiting on this spell, as it’s even more random than Plane Shift,
so I’m not sure why you’d bother with the SL 8 slot even if you definitely do want to go to the
First World for some reason. If you just want to meet fey, there are plenty in the Prime Material
and you can Entice Fey.

● Seamantle: If you want to put out a forest fire this helps to a degree. Otherwise, improved cover
is good but probably not 8th level spell good. You are always counted as swimming, gain a swim
speed and breathe water, so like with other immunities, you can use this to proactively drop gas
or fire spells on top of yourself to use the immunity offensively. You can probably move in and
Protection

out of water freely, and if you are using Air Walk, (might?) be able to use this as some sort of
omni-terrain movement where you can swim, surface, then start swim-flying in the same round?
Talk to your GM about it if you’re in a naval campaign. It is conjuration, not a polymorph, so you
can stack it with a polymorph/wildshape if you wanted to wild shape into a giant squid, start
grappling people and be a land kraken. It’s also “target: you” so you could put it on your animal
companion if you wanted them to be a land kraken. It’s not the best buff on its own, but if it
stacks and you know you’re only having one fight today so you’re not worried about spending
an SL8 on a tertiary buff, a min/level defense buff with an immunity is going to be a good move
in some scenarios...

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 ● Atavism, Mass: It’s a buff you can use on the uncountable number of dire tigers, dire crocodiles,
or dire tyrannosaurs you can potentially put on the battlefield, but it’s still an iffy buff to put on
Beastmaster

your animal companion. Because it’s min/level, you might want to put it on creatures you
created with Alter Summoned Monster, but there are no SNA VIII or IX animals, sadly, and a
purple worm or storm giant will still be better options than an atavism dire crocodile unless you
needed the aquatic ability. Casting it mid-battle after a summon is not likely worth the action, so
you’d have to cast this on rounds/level summons before bursting into the room and starting the
fight, which is… iffy for gargantuan animals to actually be able to fit through a door before the
battle is already over.

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 9th Level Spells

● Antipathy: Get the fuck away, the spell! Great for defending points from specific individuals, or
Cont

hiding your special one ring.

rol

● Ascension: If you use your level 20 alternate capstone to obtain a minor artifact (or Sacred
Geometry to apply Ascendant Spell), this spell becomes usable. Give your whole party 1 mythic
tier of their choosing. Enjoy.
● ✰Shapechange✰: BECOME ANYTHING! EVERYTHING! Yes you might have wild shape but fuck,
every now and then, it feels great to just become a dragon and make that everybody’s problem.
And then become a water elemental. Then become a dinosaur…and then-... Casting this on your
animal companion gives them a massive stat buff, huge number of attacks, flying, fear aura,
immunity to an element of choice, and generally makes them at least competitive in late-game
where they might otherwise be falling behind the game of rocket tag. Dragons can even swim,
burrow, or Spider Climb on command. The only thing dragons can’t do is pounce… but you
know what does? An allosaurus, which you can also turn into for one round as a free action just
Buff

to get the charge/pounce/rake going because Beast Shape IV is also now on your list! You can
even use Giant Form II to turn into a troll for regeneration (the flavor of troll changes what
elements are your weakness, and remember - you can’t die if regeneration is active) or a
gegenees for a six-armed grappler or weapon user whose equipment doesn’t meld. If you can
somehow get a ring of continuation on them, the 10 min/level duration makes this a 24 hour
buff on them. (Regeneration now works between all battles.) Put it on both of you, and you
don’t have to be whatever your base species was ever again!
● Threefold Form: Being in three places at once sounds good, but since the spell is clear that it
doesn’t break the action economy it’s not actually amazing. It could be fun with a reach weapon
and combat reflexes but single attacks don’t swing fights at this level. The Threefold Aspect part
gets in the way more than helps, as the bonuses are enhancement (and thus, anything that
would help you is overlapped by belt/headband) and there are untyped penalties as well. It also
burns down your buff durations three times as fast.

● Polar Midnight: The damage is nothing but the dex damage is pain and if they don’t move, they
Deb

are immediately frozen…which includes if they CANT move and you have SO MUCH CONTROL
uff

NONSENSE this can be actually incredibly deadly.

● Clashing Rocks: Have you ever needed to drop a mountain on someone? Just doing damage (at
least, only 20d6 damage…) is not noteworthy at this level, but it’s ref-partial SR:no that on a
failed save trips and buries the enemy, which takes a DC 25 strength check to escape on their
own. Outside of the highest-strength brutes, this is practically a save-or-die. Even if they save, a
trip can be lethal, especially if they were already next to your party that’s flanking the big boss
Blast

so you can pound it to death with full attacks while it’s down. Just make sure you have clear
lanes to have the rocks hit the target without mashing your party.
● Tsunami: No SR army smashing tidal wave! It’s a maneuver, even if a maneuver with a +8, and
it has the same problems with how hard late-game creature CMD scales all the wizard maneuver
spells have, so you’ll probably have trouble hitting anything level-appropriate with this. It’s
good for flexing on armies of nobodies, though, or if you UMD a scroll of this much lower-level
and use it as an “I win” button against a powerful (for the level) enemy.

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 ● Elemental Swarm: You need to cast this at least twenty minutes before you expect to fight,
because large elementals aren’t too potent at this level, but you might cast this a couple of times
to assemble a horde of disposable punching bags without needing to spend actions summoning
mid-fight. This is a (summoning) spell with 10 min/level duration, so this is an SL 9 spell that
provides half a dozen targets for Alter Summoned Monster if you just have a wand and make a
small army of storm giants. Even some pixies to Irresistible Dance spam can 100% shut down
anything that lacks SR, but few things lack SR at this level.
● Summon Nature’s Ally IX: The list of options to summon is getting short now. Pixies with
irresistible dance are… not exactly impressive, I can see someone casting SNA IX for a pixie and
getting laughed off the battlefield, but if the enemy has no SR, this spell trades a summon’s action
for the target’s round and throw a debuff even if they save, which against the few creatures still
Summons

without SR at this level (maybe a high-level class level humanoid), is definitely worth it if you
can summon them before battle (like with Elemental Swarm and Alter Summoned Monster) to
avoid spending your own actions. Storm giants have useful SLAs with gravitas as well. Constant
Freedom of Movement and electric immunity means you can blast many of your control spells
over them without them caring, and a +27 default attack bonus (more if you’ve invested at all in
summoning augmentation) is solid enough to hit all by the beyond-CR 20 monsters reliably,
which if the wizard includes them in the Haste, may result in some surprising damage. If you
have Summon Plant Ally or are a follower of the Eldest then alraune, ankou and hamadryads all
come with other useful magics, and some archetypes like goliath druid with alternate summons
can make use of summoning diplodocus. With the ring of natural attunement, Toshigami can
also self-haste attack and has some crazy defenses and SLAs like Time Stop! Or just get a mass
spam SNA VIII’s elder elementals or SNA VII’s tyrannosaurs until there’s no floor space on the
battlefield.
● Entice Fey, Greater: If you’re willing to pay then you can get all kinds of strange magics by
dealing with fey. It’s end-game, and you’re not going to carry your money to the next game, so
you might as well splurge when you’re getting to the final showdown on some flashy backup.

● Temporal Regression: Create a restore point! This is a tricky spell to use, and the standard
action to activate it with a standard action cast on a rounds/level is difficult to navigate. You
Utility

really want to cast this right before starting a fight, not in the middle of one. Consider a greater
extend rod if you plan to use it often. You reset durations on all your other buffs, so cast this just
after spamming all your best rounds/level buffs before kicking down the door for a tough fight
to extend their durations. You might need to UMD a scroll of Dimension Door or use Companion
Transposition to get back to the fight if you moved too far from your buff point.

● Winds of Vengeance: The gold-plated flight and wind control spell rolled into one. Perfect flight,
Protectio

immunity to ranged weapons and the ability to knock prone enemies who attack you in melee
by hitting them back with your immediate action is a reasonable package of buffs. No SR is
n

listed on this ability to knock enemies back, either. You can probably get by with a lower-level
spell and save the SL 9 slots for fight-winning spells in situations you aren’t using all the
features, however.

● Foresight: Never being surprised and always being able to use immediate actions, even before
Inform

your first action, can be a literal lifesaver once the rocket tag nukes are brought out. Druids
ation

have less immediately fight-winning SL 9 superspells than other classes that get this spell, so it’s
a pretty solid choice. As casting it as a personal/”target: you” spell is an option, you can make
your animal companion a precog without you needing to warn them, too.

71