Best Baldur’s Gate 3 Druid Circle of the Moon Build

Contents

What is the Circle of the Moon Build?

Druid Circle of the Moon Build

There’s a lot that goes into the Best Baldur’s Gate 3 Druid Circle of the Moon Build. This article will cover everything you need to know to replicate this build yourself, including skills, race, etc.

What is the Circle of the Moon Build?

The Circle of the Moon is a Baldur’s Gate 3 Druid Build focused on Wild Shape. This differentiates them from their Circle of the Land counterpart since they can trigger this as a Bonus Action. This build also gives you Lunar Mend, which allows you to spend a spell slot to recover HP.

The build has a lot of powerful Spells and thanks to Wild Shape, can transform into different creatures. These include:

Badger
Spider
Dire Wolf
Cat
Polar Bear
Deep Rothe
Dire Raven
Aberrant Shape Intellect Devourer

Each creature has its own Hit Points, Abilities, Attacks, and special Features. For example, the Badger can burrow underground and the Raven can fly great distances. Each creature also has a separate health pool independent of the main pool. When this depletes, you change back into human form with the same health you had before using Wild Shape. Due to how powerful it can be, Circle of the Moon Druids can only use Wild Shape 2 times even at Level 5 before needing a Short Rest.

Druid Circle of the Moon Build

Background

Druids need Wisdom Skills to hit targets with their Spells. As such, you should pick a Background that provides you with these skills. These backgrounds include:

Folk Hero: Provides Animal Handling and Survival skills
Acolyte: Provides Insight and Religion skills
Outlander: Provides Athletics and Survival skills

Race

While using Wild Shape, your Strength, Dexterity, and Constitution modifiers are replaced by the stats of whatever animal you shift into. You retain your Intelligence, Wisdom, and Charisma Modifiers.

But since you can’t cast Spells while shifted, you need Dexterity and Constitution to increase your survivability in human form. As such, the best races for Druids are those with high Constitution and Dexterity. Due to being spell-based Strength is not important for Druids.

The most recommended races for Druids are:

Gold Dwarf

Gold Dwarf is the first, most recommended race for Circle of the Moon Druid. This race features traits like Dwarven Resilience, Darkvision, and Dwarven Toughness.

Dwarven Resilience gives you a Saving Throw Advantage against Poison and resistance to Poison Damage. As a result, you only receive half the damage. Darkvision helps you see and attack more accurately in the dark. While Dwarven Toughness raises your maximum health by an additional 1 HP every time you level up.

Wood Elf

If you don’t want to be a Gold Dwarf, you can choose Wood Elf are your Druid race. This race features the traits Darkvision and Fey Ancestry.

Fey Ancestry gives you a Saving Throw Advantage against Charmed and Sleep effects. While Darkvision helps you see and attack better in the dark. Both of these increase your durability.

Skills

Since you need high Dexterity and Wisdom for this Druid Build, you need to choose skills that fall under these Abilities. These include skills like Acrobatics, Sleight of Hand, Stealth, Animal Handling, Insight, Medicine, Perception, and Survival.

Abilities

Your primary Ability as a Druid is Wisdom. This makes your Spells more effective in combat. And if you use the Shillelagh Cantrip, can even increase your melee combat damage. As such, you want to assign at least 16 points to Wisdom when starting out and increase it to 18 later in the game.

Next you need to focus on Constitution and Dexterity. These aren’t as important when you’ve shifted, but they are necessary for using spells. Get both of them to at least 14 points each.

Cantrips

There are two main Cantrips you need to prioritize as a Druid at Level 1. Let’s discuss these below:

Thorn Whip

Thorn Whip is a transmutation Cantrip that both pulls enemies 3m towards you and deals damage. It has a range of 9m, but can’t pull huge targets.

This Cantrip is particularly great for fights that include elevation. You can remove your target’s advantage by pulling targets down from below. The resulting fall can deal significant damage or even kill the target.

Shillelagh

This transmutation Cantrip transforms your club or quarterstaff into a magic weapon. As long as the transformation lasts, the weapon deals 1d8+2 Bludgeoning damage and uses your Spellcasting Ability for Attack Rolls.

This Cantrip doesn’t require Concentration, so you can have Shillelagh active constantly. It’s great for melee combat as a Druid.

Spells

Below are the recommended Druid spells for each level:

Level 1: Entangle, Thunderwave, Fairie Fire, Healing Word

Level 2: Goodberry

Level 3: Moonbeam, Heat Metal, Spike Growth

Level 4: Flaming Sphere

Level 5: Call Lightning, Sleet Storm

Level 6: Primal Strike

Level 8: War Caster

Level 10: Elemental Wild Shape

Level 12: Resilient

Equipment

As you remains shifted for long periods of time, equipment isn’t that useful to the Circle of the Moon Druid. But there are times you need to engage in melee combat. For this, you’ll need decent Dexterity and a Ranged Weapon of some type. Clubs or Quartstaffs are especially great, as you can buff them with Shillelagh.

Coming to armour, Druids can wear Medium Armor. This is very useful when Wild Shape is inactive. Lae’zel’s Githyanki Half Plate or Scale Mail +1 are two of the best Medium Armors. You need at least 10 Strength to use these. The Absolute’s Talisman works great for Accessories. This allows you to maintain your Wild Shape form and keep fighting without having to stop to heal.

Conclusion

Druid Circle of the Moon Build revolves around using Wild Shape as a Bonus Action. The rest of the build supports this. We hope this guide on Best Baldur’s Gate 3 Druid Circle of the Moon Build helps. As always, happy gaming!