Why You Should Play Wildfire Druid

Author: Lilith

The Circle of Wildfire Druid, released in Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything, lost a lot of its hype in the public eye when fireball was removed from its list of Circle Spells, a spell which was included in its Unearthed Arcana (playtest material) version. 

However, the subclass still features a solid kit with its amazing centerpiece right at level 2—Summon Wildfire Spirit. This feature sparks its massive potential for tactical play. The Circle of Wildfire Druid can function as a single-classed build that shines from start to end, or it can be a tempting 2 level dip that is highly synergistic with certain other class features. 

The subclass features a helpful list of Circle Spells. Druids with circle spells always have those spells prepared, which means having standout choices like revivify and plant growth always at your disposal. You would already be choosing to prepare these spells anyway, so because of this you get extra preparation slots. 

Among the non-Druid spells on your list, burning hands can clear out swarm encounters at early levels, but unfortunately flame strike is an ineffective blast option.

The main intrigue for Circle of Wildfire Druid is its signature ability: Summon Wildfire Spirit. This feature, which you acquire right at level 2, is immensely versatile and stays relevant throughout your entire career.

You can summon the spirit as an action with one use of your Wild Shape. When it is summoned, creatures other than you within 10 feet of it need to make a Dexterity saving throw or take 2d6 fire damage. On that same turn and subsequent ones, you can command it to use different actions with your bonus action.

Despite sitting at a low 13 AC with no saving throw proficiencies, this Wildfire Spirit is deceptively sturdy. Flight and immunity to common conditions ensure that it can often stay out of harm’s way, with the exception of ranged attacks. Fire immunity also provides insurance against a large portion of damaging areas of effect. Lastly, if there is any obstruction in its path, it can easily teleport out of danger.

For more survivability, it especially benefits from typical sources of temporary hit points present in optimized parties, such as Inspiring Leader (feat), Twilight Sanctuary (Twilight Domain Cleric), Bear Spirit Totem (Circle of the Shepherd Druid), or Protector Cannon (Artillerist Artificer).

The spirit has a generous duration of one hour. You can summon it up to two times every rest, which means you can reasonably have it online whenever it’s needed, even during exploration. Even if the spirit is targeted with ranged attacks and killed, it still contributed as a damage sponge, keeping damage from being directed at your party for the cost of a readily reusable resource.

The Wildfire Spirit has two listed actions in its game statistics. Flame Seed is a straightforward (if underwhelming) ranged attack, but its second action, Fiery Teleportation, is the star of the show. 

To clarify: the end location of where the spirit and your allies end up must be visible by you. However, you do not need to be able to see the spirit, or your allies, to have it teleport. The ability does not require the spirit to have line of sight on you, the allies it is teleporting, or the location it wants to teleport to. This means you can bring allies from where you can’t see to you, even through obstructions, as long as your targets are within 5 feet of the spirit, you can see the destination, and the teleport distance is no more than 15 feet. The teleport also applies to individual creatures, meaning that you can place each of your targets in a different spot.

It is worth noting that the spirit can take any action when commanded to do so as a bonus action (a convention for pet creatures since Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything), and Ready is a generic action any creature can take, which opens up even more options for how you may use its abilities. You can also use the spirit like a regular familiar—taking the Help and Use an Object interaction to grant allies advantage or set up items like oil, caltrops, ball bearings, or administer potions of healing.

Damage

The most apparent use of the Wildfire Spirit is for its damage, which is also the only usage that is concerned with your Wisdom score. Its numbers on its ranged attack are nothing special, but the area of effect components of both its initial summoning, and Fiery Teleportation make it a pretty good damage dealer.

When you use an action to summon the spirit, it forces a Dexterity save that deals 2d6 fire damage on a failure in a deceptively large area. You can then use your bonus action to deal another 1d6 + your proficiency bonus fire damage in a smaller radius.

Just from the initial summoning turn, your contribution is comparable to a casting of thunderwave at flexible range, using a renewable resource. You can easily clear out a large portion of early swarm encounters like ice mephits or twig blights this way, though this tactic will quickly become obsolete in later levels.

Clearing Obstacles

Your party can always make use of better positioning or simply more movement. You are here to boost them forward or bail them out.

Use Fiery Teleportation to split your group multiple ways—over obstacles, to higher ground, across harmful effects, past enemies, or out of a cramped corridor. If you don’t need to be teleported by the Wildfire Spirit right away, you can even catch an extra ally during their turn if you have the spirit use its action to Ready its Fiery Teleportation.

Sometimes, you can anticipate a wave of area of effect spells or abilities coming, such as from a squad of flameskulls. Correcting your party’s positioning can save 1-2 members from suffering the full brunt of the barrage.

Recall, Passwall

Fetch someone stuck on the other side of an obstruction, be it an inopportune party split, falling rubble, a wall of force spell, or just a prison cell. You only need the Wildfire Spirit to get within 5 feet of the target, which it can often do with its own teleportation, Small size, and flight.

You can even go one step further, using the new Wild Shape option from Tasha’s optional features—Wild Companion—to summon a familiar.

Since this action is not affected by spell targeting rule, you can resummon the familiar behind any obstruction. Jeremy Crawford explained this interaction with a surprising level of clarity in this interview.

Now that you can see the other side, the Wildfire Spirit can teleport across, bringing you and your allies with it if needed. Of course, this maneuver expends both of your Wild Shape uses, so spend them wisely.

Flexible Mobility

A fairly straightforward usage is to allow your allies to access more spaces with their turn. By having the spirit Ready its teleport, you can even interact with airborne movements. This also works as a readily available booster for the Simic Hybrid’s Manta Glide.

Let’s look at a scenario. 

The party’s Paladin got separated from the party! Misty step is not enough for a reunion, but with a readied Fiery Teleportation to catch him at the end of his spell, it will be just enough!

Evasion

For the vast majority of monsters in 5E, if it cannot reach you, it will be drastically less threatening. The Wildfire Spirit opens many opportunities to exploit this weakness.

A simple usage is to Ready an action to teleport your target away just as the monster approaches it. If you cause a party member to be just within a monster’s reach and then move them away, it might not have enough movement to reach someone else and would thus be forced to Dash instead. 

This gets especially effective when you also utilize movement restricting effects, such as difficult terrain and the spell spirit guardians. For instance, since spirit guardian’s effect of halving speed is applied retroactively, you can even move the area effect onto a monster when it has spent half its movement. This strategy stops the monster dead in its tracks.

Legendary Actions in 5E often allow the monster to either move, or attack, but not both. Moving an ally just slightly away once the legendary creature approaches them can be enough to reduce its offensive output greatly.

As you might have noticed, all the techniques above are available with just a 2-level investment. If you dip into other classes, the spirit’s durability suffers, but its uptime and tactical potential remain just as inspiring. Let’s look at some ideas on how you can utilize the Circle of Wildfire when multiclassing.

Due to their weaker selection of 4th level spells and the reliability of spirit guardians, Clerics tend to have smaller multiclassing opportunity costs once they’ve reached 5th or 6th level, and can afford to dip the 2 levels in the Circle of Wildfire Druid. Clerics also benefit from gaining access to thorn whip to combine with spirit guardians for extra damage potential, absorb elements for enhanced defense, and goodberry to bank with leftover spell slots.

Notably, the Twilight domain can share its temporary hit points with the Wildfire Spirit to make up for its reduced hit points from having fewer Druid levels. Alternatively, a level dip in Life Domain Cleric nets you the powerful “Lifeberry”¹ combination, while improving your occasional healing word as a minor bonus.

_{^1. The term Lifeberry is a blend of Life Domain Cleric and goodberry, the spell. It means to combine this Cleric Domain and spell to create a very efficient healing source: the lifeberry. Disciple of Life, a feature Life Domain Clerics get right at level one allows you add an additional 2 + the level of the spell of healing on healing spells you use. This means that every one of your goodberries benefits from the bonus from the feature. This interaction has been clarified as Rules as Written in the Sage Advice Compendium.}

Alternatively, you can abandon the focus on Wisdom score altogether. This is doable as the premium Druid spells don’t rely on spell DC at all—goodberry, pass without trace, spike growth, conjure animals, plant growth, and polymorph (on an ally) to name a few.

Two levels in Warlock nets you the Agonizing Blast and Repelling Blast package, while you can still rely on Druid staples like conjure animals without a high Wisdom. Repelling Blast can be used from flexible angles using Enhanced Bond, a feature we will get into next. The Hexblade is particularly interesting as Hexblade’s Curse applies to each instance of spike growth damage, and it nets you the shield spell to greatly improve your defenses. Another decent alternative is the Undead Warlock, which we’ve written about here.

Post-publication on this article, we took our own advice and created the Witchfire build, which you can find here.

The important part about this feature is the ability to cast spells from the spirit’s space. Do note that while it lets you get around cover for your spells, you still need to abide by line of sight requirements, unlike what the Order of Scribes Wizard’s Manifest Mind ability can do. For the Circle of Wildfire Druid, this mostly acts as extended range for your spells, but it also opens options like casting thorn whip from the air to drop an enemy prone, or casting revivify on someone from far away. 

The bonus damage and healing are nothing to build around, but they are nice regardless. You get a bit more value out of wall of fire, where the damage increase applies to all targets on their initial casting.

One interaction that leads to a good amount of damage is by using this feature with magic missile. Rules as Written you roll damage once for this spell, and thus would add the damage from Enhanced Bond to every missile. This type of interaction is the precedent of the “Hexvoker”² concept.

_{^2. Hexvoker refers to the combination of the Hexblade Warlock’s Hexblade’s Curse and the School of Evocation Wizard’s Empower Evocation features when casting magic missile. The damage bonus from both features is multiplied by the number of missiles from the spell for a fairly efficient burst of single target damage.}

However, this requires you to turn magic missile’s damage type to fire, which is currently only available through the Order of Scribes Wizard’s 2nd level feature: Awakened Spellbook. Which is, unfortunately, rather costly to build around. 

The Circle of Wildfire Druid finishes off not with a bang, but with just some niceties. You get some extra healing or damage, and a revival ability akin to Celestial Warlock’s Searing Vengeance. These are handy, straightforward bonuses that keep you engaged during combat. While not necessarily game-changing, they do improve your character while your Wildfire Spirit continues to shine as you and your party learn new tricks to play with it.

The Circle of Wildfire has the potential to be incredibly flashy and versatile in play, without sacrificing any of the core strengths of the Druid chassis. While you are not usurping the Circle of Shepherd as king of reliability, you make up for it with a whole bag of tricks with your teleportation ability. Each of the Wildfire techniques can fit into a party composition in its own way, keeping your gameplay from ever being monotone. 

If you are looking for a new character to play, try the Circle of Wildfire; If you are thinking of dipping into Druid, this is your number 1 contender!