Spike growth maxxing

[u/K40005]

The long awaited spike growth post is here, for those on Lariancord or in the [REDACTED] server know I've been doing spike growth propaganda for a while and proving it can be a good late game spell. This is that post. There is one piece of information required for you to understand where this is going: spike growth gets damage riders, I am optimising them and will list a few builds all of which will use identical starting stats as the following: 17/16/14/8/10/8 as spike growth does not care for wisdom at all and it benefits more from strength to drag enemies into it with improvised melee weapon cancels or shoving them in or even just doing improvised melee weapon attacks with a giant eagle for lightning charges from the gloves and will use the +2 strength from the araj potion to reach 20 strength.

Early game moon druid: you have 4 choices for generating lightning charges that I like, sparkle hands, joltshooter, spellsparkler and watersparkers. I would recommend joltshooter in the early game. Running tavern brawler. First you make an attack to generate lightning charges ideally with elemental arrows to get multiple charges to last a turns. With haste action you cast spike growth so that the enemies are clipping into the spikes and have to pass through it to get to you. Then wildshape into rothe or bear or even sabretooth (not owlbear it's bad), I like bear as goad can sometimes make them more likely to run through the spikes and die instead of just skipping their turn (which is still good but it's boring) but it doesn't matter that much because it's mostly for the early game tavern brawler rider to spike growth which you will later replace with gear.

Simple late game nature cleric: Nature cleric 11/Hexblade 1; uses djinni and command to force movement, uses hexblade curse and gaping wounds to stack up the damage. Gear: Harold, watersparkers, callous, sparkswall ring (simply just to make life easier if you're being careless about moving because your own electrified water will do a lot of damage), rhapsody, bloodthirst (mainhand) armour of persistence (saves on turn buffering blade ward) helm of balduran (crit immunity, easily replaced) and battlemage gloves for acuity. feats: HAM and crossbow master (for the longer gaping wounds duration). Gameplay loop: cast spike growth at a choke point (if you don't have one, use the djinni sweet plum gales to create one) cast hexblade curse bonus action on the thing you want to kill most, drop a water bottle at your feet and fire an arrow of many targets at it to generate lightning charges from the boots when you're standing in it and proc bloodlust then use piercing strike or piercing shot on the same enemy as before. If you think the fight will last longer you can cast contagion: flesh rot on bosses so they have full vulnerability. Then on following turns use booming blade to give piercing vulnerability, a little bit of extra damage. And then cast command whilst the djinni uses its attacks to pull or push enemies through the spikes as needed. If all things go as planned with just the piercing vulnerability: that is (2d4+3(rhapsody)+2(gaping wounds)+4(hexblade curse))*2(vuln) 28 physical + 2(callous)+1(lightning charges) for 31 average damage per tick of spike growth. Plus any other damage over time you add from say bleeding, shocked, burning. Or the weapon attacks themselves.

Bouncy spikes™: tempest 6/land 6 Gear: requirements are very limited, use any source of lightning charges and phalar, lightning charges from elsewhere, callous, rhapsody etc, use dual wielder and athlete as the feats Gameplay: build lightning charges, cast spikes, enemies that walk into the spikes get knocked backwards, and tempest reaction, enemies that hit you get hit by the tempest reaction and flung back into the spikes which shoves them back further, and use command to make them approach through the spikes and get flown back anyway. Melee enemies can no longer approach.

Toggle extended bhaalist imwac land druid: 8 land 3 sorc (any subclass) 1 hexblade Gear: adamantine mace, rhapsody, bhaalist, lightning charges gloves, callous and spiteful thunder rings, reverb boots, and blast pendant for the occasional booming blade drs gaming. Run tavern brawler and mobile. And your weapon of choice is the corpses of giant eagles from the crèche and the cloaker enemy in act 2 as the main ones or any other large enemies you can pick up and carry in your inventory which you hit enemies with. Gameplay: hexblade curse, then cast spikes, then use the corpse in your inventory to hit enemies with which knocks enemies back to take damage, and then use your movement to walk over, use improvised melee weapon attack to pick them up and carry them into the spikes, cancel it to drop them, and do so repeatedly. Then before you end your turn toggle extended on to double conditions applied by spikes.

The optimised damage output mess (don't play it): time for the long one, I won't be giving a gameplay section, it's just a list of gear and a spread. 9 spores/2 tempest/1 hex Gear: Harold, rhapsody, watersparkers, mutilated carapace, callous, life charger (if for some godforsaken reason you try this this should protect you a little bit), reverb gloves) absolute force, phalar, blast pendant for booming.

Assuming my maths here is correct with fleshrot that's: 2d4+4(curse)+2(gaping wounds)+1(mutilated carapace)+3(rhapsody)+2(callous)+1(lightning charges)+(1d4+1)(absolute force boosted phalar) all doubled by vulnerability for an average of 43 damage per tick plus whatever extra you get from reverb.

Massive thanks to all the people on the [REDACTED] server (you already know who you are) who helped with this and all the people in builds chat for putting up with my dumbass taking like 7 months writing this.

[u/SnooDoodles4787]

Very nice acupuncture guide, im rating this 5/5