Pathfinder 2E Storm Druid: Animal Companion or No?

[HappyHubris]

I'll be playing my first full campaign soon and I have decided to go with a little Kobold Storm Druid. Our tentative party is Obedience Champion, Thief Rogue, Cloistered Cleric, TBD Bard, and my Storm Druid. Looking at the lineup my guess is that I would want to focus on damage and crowd control. We will likely be doing a 1-10 or 1-12 AP. We are allowed free archetype only for flavor/light supplemental choices, not class archetypes or the heavy hitters, and I'm leaning towards Herbalist for thematic reasons. I am limiting myself to content in Player Cores 1 & 2, as I like having paper references in front of me.

Perusing the Druid feats, I am considering three main options:

• Sprint for a larger focus pool with order explorer and the order spells. This would give me a nice roster of free nukes each fight, but would involve juggling a number of features and being shallow instead of deep.
• Grab animal companion and bulk it up with the many available feats. This is likely the most powerful path, but it would be all of my eggs in one basket.
• Focus on thematically building out my Storm order with incremental upgrades. Probably less impactful but more cohesive, with room to grab a bunch of random feats.

What do you think? Or is Druid not the best fit for this group and I should look at a more traditional caster like Wizard (Witch is off the table for another campaign)?

 

[The-Magic-Sword]

I think it works well, the main piece of advice I can give you is to maximize your total number of focus points if possible as fast as possible because your lightning focus spell is so good but I'm not sure if that's the kind of thinking you were discouraged from. The only anti-synergy is that you and the cleric both cover wisdom, but two characters on one ability score isn't crazy either so I'd say it's fine. The Animal companion is fine but probably not quite as strong as you're expecting (still good though! and it's a flank buddy for your Rogue and such.)

Though, if the campaign continues at high level, Beastmaster could net you a Gryphon, and a storm druid on a Gryphon is a great vibe.

So I would personally go with something to get you focus points (like Blessed One), then take Beast Master just in time to get the higher level companions and do both that way.

 

[HappyHubris]

I'd like to stay narrative-driven, so I would probably use levels 2 and 4 on order explorer and a focus spell instead of trying to make my character blessed by a god. And then get another focus spell at 6 I believe for my storming.

Interestingly our cleric has since mused about going with another class with a bit of healing like kineticist, so we're less likely to double up on wisdom. And I'm more likely to go medic for the free archetype.