Players be like
Insect swarm creates a magical effect, it doesn’t summon literal bugs. And before you call me a buzz kill, it’s kind of lame to try and essentially skip the encounter I spent time building.
Can you even cast animal shapes on so many bugs at once?
Then after viewing your link I have two things.
First, I guess you’ll have to downsize a bit. Elephants are classed as being to big for the spell to work, so you’ll have to go with something like horses.
Second: is the range/area of 30 feet in reference to how close they have to be to you, as well as the aoe?
Rules as written, it affects an unlimited number of willing creatures within a 30 foot AoE of you.
But it has a duration of 24 hours, and you can continually retrigger it as many times as you want during that time by expending a standard action. I could see an argument being made to ready an action to transform the bugs when they come into range as they dive bomb the opponent, but even if that works, the caster is going to be awfully close to ground zero.
except that elephants are size Huge, and you can only make Large creatures with Animal Shapes.
:)
They’re probably all much closer together than an elephant length right? So them all turning into elephants would cause the size of the swarm to instantly and violently expand, possibly ejecting some of the outer ones at great speed and endangering everyone within a considerable distance.
