The Bulette is a pretty good damage dealer, that much is true, and is probably a fairly strong CR7 monster to melee. (It's quad-claws only do 15 average per hit, though, if you turn them into primaries, or 11 if you keep them as secondaries, as in the monster entry.) (AND it still only has a +6 Will save, which means it will likely as not succumb to a well placed Charm monster
, which just means... lucky sorcs.).
But the kicker is the total package: Your Giant Croc AC grapples (it is at least tied for grapples because you gave it Improved Grapple, hopefully) the bulette while you slowly bludgeon or claw it to death. You can also summon another, of course. Incidentally, Level 7 is a bad breakpoint for melee for a druid, and a lull in Druid power in general: Your best form at level 7 is a Leopard, Deinonychus or a Black bear, none of which are particularly impressive (the dino probably winning by a thin margin). One level more and you would get a TON of strong WS forms, Dire Lions, Dire Ape, etc. The AC of course gets better. Core spells at 4th level are rather lacklustre, with only a few workable staples.
Now, going with the Lance charge theme: Your feats could be:
Mounted Combat(1), Ride by attack(h), and Spirited Charge(3), Natural Spell or whatever(6).
If you're a Dwarf obviously spirited charge will have to wait until 6. (But a dwarf makes some sense, here, because either your Wis or your Str will suck, otherwise, and you're obviously not going for WS, so you DO need those physical stats.)
You'll ride the fastest AC you can find (Light Warhorse, probably), which might get some decent AC due to barding and levels. You can't power-attack on the charge, so you'll be doing 3x 1d8 +6 +1 enh. or so (36 damage on average), with a generous assumption of 16s in Str, Con and Wis, and a +2 Str item. (A Dorf might do it.)
If you're lucky your mount is fast enough to always stay over 40ft out of reach, which you might manage. The Bulette can't do it's quad claw on a charge, nor is a charge particularly dangerous - it will do damage, obviously, which you may or may not be able to negate using either the "Cover" action of the Ride skill, or the negate hitting action of the Mounted Combat feat. However, each round the bulette charges, you can't charge it back, unless you have a mount speed of 60ft (Light Warhorse). So, you will probably need at least 5-6 rounds to kill the bulette, 3 in the most optimum case.
It could play out like this:
Surprise: Bulette surprises you by attacking from below (hopefully not with Leap). You hopefully negate the hit via cover or mounted combat.
1st: If the Bulette wins init you and your mount are in for a beating. You take cover and negate one hit on the mount. Likely as not your or your mount will take two to three hits, then. If you survive, you run away around 100 ft then stop. Hopefully your mount can tumble
. If Bulette didn't win init it can close 80ft. Let's say it won't burrow.
2nd: Bulette won init: closes 80ft. You won init: You ride-by charge, passing it by 100 feet. You have 50% chance to hit (+12 on a charge), so you do weighted 20 damage.
3rd: Rinse repeat until the bulette is either tired of this crap, or you kill it. If you hit every time, you can do it in 3 rounds, as said above.
Now let me introduce the OTHER character class who can do this, in about the same amount of time: It's called a Paladin, and hopefully he took a LIGHT Warhorse mount. Or the Fighter, but his mount will be a lot more fragile.
I do agree, 7 is a pretty bad place to be for a Druid in Core only.
However, outside of mounted combat, how do the aforementioned builds (Ranger/Fighter, or Ranger/Rogue) fare soloing the Bulette? The only builds I see surviving are those that actually just sneak by, and are never even attacked, because a lot of mundane builds will never survive a quad-claw raping.
