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Renduaz
2017-05-17, 09:43 AM
Continuing from my last thread ( http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?519713-The-God-of-Cantrips-Most-overpowered-uses-you-can-think-of&p=21858805#post21858805 ), it is time to let out your inner munchkin. It is time to transform what those naive thinkers at Wizards of the Coast imagined to be an harmless curiosity, into the power of a deity. This is the place to post the most powerful combinations and applications of cantrips you can think of.

Bubble Trouble: Cast Shape Water into a 5x5 feet sphere or smaller as needed for 1 hour, change it's opacity to completely opaque, and the next time you see an enemy, encapsulate his head with it. Good luck to him without water breathing or trying to suck in all the water ( Which you will animate right out of his lips ), and if he tries splashing the bubble away with his hands or anything else, just animate the water right back into the sphere before they even leave. Did I mention you could put a swarm of quippers in your water bubble?

Water Wheels: Just how much velocity can you move water with using Shape Water anyway? The only thing we know is that it can't be powerful enough to cause damage, so near light speed must be out of the question. But then it remains to be answered, "Damage to what and whom"? Surely not a bug, nor adamantine. Most reasonably the average human or a monster of CR 1/8 at least then. Now, a even a fire hose jettison won't be enough to cause damage by itself, but even at much lower speeds, this will still work - Take four wheels designed like those of a water mill, no more than 5 feet in diameter, and attach them to a cart or sled which is just enough for you to sit on. Pour a lot of water next to the wheels. Use Shape Water to propel the wheels forward. Alternatively, turn the water near the two front wheels into small spheres which fit in the folds of you water wheel and animate them to propel those.

Daern's Instant Trench: Use Mold Earth to dig up a hole for you to take up to 3/4 cover in when fighting in open terrain on loose soil or earth, which is most grasslands or forests.

Daern's Instant Trap: Take out a 5x5 cube of earth and fill the hole with spikes or anything else you can think of. Bear traps are especially useful. Continue doing this in a line in front of you or circle around you. Cover the holes back with the loose earth. Have someone else lure a melee enemy or do so yourself from a distance while readying an action. When he's about to step into the 5x5 feet area of your covered trap, immediately snatch the loose earth from under his feet. An even better alternatively is to cast this as deep as possible, more than 5 feet, until you reach packed or hard earth, over a large zone, cover your pit with leaves or branches, then use mold Earth again to sprinkle some of the loose earth over them, enough to hide the trapped area, and now you could possibly even kill an entire unaware army depending on how deep and what kind of traps of mechanisms you had installed in the pit area.

Firestarter: Even Control Flame's most basic function will let you completely burn any wooden or otherwise flameable structure in up to 60 feet square foot by expanding 5 feet at the time with a range of 60 feet. Pretty good. You could cast Grease or carry small barrels of tar or oil to create a 60 feet expanse of burning terrain anywhere, particularly dungeons.

Light Distraction: With Dancing Light's ability to appear as torches or lanterns or even combine into a vaguely humanoid form of medium size, in dark environments this is basically akin to a distraction with Minor Illusion, except that this has a range of up to 120 feet. You can move them around, or wink them out of existence only to manifest them 120 feet in another direction.

Garangutan Druidcraft: Are there giant leaves or flowers in your campaign? You can now presumably carry their miniature buds on you and erupt them to their full magnificence whenever they are needed.

Arcane Chef: As much as WOTC attempted to prevent most of their spells from potentially allowing a magic user to break a campaign's economy or accumulate stacks of gold effortlessly ( There are actually a few ways to do this, but this one is notable for being just the most basic cantrip ), I think they've missed the financial implications of Prestidigitation's "flavor up to 1 cubic foot of nonliving material for up to 1 hour ( And it's not as if you couldn't just instantly recast it before 1 hour has even passed or immediately after )", with seemingly no boundary on the flavor you can create. With this you could take the cheapest wine or ale, change it's flavor to that of the most expensive wine or ale in the world, and sell cups of it in some mini-bar or stall to pretty much everyone who can't afford the latter, for a much reduced price, yet higher than what you paid for the cheap wine or ale. You could do what everyone in our own society would become a billionaire if he successfully managed to through science - replicate the perfect taste of sweets, sugar or other unhealthy foods in an healthy food. It doesn't even have to be illegitimate, you can straight up inform buyers that you're selling Prestidigitation-altered ordinary wine which will still taste perfectly like the finest vintages or healthy foods which taste perfectly like the most lavish desserts or sweets. Still going to be highly enjoyable within the hour when it will long pass down to their stomach. You might lose a bit of the prestige value on things like beer, wine and other drinks, but various peasants and workers or even the higher class will still be willing to pay extra ( Yet nowhere near the full price ) for what is essentially the same taste, , much as it happens in our world with either clothes or foods and so forth. And when it comes to replicating the taste of unhealthy foods in healthy ones, it won't matter. Not to mention turning every meal into the most delicious ever.

Food Poisoning: This one can actually kill creatures without even using poison, or creatures who have immunity to poison. Using Prestidigitation, take any non-consumable liquid or chemical which looks like water or a brew or that giant's ale, change it's flavor to that, and someone is going to gulp down a whole battle of toxic material, use in combination with Shape Water to even give it the same color if need be, plant where you want or replace the creature's drink, and watch as it gulps down a whole ****ing jug of pure poison or Mercury ( If brew/sauce/something has similar texture ) or God knows what without ever noticing it. Until he's dead, that is.

Profitable Blossoming: To a minor extent, "You instantly make a flower boom", and to a much greater extent, "You instantly make a leaf bud blossom" can be used to make gold with edible leaves such as cabbage or more expensively, difficult to grow cooking herbs by obtaining/purchasing the seeds and foregoing what would normally be the cost of watering, fertilizing and especially the massive amount of time needed, not to mention the risk factor of a poor season or drought, by simply blossoming all of their leaves instantly as soon as you have the buds. Can also lend your service to any farmers you pass by, "Hey sir, how about I make your entire cabbage field/herb garden all blossom instantly instead of you toiling for a few months and risking poor crops which didn't grow or bad weather and fertilization, for a small price?". With the expensive, exotic spicing herbs or flowers like Lotus, Anise and so forth which would normally be a huge pain in the ass to grow properly under the right climate, you could make a lot of gold by just blossoming their buds instantly. Not to mention also blooming various flowers used for perfumes, medicinal herbs, and so forth.

ATHATH
2017-05-17, 09:59 AM
Shape Water can effectively be used as Minor Creation, but only with ice (and it's temporary, and you can only have 2 objects at a time):
1. Shape the water into the desired shape (a ladder or a sword, for example).
2. Freeze the water using the freeze function of Shape Water.
3. Stop concentrating on the water's shape, because it's solid now.
4. Profit!

Renduaz
2017-05-17, 10:05 AM
Shape Water can effectively be used as Minor Creation, but only with ice (and it's temporary, and you can only have 2 objects at a time):
1. Shape the water into the desired shape (a ladder or a sword, for example).
2. Freeze the water using the freeze function of Shape Water.
3. Stop concentrating on the water's shape, because it's solid now.
4. Profit!

Yes, someone else also mentioned that in the previous thread, however a lot of those might not work, since your ice can still break. An ice sword will likely shatter at first impact. A ladder will possibly break under the weight. And ice constructs which are outside of freezing temperatures will also begin melting very quickly depending on how someone reads the spell description. While the duration of the spell freezes it instantly and wears off after one hour, it is possibly not immune to natural heat or fire. It will definitely not be immune to shattering.

ATHATH
2017-05-17, 10:29 AM
Can you use Shape Water to create an ice slick?

Renduaz
2017-05-17, 10:42 AM
Can you use Shape Water to create an ice slick?

It's possibly going to wear our or melt from the friction rather quickly, I think.

Hrdven
2017-05-17, 02:57 PM
Bubble Trouble: Cast Shape Water into a 5x5 feet sphere or smaller as needed for 1 hour, change it's opacity to completely opaque, and the next time you see an enemy, encapsulate his head with it. Good luck to him without water breathing or trying to suck in all the water ( Which you will animate right out of his lips ), and if he tries splashing the bubble away with his hands or anything else, just animate the water right back into the sphere before they even leave. Did I mention you could put a swarm of quippers in your water bubble?

Water Wheels: Just how much velocity can you move water with using Shape Water anyway? I think you can only move the water up to 5 feet in any direction. So in the first case, the target will just move away from the bubble and attack you (and you used your action to cast the cantrip)

I wonder if there is some nice combination of shape water with any electricity spell or cantrip, to help conduct the water?

Renduaz
2017-05-17, 03:51 PM
I think you can only move the water up to 5 feet in any direction. So in the first case, the target will just move away from the bubble and attack you (and you used your action to cast the cantrip)

I wonder if there is some nice combination of shape water with any electricity spell or cantrip, to help conduct the water?

No, that's just for the first effect.

" You choose an area of water that you can see within range and that fits within a 5-foot cube. You manipulate it in one of the following ways:

* You instantaneously move or otherwise change the flow of the water as you direct, up to 5 feet in any direction. This movement doesn't have enough force to cause damage.
* You cause the water to form into simple shapes and animate at your direction. This change lasts for 1 hour.
* You change the water's color or opacity. The water must be changed in the same way throughout. This change lasts for 1 hour.
* You freeze the water, provided that there are no creatures in it. The water unfreezes in 1 hour.

If you cast this spell multiple times, you can have no more than two of its non-instantaneous effects active at a time, and you can dismiss such an effect as an action. "

When you create a simple shape with an area of water that fits into a 5-foot cube, and animate it at your direction, you can move it up to 30 feet which is the spell's range.

And there is an electricity combo with shocking grasp or other stuff, but allowing that kind of physics is under the DM's discretion. He could simply tell you that your target takes the same electricity damage it would with or without the water to conduct it.

Zorku
2017-05-17, 05:14 PM
A 5ft cube of water is rather heavy, so you could presumably set off any pressure plates as you walk down a hallway... while you hope that 30ft of distance keeps you out of harm's way.

Anybody know how much energy the typical arrow or bolt loses when it travels through 5 feet of water?

Stealthscout
2017-05-17, 10:02 PM
I have more than a few ideas for shape water in my Sig. The danger is that they all rely on dm rulings though.

For instance you can get a perpetual motion machine by animating water into 'falling' in a circle. But some dms would argue it looses momentum eventually and stops. Some of them anyway.

Tanarii
2017-05-17, 11:18 PM
When you create a simple shape with an area of water that fits into a 5-foot cube, and animate it at your direction, you can move it up to 30 feet which is the spell's range.
IMO animate != move around. It pretty clearly means changing shapes and moving around in the space. Waving it's watery tentacles. Dancing like a watery ballerina. Etc.

Jacquerel
2017-05-18, 04:00 AM
The 30 foot range of the spell just means you target water that is 30 feet away from you, not that you can move it 60 feet every turn, surely. It pretty clearly says that you can only move it up to 5 feet in any direction per cast of the spell.

Zorku
2017-05-18, 09:30 AM
The 30 foot range of the spell just means you target water that is 30 feet away from you, not that you can move it 60 feet every turn, surely. It pretty clearly says that you can only move it up to 5 feet in any direction per cast of the spell.
Sure, but if you've got access to any tinkerer types that can build a modestly effective turbine (or more likely, specialized water wheel,) then having some magic apprentice move a thousand gallons (935) from a lower basin up into a higher basin is gonna convert into an awful lot of mechanical work. Even today pumping water against gravity until you wanna let it spin a turbine is some of the most efficient means of storing energy for later use that we've ever come up with.

Go to the wizard academy and grab some freshmen, hand out some gold so they can write this into their spell books, and then set them to work practicing this spell in the tinker's place until they've moved way more water than you could get moved by paying peasants to do this with buckets (and yeah, I get that 1 gold would keep a peasant on bucket duty for quite awhile.) The trainees are gonna suck, so the tinker needs a nice water tight floor in this area, and possibly a slight slope down to a... wait for it... 5ft cube in the floor, where some of the kids that are a little more steady with this can just bring the water right back up.

If you want free energy this is gonna give you more than you can use anywhere except maybe Eberron, but those guys are also more efficient with their machinery, so maybe you just need a few more freshmen at work.


This should even work pretty well in arid climates, if the tinker is willing to build this underground (maybe right off of the local qanat that the tinker probably maintains, and they can have some of the kids making ice for the ventilation system so that they don't even have to haul such stuff around to get it into storage during the Winter.)

Jacquerel
2017-05-18, 09:35 AM
Maybe I should have quoted, I was responding to the OP's assertion that you could move a globe of water on someone's head to perfectly follow someone. You can't, you can only move it 5 feet per cast and almost everyone can move more than 5 feet in the time it takes you to cast the spell.
Your stuff about water wheels is very interesting but also has nothing at all to do with what I was getting at :P

Zorku
2017-05-18, 09:36 AM
Oh sorry, I thought it was a response to the perpetual motion machines people keep bringing up.

Jacquerel
2017-05-18, 09:40 AM
You could definitely make yourself into a very effective generator with this cantrip if you so desired.
It wouldn't be very exciting though, I imagine most wizards would get bored and go and do something else :P

If you have a large base of low skilled mages though, such as in the case of your wizarding interns, this could solve a lot of local mechanical problems and be good for the area's infrastructure. The wizard academy could have working showers and bathrooms... although personally I've always imagined that a wizard's toilet is just a portal to the plane of water.
It's also quite possible that an advanced wizard could create a device that would cast shape water automatically, but there's no actual rules for that.

Coffee_Dragon
2017-05-18, 09:48 AM
What does "perpetual" even mean nowadays.

Zorku
2017-05-18, 12:28 PM
What does "perpetual" even mean nowadays.
I'm disillusioned enough from crackpots that think they can get endless motion from stuff like this:
http://floda31.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/Perpetual-beer.jpg
(Minus the beer, what am I even???)

-that I don't really assign any prestige to the word perpetual. Cheap and clean are lofty enough attributes for energy...
until you get to the point that you've got a permanent gate spell (or did that one have to be a set of 2 permanent gate spells?) that eliminates the need for a bunch of kids practicing cantrips.

Renduaz
2017-05-18, 12:34 PM
The 30 foot range of the spell just means you target water that is 30 feet away from you, not that you can move it 60 feet every turn, surely. It pretty clearly says that you can only move it up to 5 feet in any direction per cast of the spell.

Where did you see a need to move something "60 feet" each turn?


IMO animate != move around. It pretty clearly means changing shapes and moving around in the space. Waving it's watery tentacles. Dancing like a watery ballerina. Etc.

That's possibly I suppose. I wonder, since this isn't a concentration spell, if a mage hand could possibly move around a water sphere kept together by animate water effect ( 1 hour duration ).


Maybe I should have quoted, I was responding to the OP's assertion that you could move a globe of water on someone's head to perfectly follow someone. You can't, you can only move it 5 feet per cast and almost everyone can move more than 5 feet in the time it takes you to cast the spell.
Your stuff about water wheels is very interesting but also has nothing at all to do with what I was getting at :P

The "move 5 feet" is just for the FIRST effect of moving water, not for the "animate water for up to 1 hour" effect. Read the spell description again, carefully. Tanarii might have had a point about the wording though.

Jacquerel
2017-05-19, 04:00 AM
Tanarii does have a point about what animate means :P
If "animating" the water could cause it to move more than 5 feet, then you'd never use the first action to move it in the first place. Clearly as that part was written first it is important, and if a later part seems to make it completely pointless then you're probably reading the spell wrong.

I mentioned 60 feet because that is the maximum range the spell could move water with your interpretation of how it works (from one side of your 30 foot radius to the other) and to emphasise how clearly this is not how the spell is intended to function.

If you want to move the water then you must use the action that allows you to move the water. That action only lets you move it 5 feet.
You cannot move the water using any other part of this spell, because moving it is the function of the first part of the spell.

Zorku
2017-05-22, 02:56 PM
Actions only exist as the discrete measurements of activity that they are within combat. Animating water for an hour is an out-of-combat sort of action, so it might have some overlap of function.

The use of the term "animate" in this edition does seem to exclusively carry the meaning behind animate dead and animate objects in the PHB, then expands just a pinch to refer to an animated rope, where one end moves to a point of your choosing, in the DMG. Based on the MM your 4 primary elementals are merely a large glob of their element that is animated, so it's arguable that you can make this do anything a water elemental could, or 1/8th of a water elemental anyway. Under such an easily abusive interpretation, it could quite easily seat itself on the shoulders of a creature- which isn't that big of a deal in combat, considering how generous the suffocation rules are, but does have some nice utility when the animated water has the suggested content of several quippers. If we wanted to roll with this I'd give the afflicted creature an athletics/acrobatics check to "escape the grapple."

Something that your average DM is much more likely to tolerate, is that animated rope reference. This one has limited movement relative to the ground you're standing on (unless the DM is a bastard and things you have to work you ass off to make mobile spells keep up with any kind of vehicle you could ride in, like all magic has fixed coordinates on the globe/disk/torus/whatever-shape-you-world-is,) and it's got a simple task that it just keeps doing until it's done or the spell ends. Animated objects have a movespeed or 30, so they seem to move at a similar pace to most humanoids, though the animated rope only moves 10 feet per turn, so the actual speed of this water is pretty much left to the DM to decide, but to keep the spell actually useful, I'd be happy with it moving at walking speed. I like the idea of turning this thing into a block of ice (or shaping it into a little buggy first) and riding that while the rest of the party walks down a road, and this seems like the kind of speed that isn't going to break my world (or at least, not any more than pinning somebody under almost 4 tons of ice would.)

For some reason I'm still inclined to think that the intention is more like turning the water into shapes and maybe making it jump back and forth in a small space, but I can't find any textual backing for this interpretation.

Joe the Rat
2017-05-22, 03:08 PM
Get a pile of something really nasty you'd wish upon your worst enemies (plague-ridden rat zombies, green slime, halflings, etc.)
Shape sphere-shaped shell of water around it.
Freeze it.
Load it into a catapult/trebuchet.

Zorku
2017-05-22, 03:52 PM
Get a pile of something really nasty you'd wish upon your worst enemies (plague-ridden rat zombies, green slime, halflings, etc.)
Shape sphere-shaped shell of water around it.
Freeze it.
Load it into a catapult/trebuchet.

You basically want your army to hack up a bunch of troll parts and stuff those into the shape water capsule.

*Yeah yeah, in 5e every lesser troll bit decays if it's not reattached quickly, only the greatest portion regrows, and they don't come back after you kill them proper. If your DM is that kind of a stickler then parley with the trolls and talk them into playing 8 heads in a dufflebag. Still a pretty nasty problem for the defenders if enough of these things crash into the place and manage to bounce under the porch or into haypiles n such. They know well enough when they're regrown, so they can more or less all start running around the streets at the same time.

If you can get your hands on some really nasty stuff, and you don't want to try and occupy the city/fort when you're done, stick a little black mold in your capsule (the oldschool variety, but if you just have mundane black mold I guess that will also deal 2d10*10 gold in property value damage.) Water melts, mold blooms for almost 1000 gallons worth of water. If you aimed well enough that this gets it near a fountain or well then it blooms much larger than that. Sunlight eventually kills off what's exposed, but good luck to anybody trying to clean up the remnant during a siege.

Saeviomage
2017-05-22, 07:31 PM
IMO animate != move around. It pretty clearly means changing shapes and moving around in the space. Waving it's watery tentacles. Dancing like a watery ballerina. Etc.

If it can dance like a watery ballerina, why can't it dance to the next square? If I create a 5' sphere of water, why can't it roll around?

I personally think it's a very poorly thought out cantrip, mainly because if you actually apply it as written, it's incredibly powerful.

Zorku
2017-05-23, 09:35 AM
If it can dance like a watery ballerina, why can't it dance to the next square? If I create a 5' sphere of water, why can't it roll around?

I personally think it's a very poorly thought out cantrip, mainly because if you actually apply it as written, it's incredibly powerful.
There's a weird assumption that seems to be written into a bunch of the spells: The space where you can the spell is distinct from the thing the spell influences.

I don't think the devs really thought through this enough to put it into such concrete terms, but going off of sage advice and some of the wording of spells, they did seem to have the notion that moving things around within the space where you originally cast the spell is a distinctly lower level of effect than casting the spell and then having whatever you've done both persist and continue to "do stuff" when it leaves that original space.

Because this isn't codified or written into the errata (as far as I've seen,) obviously lots of people won't run it like this, but it does seem to be the intent. The edge cases where you actually get different answers based on which way you envision the system are pretty minor, so I think it's more of a mental exercise than a question that can shake the foundations of your game.


As I just went over in my last post, animate very much does seem to mean that you've put a spirit or reasonably similar thing into the thing you are animating. If it does not mean that this water walks/flows about and follows simple commands, this is probably the only place that they have used animate with a different meaning.

Jacquerel
2017-05-23, 09:44 AM
To further illustrate the above speculation about how the devs treat movement and spaces, moving less than 5 feet on a grid in 5e does not require an action. Every creature "controls" five feet of space despite the fact that your average human has less than a 2.5 foot radius and so obviously does not actually take up that much space. This is to represent that you are moving around within that area, and are not actually strictly stood still even if you don't use your action to move that turn.

If you want your water to "animate" as in move then it can move any distance less than five feet. If you want it to move on the grid you have to use the action that lets it do that, which limits it to moving five feet (or, into the next grid space).

Hrdven
2017-05-23, 11:02 AM
This was a potentially interesting topic before this discussion on animate water. Please leave it behind and propose other cantrip tricks, or close the topic.

Zorku
2017-05-23, 11:37 AM
This was a potentially interesting topic before this discussion on animate water. Please leave it behind and propose other cantrip tricks, or close the topic.
You seem to think that this discussion prevents other discussion. I'm going to tell you rather flatly that you are mistaken, and I don't appreciate you telling me what to talk about without adding any "cantrip tricks" of your own. I do want to be interesting, but not for your sake. So, real quickly, take a look at the other thread. People don't actually have that much to say about getting munchkin levels of power out of cantrips. You can accomplish a lot with them, but most of the time it's too situational to recommend for general use, and a majority of the rest of the time you have to worry about a DM shutting it down because they recognize that this is a cantrip and they expect you to have to spend some lofty 1st level spell or 2nd level spell in order to solve this puzzle.

So in that spirit: build a fortress with lots of big pull levers only accessible through narrow holes and with a large pit in front of them, then use lightning lure or thorn whip to yank them for whatever effect the lever does.

Take the actor feat and use message to talk to any noble or similar npc in the voice of their closest advisor, or personal guard, or even in their own voice, while you remain out of sight around a corner. Whether you're annoying them, manipulating them, or outright trying to inception an idea into their head, you'll probably like the results. For greater munchkin-ing, act like you don't need the actor feat for this, then take it when the DM starts giving you pushback about it.