What class makes the best hydromancer?

[rmnimoc]

Excluding Lore Mastery Wizard for reasons I hope are obvious, which class and subclass does watery things the best?

I'm going to be playing a Water Genasi who specializes in watery spells and hit a bit of a stop when I was trying to decide class and subclass, since between Sorcerers, Clerics, and Druids there are plenty of options with a few options in those even.

At the moment I'm torn between Sea Sorcery for all their fun stuff, Moon Druid for general water stuff and turning into a water elemental, and Circle of the Land (Coast) for all their nice circle water spells.

The campaign starts at level 2 and will likely go to 20.

All that said, which class do you all think is best at doing the watery things.

[Man_Over_Game]

Excluding Lore Mastery Wizard for reasons I hope are obvious, which class and subclass does watery things the best?

I'm going to be playing a Water Genasi who specializes in watery spells and hit a bit of a stop when I was trying to decide class and subclass, since between Sorcerers, Clerics, and Druids there are plenty of options with a few options in those even.

At the moment I'm torn between Sea Sorcery for all their fun stuff, Moon Druid for general water stuff and turning into a water elemental, and Circle of the Land (Coast) for all their nice circle water spells.

The campaign starts at level 2 and will likely go to 20.

All that said, which class do you all think is best at doing the watery things.

The Arctic Land Druid actually does really well with ice as a caster. The Coast Druid mostly works around mobility, defenses and team support; it's not a proactive caster.

You could do well as a Land Druid + 4 (1) Elements Monk. I've heard of people using Shape Water to make an icicle club, then enhancing it with Shillelagh in the same turn.

If UA is on the table, Sea Sorcery would do it best. Officially, a Land-Coast Druid is good, as long as you're aware of the limited support you have in combat. It would perform very well as a gish, acting maybe as a fisherman during the initial stages of his adventuring.

[Zejety]

I've played a Sea Sorcerer up to level 6 and found it very lacking.
Actual water spells don't interact well with the curse ability, and your spell selection is too limited to fit both spells that fit thematically and those that work well mechanically.

[bc56]

If UA is on the table, Sea Sorcery would do it best. Officially, a Land-Coast Druid is good, as long as you're aware of the limited support you have in combat (might perform well as a Gish).

Sea sorcerer has been published in XGE under the name Storm Sorcerer, so it's an option even if UA is unavailable.

[Man_Over_Game]

Sea sorcerer has been published in XGE under the name Storm Sorcerer, so it's an option even if UA is unavailable.

The Storm Sorcerer doesn't have any support for water. At best, it has some support for things related to storms, and still doesn't have many ways of proactively causing them.

Rather, you'd have as much luck being water based as a Storm Sorcerer as a Tempest Cleric would.

[Haydensan]

Sea sorcerer has been published in XGE under the name Storm Sorcerer, so it's an option even if UA is unavailable.

See sorcerer and storm sorcerer are not the same archetypes. The former is only in UA while the latter was originally a UA then was released SCAG (iirc) and finally reprinted in XGtE

[Vekon]

Any caster played by a player willing to reflavor their spells and a DM who will play along.

Fireball becomes a sphere of scalding, boiling water. Or becomes Iceball and does cold damage.
Slow causes frost and icicles to form on the skin and joints of its targets.
Scorching ray and firebolt become frozen ray and waterbolt, respectively.

So on and so forth.

[Vogie]

When I was making my Cryomancer (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?580522-Cryomancer-Bloodline-(PEACH)), I used the UA Pyromancer and Sea Sorcerer as a guideline.

[TyGuy]

You know, the more this comes up and I think about how I'd love to play an elementalist (fire for me); the more I think the biggest quality of life change would be a polite homebrew request to lighten up on the arbitrary spell lists and simply have access to all the appropriately themed spells.

[LudicSavant]

Most of the good water themed spells are on the Druid and Wizard spell lists.

Sorcerer has quite a few too, but is rather more limited in their spell choices overall.

[tieren]

I'm going to go a different way and suggest 4E Monk. If you just took the ater/cold based elemental disciplines you would have a very thematic character, who could run on water.

[rmnimoc]

I'm going to go a different way and suggest 4E Monk. If you just took the ater/cold based elemental disciplines you would have a very thematic character, who could run on water.

That was actually the build I was thinking of going for before I decided I'd rather play a caster than Aquaman.

[Grod_The_Giant]

Mystic? Mastery of Ice and Mastery of Water are perfect for a hydromancer; Mastery of Force, Corrosive Metabolism and Psionic Restoration are also thematically appropriate.

[ImproperJustice]

I really enjoy hitting people with massive blasts of water, and Druid really is the better option.

On the low end you have shape water, create water, water wall, tidal wave, and sleet storm.


As you move up, you have control water, watery sphere, and the penultimate water attack: Tsunami.

I think Circle of Land for coast is great, mainly for the arcane recovery and bonus spells.

[Nhorianscum]

Excluding Lore Mastery Wizard for reasons I hope are obvious, which class and subclass does watery things the best?

I'm going to be playing a Water Genasi who specializes in watery spells and hit a bit of a stop when I was trying to decide class and subclass, since between Sorcerers, Clerics, and Druids there are plenty of options with a few options in those even.

At the moment I'm torn between Sea Sorcery for all their fun stuff, Moon Druid for general water stuff and turning into a water elemental, and Circle of the Land (Coast) for all their nice circle water spells.

The campaign starts at level 2 and will likely go to 20.

All that said, which class do you all think is best at doing the watery things.

Need a specialist call a sorc! Sea sorcery taking the Izzett Ravnica background for more water spells alongside 1 levels of Zeal cleric (or 2 paladin) (Sorc1/Cleric1/Sorc 20)

Keep in mind that forced movement over 10ft in one shove inflicts "fall damage" on contact with a wall (or just launch them straight up if no wall is comvenient) via the monsters throwing people rules. This matters the moment we hit level 2. Curse + Tsmite lets us drop a booming blade and then immediately trigger curse-movement and hurl an opponent for "dienow" amounts of damage. Also we can 0 out enemy move with frost thingy. Sleep still works. So does fog cloud.

Water spells are great at moving things, get creative, slam things prone, and then 0 their move with ice to keep them their or fry em with lightning now that their dex save doesn't exist anymore. We're extremely mobile here so with warcaster the name of the game is weeeeeeeeeee.

We get really good at 8th level with quicken+ Wsphere.