Quote Originally Posted by Dork_Forge View Post
Anything that doesn't have a swim speed gets disadvantage on melee weapon attacks, so that would apply to the Beast of the Land as well.

Then there's the whole it not being able to breathe under water thing...

The Beast of the Sea is not useless when used in it's appropriate environment, underwater sections (and even whole adventures) are a thing, this is just an option for those occasions and not really intended to be used otherwise by the looks of it.

Though if pepole actually have a problem with this then just ask to drop the swim speed down a little and bump up the land speed accordingly...
A big difference though is that the spells that support land creatures in water are a lot better than the spells that support the beast of the sea on land - Longstrider is pretty cheap to use once in a while, but most of your campaign is probably boots on some kind of ground, so you'd have to spend a lot of your daily resources on this just to keep up with travel pace. "get a horse" doesn't always work, because once again, a DM can just veto this on the basis of not having the right anatomy. On the other hand, water breathing is a spell on the ranger's own list that lasts 24 hours, benefits the entire party, and is a ritual if the wizard or cleric takes it. Not having a swim speed can be hampering to the beast of land, but having an attack at disadvantage is probably better on average than not having an attack at all because you're too far away.

I would like to have it be like 20/40 or something, and I would certainly allow it if I were DMing, but I wish it was just in the book that way so I don't have to argue with "no homebrew ever" DM's for me to play this. "just rule it differently" doesn't work when I want to actually play a class myself.