Quote Originally Posted by Foxhound438 View Post
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.
I never suggested (and wouldn't) getting a horse to solve an animal speed issue.

Water Breathing allows you to be underwater for a significant period of time, it does nothing else to help you with the various hindrances of being submerged. There's an aside that there's a two level gap between getting to chose a beast and a fullcaster being able to choose that spell and 6 level gap for the Ranger.

This is also such a niche negative, you're only going to choose this beast if you're going to be dealing with underwater (or at the very least in water) section that's more than just a single obstacle. So sure, you could get caught on land and at a disadvantage, but you had a huge advantage for the bulk of that section (and do have tools to mitigate the speed issue). If this was a case of the flying creature, not the sea, then I'd understand this more as it's a more universal choice, but the combination of when you'll choose the beast with the even lower amount of time it could be a downside just don't seem significant enough to me.

On the topic of disadvantage on attacks for the land underwater, it's a pretty significant nerf and the movement speed is still so low that the beast could easily lose at least one turn before attacking, whilst being on that creature's home turf.