Is anyone playing a Graviturgist? How is it? It seems.... underwhelming to me, am I wrong?

If played by someone clever, it can be a decent battlefield control subclass. Notice that Gravity Well doesn't limit the number of creatures that can be affected, so an AoE can essentially rearrange an entire area in small but significant ways: Giving allies flanking, free disengage, forcing enemies into melee range, separating a rider from their mount, pushing enemies off of a bridge or cliff, etc...

If you play in a campaign with environmental hazards and cooperative teammates, then forced movement is pretty great, especially when combined with certain spell effects.

If you really lean into the tactical elements of it, the graviturgist can be super effective. Gravity well is great for rearranging both enemies and allies, and the extra spell options can be handy for forced movement and battlefield control. Even adjust density has situational tactical options, because you can reduce an enemy's speed without needing them to be willing or giving them any save against the effect.

Personally, if I were to play one I would start with a single level dip of order domain cleric before taking wizard levels the rest of the way, grab the telekinetic feat early on, and focus my spell selections on creating an area that the enemies really don't want to be in and keeping them there.

Cast Sickening Radiance. Druid casts Spike Growth.

Use spells like an upcast Jim's Magic Missiles to bring enemy out of SE across the spikes, then back into the SE. Let's say you moved them 20 ft total. That's 8d4 damage plus a Con Save and on fail take 4d10 damage and get a level of exhaustion. Start of enemy turn, another con save for another possible 4d10 damage plus another level of exhaustion. 

Gravity Well can be fantastic at moving enemies into and out of persistent AoEs to retrigger the damage and effects. It's also great for keeping enemies at bay, giving yourself or party members free disengages that not even enemies with Sentinel can prevent, force enemies into traps or hazards and more.

Flying enemy? Shoot a ranged spell and force them to the ground. Push enemies off cliffs or off boats. It's the ultimate feature for those who want to be more tactical.

And that's just Gravity Well.

Adjust Density is useful in and out of combat. It can be a little bit more niche but has uses. You can use it as often as you want. So, the 1 minute time-limit can just be refreshed over and over as needed - helping you to carry heavy things, or move faster, make it easier to climb. Even a wizard could grapple the enemy effectively when they suddenly weigh 350 lbs and have advantage to strength checks. 

Violent Attraction is deceptively useful. At first glance it doesn't seem like much as making your ally hit for more damage doesn't seem useful for yourself. Until you remember it also increases fall damage and you have Gravity Well which lets you move enemies in any direction - even up. So, using a spell like Jim's Magic Missiles to launch an enemy up into the air and then immediately use Violent Attraction to slam them for extra damage. Using JMM at 1st level could be up to 6d4 force + 1d6 bludgeoning + 2d10 bludgeoning. That's not bad for a 1st level slot.

Going to note here: falling usually results in the target being prone. So not only do you throw the enemy around, slam them into the ground for extra damage, but you might also make them prone and more vulnerable to your melee-based allies.

Event Horizon is excellent battlefield control. Even if they succeed the save, they are still significantly slowed, which combined with your spells and Gravity Well, gives you freedom to basically move them around as you want while ensuring they're going to have an extremely difficult time getting close to you - so melee-based enemies are barely a worry. As a bonus feature: it only affects those hostile to you, so your party members are unaffected, making it easy to give them tactically advantageous positioning. 

Literally all of the features are amazing. It's a fantastic subclass.

Graviturgy is just cool and very useful. And in general fun to use

THe only uses for the Graviturgy is add an Slow-motion effect while you are falling down, or add a super effective damage when the target cracks down by the fall. Another use is adding the same effect as the spell Enlarge/Reduce, sooner than the expected. I don't know if can alter the dimensions of the spells Mage Hand and Magic Mouth.

The spells are incredibly useful. Especially on an airship or in a cave of some type. Hell many houses are not set up to suddenly have it and the stuff above it to suddenly get an extra thousand or more points of force damage to it. Although some spells are tricky to use in later levels. Like gravity fissure. Can destroy an entire airship by itself, but a 100ft line (essentially 10 foot wide too) just doesn't have as much impact unless something is set up to let you use it to max effect here and there.

Are there unique spells for this subclass? My 6 year old son is thinking about playing one. Recommendations?

Quote from PMFL >>

Are there unique spells for this subclass? My 6 year old son is thinking about playing one. Recommendations?

The Chronurgy and Graviturgy sub-classes both get access to the Dunamancy spells as standard, all from the Explorer's Guide to Wildemount; a few of these are very gravity themed so very appropriate for a Graviturgist.

Whether it's worth it for a six year old will depend on the six-year old; a lot of the unique Graviturgy abilities and some of the dunamancy spells you might take it for are heavily geared towards control. Control effects in D&D can be very powerful, but they often work by enabling other players to do more, rather than letting you deal damage directly. That said, if you give opportunities for enemies to be pushed into things then you can allow a Graviturgy wizard to deal a lot of direct damage if that's how they'd prefer to play.

But I generally like to see established in games the idea that if you help someone to deal damage, then that's your damage too; this is the mentality I use when playing support Bards, as Bards aren't a typically high damage class, but they can buff the party or seriously ruin an enemy's day in other ways, and control/support Wizards can do the same. Plus it's also just good in a team game to establish that you win by working together, and allows support builds to really shine and have fun.

On the other hand my experience is that you always end up with one player who has to be rolling the most damage and/or most attacks, but maybe I'm just unlucky that way; you'll know the mentality of your son and the other players a lot better than I do though. 😉

Amazing reply. I think my son wants to play a Graviturgy wizard because he likes Sigma from Overwatch, haha. He was on his iPad trying to find Graviturgy spells on DNDB but we had trouble finding some.

He has been talking about it for a few weeks now. He wants to get into battlefield control. He has come up with some good ideas and he's working on his backstory right now. We will see how long that lasts as this weekend he's going to play his oath of vengeance paladin...so maybe he'll change his mind.

Thank you for the information. I'll be sure to share it with him!

Just realised I forgot to link you to the dunamancy spells on DDB; if you need to find them again though there's a handy "Dunamancy" spell tag you can use in the search. You'll need the digital copy of Explorer's Guide to Wildemount to see the details and add them to a Graviturgy wizard, but you can unlock just the spells and sub-class if you don't want to pay for the whole digital book.

Magnify Gravity is the lowest level spell (1st level spell) so it'll be a mainstay for a little while; it's a nice single round mixed control/damage spell as it deals decent force damage and slows enemies down. Then later there's Gravity Sinkhole (4th level spell) which is a persistent singularity type thing that deals damage and can pull things into its centre, depending upon how you rule it it can fully immobilise enemies by suspending them in the centre (as you can only use your walking speed if you can walk 😉). Depending on the campaign you might get to Gravity Fissure (6th level spell) which is more of a pure damage spell, and a pretty decent one at that.

There's also Dark Star (8th level spell) and Ravenous Void (9th level spell) which you'll only see in a high level campaign. I've never used either of these but they're suitably strong for the level (there are arguably better choices but not if you're heavily into the gravity theme).

You might also count Immovable Object (2nd level spell) as gravity based, since it lets you fix an object in place, including in the air (kind of like a DIY Immovable Rod). There's also Pulse Wave (3rd level spell); it's described as "pressure" but still deals force damage so you could theme it as gravity based, and I think it's good to have a 3rd level spell among your themed picks.

While many of these spells have control elements a lot of it comes from the sub-class features, and you can absolutely play it for more damage or more support, a mix or just whatever feels right at the time. I think control's what it's best suited for though, and playing control can be a lot of fun!

Something else we did in the game I played a Graviturgist is to reflavor or slightly modify other spells to have that gravity feel. Some examples are the gust cantrip, describe it as a gravity spell instead of air and call it something like gravitic shift. Change thunderwave to force damage and maybe reduce it to 2d6 damage if your dm feels the need, we found leaving it at 2d8 to be just fine. We called it Gravity wave. I also changed ray of frost to graviton ray and made it a d6 but flavored it as adding temp mass to an object to hurt it and hinder its movement. The other spell we altered that is used alot was Maximilians earthen grasp, didnt change the damage or anything, just reflavored it.

I think it adds alot of fun and flavor to the Graviturgist just in terms of immersion and making it feel unique having gravity and force based spells that are control and movement oriented. 

Very helpful!

Yeah, I thought there might have been a list under the Wizard Graviturgy Subclass. Thanks for the links and the Dunamancy tags.

Quote from Jessebruffett >>

Something else we did in the game I played a Graviturgist is to reflavor or slightly modify other spells to have that gravity feel. Some examples are the gust cantrip, describe it as a gravity spell instead of air and call it something like gravitic shift. Change thunderwave to force damage and maybe reduce it to 2d6 damage if your dm feels the need, we found leaving it at 2d8 to be just fine. We called it Gravity wave. I also changed ray of frost to graviton ray and made it a d6 but flavored it as adding temp mass to an object to hurt it and hinder its movement. The other spell we altered that is used alot was Maximilians earthen grasp, didnt change the damage or anything, just reflavored it.

I think it adds alot of fun and flavor to the Graviturgist just in terms of immersion and making it feel unique having gravity and force based spells that are control and movement oriented. 

That's brilliant!

Will definitely use this and help re-flavor  these. Before we saw your reply my son  suggested Feather Fall, Catapult, and Haste.

And I was like, "Haste, huh? How's that?"

And he said, "The gravity around them changes and they become harder to hit." Haha, good enough for me.