SegmentNextThe Witcher 3 Drowners: Where They Spawn And How To Farm Them
No monster in The Witcher 3 turns up more often than the drowner. It is a necrophage, the same class as the water hag, and the two share the same muddy ground so closely that a hag will often pull a pack of them into a fight she started alone.
That commonness is exactly why the drowner is worth understanding early. On the lower difficulties it is scenery you ride past. On Death March the same creature is one of the enemies that will kill a careless Geralt in a couple of hits, which is the honest measure of how far the difficulty slider moves the game.
Where drowners spawn
Anywhere with standing water. The list below only covers the spots our own quest and farming pages send you to, and it is enough to show the pattern: a shoreline, a sewer, or a flooded cave, usually with something larger sharing the pool.
| Spot | Region | What else is in the water |
|---|---|---|
| Kimbolt Way | Velen | Nothing but drowners, which is why it is a farming stop |
| Crookback Bog orphanage and the Burrow | Velen | A fiend arrives once the pack is thinned |
| Riverside west of Mulbrydale | Velen | Three of them running with wolves |
| The peat digger's contract ground at Downwarren | Velen | Tracks you can only read with the Eye of Nehaleni |
| The lake below Bald Mountain | Velen | A pair guarding a coin on the floor of an underwater cave |
| Lake Wyndamer, north towards the shore | Velen | A chest holding the Legendary Ursine silver sword diagram |
| Novigrad sewers | Novigrad | A water hag, and corpses you have to burn to stop the spawns |
| The Bits, behind the illusory wall | Novigrad | A water hag guarding the path out to the cliff |
| The river along the Oxenfurt academy wall | Novigrad | Only drowners, and weak ones |
| Whale Graveyard | Skellige | Level 18 drowners and nothing else, four or five at a time |
| Giants' Toes | Skellige | Another clean shoreline for farming |
| The tunnel to Lornruk Castle | Skellige | Several of them blocking the only way in |
| Fyke Isle on arrival | Velen | Rotfiends and ghouls mixed into the pack |
| The flooded route to the Ancient Crypt | Skellige | A siren that will not descend until the drowners are dead |
The pattern holds in scripted fights too. A cave on the way through Kaer Morhen puts a bear and four or five drowners between you and the monster you came for, and a beach on Skellige has a man named Eiric pinned behind a rock by a group of them, worth 400 experience points to clear.
How to put one down
Fire is the answer on land. Drowners are vulnerable to Igni, so a build with any investment in sign intensity clears a pack faster than a build swinging at them one at a time. Quen is the safer companion sign if you would rather not trade hits at all, and it is the one most players lean on while farming.
Coat the silver sword in necrophage oil before you start. Our oils page has the three recipes, and the top tier of that line is worth the ingredients here, because a fifty percent damage bonus against a class this common pays itself back over a playthrough rather than over a fight.
Blocking works, but only halfway. As our parry and counter page explains, the ordinary swipes of small and medium monsters can be caught on the sword, and a drowner's are no exception. Its leap, however, cannot be parried at all, so the answer to a drowner winding up at distance is a roll, never a block.
In water the fight stops being a fight. The crossbow drops to default bolts the moment you go under and the supply becomes infinite, and one or two bolts finish a drowner outright. That is also true from a boat or a ledge above the shoreline, and it is the reason the farming routes below all start with a dive. Our underwater combat page covers the rest of what changes below the surface.
What a drowner is worth
Three different systems in the game are fed by this one monster, which is unusual and is what makes the shoreline farm worth a detour.
- Experience. Drowners are among the most efficient kills in the game for their level, and our levelling page names Kimbolt Way, the Crookback Bog orphanage, Giants' Toes and the Whale Graveyard as the four routes to run. Wearing a monster experience trophy while you do it compounds the gain.
- Lesser mutagens. At the Whale Graveyard the drowners are level 18 and each one yields a single lesser mutagen, colour at random. Meditate a few hours once the group is dead and the same four or five come back, which turns the site into a loop rather than a trip. The mutagens page has the full route, including where to stand so you do not wake up surrounded.
- Alchemy components. Drowner brain is the ingredient the entire Swallow line is built on, from the base potion up through its enhanced and superior versions, so a healing stock is really a drowner stock. Drowner tongue goes into Killer Whale, the potion that extends underwater breathing and vision. Our healing page lists the Swallow recipes.
One last note for anyone hunting a trophy: the Abaya you kill for the Muire D'yaeblen contract off the Skellige notice board is a stronger water hag that leads a drowner pack, so the pack is part of that fight rather than an interruption to it. Everything else in the bestiary is on the bosses and monsters guide.