Making him float would fix this, plus allowing Barakoaya to teleport onto and float above water

thats why he'd need to float on the water too even if you pour a waterfall on him. right?

alternatively water breathing also exists.

time to give him a solar magic circle thing that he can sit on perhaps.
stops him from falling into holes when explosives etc are deployed. making it detrimental to the player to explode or deform the terrain around him as he'll just hover there and not care.
or make him remember the height he was at after he comes to a rest for a little while after being spawned him. then if he falls to far past that in one go, he'll just levitate back up on his platform. and yep, float on the water and maybe even lava and other fluids in general.
I was always told fat floats after all.

This wouldn’t help. Players could construct the pit around his floating seat and drown him in place.
It’s fine though; Barako aggros on players who break his throne or place tnt, so it’s not as though you can do this without a fight.

Right, but that also wouldn’t fix it. You could build a roof at water level and prevent him from surfacing.
Logically it doesn’t seem right to give him water breathing.

evaporate the water when he super novas/fire explodes. :3

3 things. Barako won’t attack unless he has a target, water should always beat fire, and this could be considered griefing.

1. He will summon his bois and get shielded and healed tho. so that can suffice as a time to remove the water also, cause realistically they shouldn't be able to deploy water quick enough in survival to flood him repeatedly if he's always on top of it and always clearing away enough of it so he can breathe.

2. then that means you've given him a mortal weakness then that you'll just have to hope people don't cheese him with. [shrug] but I'm fairly sure if the sun can evaporate water into the atmosphere to make clouds and stuff he can conjure some fiery sun magic stuff to dry himself off...

3. Grief smeif. it's only water. if he's in water, it's likely he's been put there by some big smarty and best you can do is just make sure his healers can shield him quick enough.
   (they usually can in my game cause I made him champion 3 to survive weak attempts at his life. but yeah...)

I actually only just found this water drowning thing out myself cause I chanced upon a video on youtube about it... but of course, being me, I'm always an anti-cheeser and prefer a good fun direct fight if thats the intended way. :V

It’s difficult enough to pull off in recent versions that I’m not worried about it.