That actually worked but made ripples eminate from the actor’s capsule collision in a diamond shape rather than from the sockets I set up under Skeletal Mesh Setup. But I’ll look into that material further. For now I came up with a workaround:
Basically on a timer I’m running Remove Dynamic Force so I can re-run Register Dynamic Force with a new water level based on the character’s current position. It’s pretty inefficient but it works. In the screenshot I had the time set to 3 seconds, but 0.5 still seems to be performative if it’s only running on a single actor.