You have practiced techniques in melee combat against spellcasters, gaining the following benefits.
When a creature within 5 feet of you casts a spell, you can use your reaction to make a melee weapon attack against that creature.
When you damage a creature that is concentrating on a spell, that creature has disadvantage on the saving throw it makes to maintain its concentration.
You have advantage on saving throws against spells cast by creatures within 5 feet of you.
Mage Slayer: Don’t Hate the Slayer, Hate the Mage
Review by Sam West, Twitter:@CrierKobold
There are few features in this game that feel as niche as Mage Slayer. This is a spell for martial characters to attempt to bully casters… so long as you can get in range to damage them. It's weird: two of the abilities offered here aren’t actually all that helpful at dealing with mages, and instead seem to be something you’d want to have against martial caster hybrids, or melee monsters with one or two spells at their disposal. That pool of creatures is incredibly small. I don’t see it.
By far the most powerful line of text here is imposing disadvantage on concentration saving throws. That is the reason you take Mage Slayer if you really want to stick it to casters. Paired with high damage hits like a Sharpshooter shot or Great Weapon Master swing, you can have a pretty good time getting annoying persistent effects gone. Against summoners, enchanters, or damaging area based evokers, this is the kind of feature you want. Unfortunately, that’s a tiny percentage of monsters in 5th edition. The majority of fights are against things that don’t have a single spell to their name, let alone one that requires concentration that you care about disrupting. If the best feature by a mile is already only good in a handful of encounters each campaign, you best be sure you really care about shining in those specific encounters.
Opportunity attacks provoked by spellcasting used to just be a thing to my knowledge. Instead of keeping it on attacks of opportunity, it moved here. Sure, that’s fine I guess. I’m pretty sure that in most cases if you’re a melee character, like a barbarian or rogue, within 5 feet of a caster, that caster is already in a bad spot. Mage Slayer gives you a bit more punch when you do get on top of them, but that isn’t really needed. Where the struggle comes in is getting to the mage in the first place. The struggle is not getting Hideous Laughtered or Hold Personed from across the room. Once you’re there, your swords and hammers are probably good enough. Its nice to have, and helps prevent Misty Step and Teleport escapes at low HP, but I think you’re regularly going to find its still a challenge just getting to them in the first place.
This issue extends into the advantage offered. It only applies against spells made when something is already within 5 feet of you that then also provokes a free reaction attack. By this point, you’re where you want to be. You did it. You got the mage, and are beating them up with your weapons. The saves you needed to pass almost certainly already happened, and happened from between fifteen to two-hundred feet out. Mage Slayer gives you nothing for actually getting on top of mages, which is the number one issue a lot of martial characters have.
You’d think for the feat dedicated to slaying mages it’d do a better job, but alas it’s not to be. Even if it was better at slaying mages, that’s such a small subgroup of monsters I think you need to be in a mage centric game to even begin to consider this. If you’re playing in Strixhaven or Thay in the Forgotten Realms, this makes a bit more sense. If you’re just in your local DMs sandbox world of elves, dwarves, and goblins built from the monster manual, Mage Slayer is going to be a waste of a feat.
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