You are exceptionally speedy and agile. You gain the following benefits:
Your speed increases by 10 feet.
When you use the Dash action, difficult terrain doesn't cost you extra movement on that turn.
When you make a melee attack against a creature, you don't provoke opportunity attacks from that creature for the rest of the turn, whether you hit or not.
Mobile: Fight and Flight
Review by Sam West, Twitter:@CrierKobold
Skirmishing is a play style in 5e that has always been a bit tricky to pull off. For starters, every creature in the game (more or less) has access to attacks of opportunity reactions. This can make it challenging to dip into range and smack somebody before dipping back out of range. Rogues pull it off well enough with their cunning action offering bonus action disengages. Monks get access to stunning strike, which opens up a tool to lock down groups of enemies at a time while moving with their extra speed in the mid to upper tiers. Mobile assists in that fantasy, but to middling success.
At its absolute worst, Mobile is 10 feet extra speed. This stacks really nicely with other speed boosts and bonus action move options; any time you can double up on a bonus it’ll start to quickly become a notable element of a character. A 30 ft. speed rogue goes from being able to cover 90 feet by spending their dash to covering 80 feet without dashing as their action, or up to 120 feet when dashing as well. On barbarians and monks this can make it look like they’re taking the dash action for free every turn by bumping their speed from 40 or 50 to 50 or 60, opening up more and more maps to be coverable distances without expending extra actions on your turn. That’s valuable; not probably worth a feat on its own, but a very nice bonus.
It then offers the ability to cross difficult terrain (even magical) with the dash action means there are next to no environments enemies can cross that you can’t. This isn’t going to come up that often, as normally the bonus speed is all you need to cross the difficult terrain into melee range anyway, but from time to time you’ll be able to navigate huge distances on foot that are overgrown, overly rocky, or filled with intergalactic black goop that prevent most other creatures from going anywhere quickly. A fly speed is still way better than this, but this ends up being a nice to have from time to time element of the feat.
The final aspect is the reason I see most players take it… and I’m not impressed. My top concern is figuring out why it's advantageous to keep moving and hitting different creatures when largely the aim in 5e is to burst one creature down at a time to diminish enemy actions. As I mentioned prior, monks do it to stun multiple creatures at a time; they aren’t taking attacks of opportunity already, making this feat redundant on them. Rogues and rangers have ranged options to engage enemies from a distance, and because ranged weapons tend to match the damage of their melee counterparts outside of two-handed weapons, I struggle to see that much value in choosing melee over ranged in that instance. Fighters and paladins have access to shields, heavy armor, and big pools of hitpoints alongside defensive features. They are the characters who should be staying engaged that the skirmishers would look to move between. At the end of the day there just aren’t enough payoffs for melee skirmishing to really find it to be a valuable play style that’s worth investing in this feat for.There could be a few rare instances where you’re trying to get to a specific baddy in the backline but can’t find a path to them that doesn’t collide with some frontline foes. Most battlemaps aren’t going to have this problem, and the extra speed is probably all you’re going to actually need to help you circumnavigate those beefier brutes entirely without ever getting in melee range with them.
If you like the idea of being a character that can cross distances in the blink of an eye, Mobile can contribute to your build. I don’t think you should put that much weight on negating attacks of opportunity, though, and consider looking for better payoffs before committing to the skirmisher life.
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