You have mastered techniques to take advantage of every drop in any enemy's guard, gaining the following benefits.
When you hit a creature with an opportunity attack, the creature's speed becomes 0 for the rest of the turn.
Creatures provoke opportunity attacks from you even if they take the Disengage action before leaving your reach.
When a creature makes an attack against a target other than you (and that target doesn't have this feat), you can use your reaction to make a melee weapon attack against the attacking creature.
Sentinel: Opportunity Knocks
Review by Sam West, Twitter:@CrierKobold
Oh, Sentinel. You’re the defender’s saving grace, an option to actually make defensive play valuable. If you’re a paladin, barbarian, fighter, ranger, or any other martial character looking to stand somewhere menacingly and punish baddies for daring to hit somebody other than you, Sentinel is right for you.
All of the text on Sentinel is spectacular. Out the gate, it improves all opportunity attacks you make by eating all of the enemies movement should you hit. A lot of the time you’ll make an opportunity attack, deal a bit of damage, then the hit creature still dashes away and can easily escape the fight. Not against a Sentinel. When something gets within melee range of you, it stays within melee range of you. To sweeten the deal, creatures no longer can even take the Disengage action to try to get away. You will always have the ability to make the attack of opportunity should they move away from you.
What takes Sentinel and pushes it over the edge in its usefulness is the last bit of text: you get a new reaction that you’ll be making a LOT. To get the most juice out of this, you’ll want to be in a group with enough threatening melee combatants creatures will want to try to knock them down. But even with a full backline of wizards and rogues and no other melee fighters, this can act as a tool that pulls enemies to attack you instead. It not only gives you more ways to engage a reaction during all points of a fight, it helps leverage your larger hit point pool to its fullest through this punishment based encouragement.
If you really want to play a character that locks down baddies, pairing Sentinel with a reach weapon (and the Polearm Master feat if you’re feeling frisky) opens up a massive area of control that makes it difficult for anything to engage anyone within 10 feet of you. Clogging up corridors becomes incredibly easy; you can cover a twenty-five foot wide section of terrain by just standing in the center of it, potentially preventing anything that enters into the space from leaving ever again. Pair this with Polerarm Master’s bonus reaction when creatures enter the space and you can prevent them from even hitting you. Should the attack of opportunity hit a creature engaging with lower than a 10 ft. reach, you stop them with the Sentinel feat, eating all their remaining movement. On your next turn, poke them a few times, then step back 5 feet. You can keep doing this as long as you can keep moving backwards, potentially denying any short ranged enemy from every landing a single blow on you. It's a pretty sweet build.
I want there to be more feats in line with Sentinel’s power. This opens up an entire build opportunity that rewards characters for playing the defender. This is an archetype that wants more than anything to stand guard and take hits, and is rewarded with more attacks, making it scale with a ton of martial features like rage, divine smite, and even spells like Hunter's Mark. If you like the concept, I promise this feat will give you moments where you feel like an unstoppable wall that just sucks attackers and never lets them leave. Any melee attacker can make great use of this. Even rogues like this feat, as it can open up more avenues for bonus sneak attack damage each round. If any of that sounds cool to you, try it out.
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