Kinetic Jaunt: Fast and Loose
Usable By: Artificer, Bard, Sorcerer, Wizard
Spell Level: 2
School: Transmutation
Casting Time: 1 bonus action
Range: Self
Duration: Concentration, up to 1 minute
Components: V, S
You magically empower your movement with dancelike steps, giving yourself the following benefits for the duration:
Your walking speed increases by 10 feet.
You don't provoke opportunity attacks.
You can move through the space of another creature, and it doesn't count as difficult terrain. If you end your turn in another creature's space, you are shunted to the last unoccupied space you occupied, and you take 1d8 force damage.
Review by Sam West, Twitter:@CrierKobold
Highly mobile characters are certainly exciting conceptually: the flourish of blades as you cut through the lines of enemies, nimbly sliding below and around them like some sort of elaborate dance. In practice, the mechanics often end up being “you don’t provoke opportunity attacks” and “you go faster”. That’s the case with Kinetic Jaunt.
What sets it apart as a tool you’d consider is the ability to move through creatures' spaces; this lets you freely navigate a frontline fight. Now, is that really valuable? I’d bet not really. Misty Step is a 30 ft. instantaneous teleport; with only a minute duration and concentration attached to it, Kinetic Jaunt probably isn’t going to be all that helpful in going multiple places to get more uses out of it. As opposed to running past enemies one time, why not simply appear behind them? Other teleportation effects land in a similar boat. If the goal is to safely get past something, just teleport.
If you’re mainly interested in getting in and out of melee range, the Mobile feat gives you immunity to opportunity attacks as long as you hit the threat. Needing to concentrate on this makes melee builds that don’t have access to mobile tricky; you’ll often want some form of damaging or attack boosting concentration effect up, and you probably won’t be able to justify spending your concentration slot here.
I think the effect is neat, but probably not powerful. It costing just a bonus action does make it marginally better, especially on skirmishing bladesingers, eldritch knights, or arcane tricksters, but for the majority of wizards, bards, sorcerers, and artificers, you have mobile options leagues better than this for the same cost.
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