Harzel
Adventurer
My players' characters are about to hit level 7, so I'm looking over the stuff that they will get. One of the PCs is a Vengeance Paladin, so she'll get the Relentless Avenger feature.
I'm having difficulty seeing how this could be useful more than rarely. Ok, your foe is trying to retreat. If it uses its action to Disengage, then you can probably catch up to it and whack on it some more, so it chooses to Dash instead, so you get an OA. Now, for this feature to work, first you have to hit it. Alright, so note: does nothing about 1/3 of the time. Assuming you hit, you can now move 1/2 your speed, so you can probably put yourself into its line of retreat if it is tiny, small, or medium, and maybe(?) if it is large, but not if it is huge or bigger. So you may have forced it to go around you, which will slow it down some, or if there is a very fortuitously placed choke point, you have blocked its retreat unless you are playing with overrun/tumble (which I do), in which case it has to make a roll to get through you. In the absence of the lucky choke point and an unsuccessful overrun, you likely have gained only 10 ft., which will generally not be enough to make up for the fact that your foe is Dashing, which means that on your next turn you will have to Dash to catch up to it and not be able to attack, which is exactly where you would have been without this feature. I suppose the other happy case is when your foe's speed is exactly 5 ft. more than yours and this feature enables you to keep up by Dashing, whereas you would not have been able to otherwise.
I don't know, this seems like a very small niche. Am I missing something?
PHB said:
I'm having difficulty seeing how this could be useful more than rarely. Ok, your foe is trying to retreat. If it uses its action to Disengage, then you can probably catch up to it and whack on it some more, so it chooses to Dash instead, so you get an OA. Now, for this feature to work, first you have to hit it. Alright, so note: does nothing about 1/3 of the time. Assuming you hit, you can now move 1/2 your speed, so you can probably put yourself into its line of retreat if it is tiny, small, or medium, and maybe(?) if it is large, but not if it is huge or bigger. So you may have forced it to go around you, which will slow it down some, or if there is a very fortuitously placed choke point, you have blocked its retreat unless you are playing with overrun/tumble (which I do), in which case it has to make a roll to get through you. In the absence of the lucky choke point and an unsuccessful overrun, you likely have gained only 10 ft., which will generally not be enough to make up for the fact that your foe is Dashing, which means that on your next turn you will have to Dash to catch up to it and not be able to attack, which is exactly where you would have been without this feature. I suppose the other happy case is when your foe's speed is exactly 5 ft. more than yours and this feature enables you to keep up by Dashing, whereas you would not have been able to otherwise.
I don't know, this seems like a very small niche. Am I missing something?
