Some feats seem simple at first glance but are actually incredibly powerful and useful as you dig down into them. Mobile is a popular 5E feat that is versatile, practical, and many times comes out to be far more powerful and useful than it even looks. Considering that this looks like a rock solid feat from the get-go, that’s pretty impressive.
So is the 5E Mobile feat in D&D any good?
The Mobile feat is a strong versatile feat that gives benefits to any player character that takes it. This is an incredibly popular feat but often realistically works best with monk, druid, fighter, and rogue builds.
That said, this versatile and useful feat has more hidden utility in it than many even experienced D&D players realize.
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Breaking Down the Mobile Feat
Let’s start with the book definition of the Mobile feat to see how it works in 5th Ed.
Directly from the Player’s Handbook:
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.
Player’s Handbook, p. 168
These are some pretty sweet benefits, and mesh well with a lot of different builds.
Benefit #1: Your speed increases by 10 feet.
Always good. Extra movement can give a lot of options on the battlefield whether it’s charging right into it from a distance, taking extra care to stay out of opportunity attack range while moving past a flank, diving for cover, or moving through a crowded battlefield as the master of battlefield control (bards gotta get their song material!).
Extra movement speed is useful, applies to the dash action, and when given to already mobile units like monks or barbarians, can get out of control real fast. Which of course means more fun 🙂
Benefit #2: Difficult terrain doesn’t cost extra movement when you use the dash action.
Difficult terrain is one of the most useful features in the toolbox of a DM, so having a feat that lets you defeat that (and troublesome spells like plant growth) while still getting more movement?
This is a very underrated and powerful bonus that comes with the Mobile feat.
- DM: This is extremely rocky, steep, and unstable terrain.
- Mobile Monk: That’s cute. I sprint up the side of the steep rock face and punch the archer ambushing us in the face.
Benefit #3: When you make a melee attack against a creature you don’t provoke opportunity attacks for the rest of the turn whether or not you hit.
This is huge, especially if you’re dealing with enemies that have sentinel but not polearm master. Or if you have enemies that have both and you feel like rolling the dice anyway. This allows a player to dart in, attack, and dart out without issue.
Or a monk can run past a front line fighter, stopping to punch, and then move past him to hit the enemy caster in the back row and engage fully with them.
This gives more movement, versatility, and control that can cause all kinds of headaches for the DM while opening all kinds of options for how your character interacts with the battlefield.
5E Classes That Should Take the Mobile Feat
Well the most obvious one first: monk. In 5E the monk class should look at taking Mobile all day long and into next week. Mobile stacks with the natural movement of a character so not only will monks gain ridiculous movement abilities at mid to high levels, but the ability to ignore difficult terrain on top of it just makes a monk terrifying.
Add in the ability to launch a flurry of attacks on a frontliner, then moving most them without provoking an opportunity attack to run back up and close with the ranged or spellcasting guys in the back – this is the type of fighting a monk is built for.
Rogues should also strongly consider the Mobile feat. They not only get an “extra” ability score improvement which is perfect for an additional feat, but the ability to move over tough terrain, to move out after a sneak attack, and to have a way to override sentinel – Mobile gets it done. It just gives the rogue everything that they want to duck in and out of a combat situation.
Fighters have multiple extra ability scores which means the ability to get multiple extra feats. In addition to some of the obvious combat feats that can make a strong fighter even more devastating, giving them extra movement that ignores difficult terrain makes an already scary high-level fighter even more so – and they have the slots to easily pick this up.
Druids have stats they need to max out, but after that so much relies on a bit of spellcasting that isn’t necessarily enhanced by most magic-based feats and wild shape. Adding that extra movement speed that still applies in wild shape form? Yes, please!
5th Ed Classes that should always take the Mobile Feat
- Druids
- Fighters
- Monks
- Rogues
5E Classes That Should Consider Taking the Mobile Feat
First right off the bat, you could justify barbarians being in the always tier except for a couple important points:
- Barbarians absolutely need both STR and CON maxed out in an epic level campaign game so they need those ability boosts, especially in a standard array game versus high rolling stats
- Barbarians need multiple feats to increase damage or build even more hit points to tank, which makes them run out of feats in most cases well before ever
So if you roll for stats and score well, and use a race like Mountain Dwarf that has the big boosts to the two big barb stats, this might still be viable. But most of the time, even though Mobile would be a great barb feat, it will be on the outside looking in.
Bards should also consider the Mobile feat. I know this seems counter-intuitive at first but stick with me. Bards are about battlefield control. Some great bard spells are 60 foot range, many are 30. For bards in small parties who know they need to be in combat, thunderwave is a must. The ability to add movement when things go wrong is huge, and allows them to weave through the battlefield for cover, to get in spell range, and then to dart out of danger.
Also if they are in a charisma situation that goes south badly without the party right there, the extra 10 feet of movement (20 with a double dash) could be the difference between life and death.
Since bards technically only need the one stat of Charisma (although Dex and Con are admittedly nice, they’re not necessary), this opens up room for a useful feat.
Melee Warlock & Melee Ranger builds. For most conventional builds of these classes, they’re going to want to stay at range and Mobile shouldn’t come into play unless things go wrong. However, if you go with a melee-based ranger or a Pact of the Blade/Hexblade warlock then you have a combat based character without huge AC and a d8 instead of d10 or d12 for hit points on dice.
In those situations, having the extra movement and dodging opportunity attacks could be an important edge – especially as these characters would want to choose their spots as opposed to straight up frontline tanking.
5th Ed Classes that should consider taking the Mobile Feat
- Barbarian
- Bard
- Rangers (melee build)
- Warlock (melee builds)
5E Classes That Should NEVER Take the Mobile Feat
To be clear, if someone in one of these classes decided to take the Mobile feat, I wouldn’t call it a bad pick. Mobile is useful for about everyone, and in a long campaign once the sorcerer got a “half feat” as a reward for spending so much time with the monk and received +5 movement. You wouldn’t think on a sorcerer that would ever come into play, but sometimes it did and when it did it was really important and surprisingly effective as a boon.
In the right situations, especially wen enemies close in on PCs who don’t want to get down and dirty, Mobile would be an outstanding option to “Nope” right out of that.
However, these are classes that often need two stats maxed out, have feats that are “must haves” first, and therefore just don’t have enough open spaces to pick up Mobile on top of the other more pressing feats and ability score upgrades.
So this doesn’t mean the 5E Mobile feat wouldn’t be useful for them…it means that between the ability score upgrades and feats the spaces run out before Mobile makes sense as a viable option.
Because of those reasons classes that can skip Mobile to look at other options are:
- Artificer
- Cleric
- Paladin
- Ranger
- Sorcerer
- Warlock
- Wizard
When you’re playing one of these classes, minus the earlier notable exceptions, then feel free to move on to the next set of feats.
5th Ed classes that should never take the Mobile Feat
- Artificer
- Cleric
- Paladin
- Ranger
- Sorcerer
- Warlock
- Wizard
Final Feat Grade for 5E Mobile
Mobile Feat Grade: B+
Is the 5E Mobile Feat Worth It?
The Mobile feat is an excellent feat that is practical, helpful to any character, and offers a lot of utility to many classes. While stacking with the abilities of others to make them just scary good. This feat hits a lot of the checkmarks I want to see. It’s versatile, it’s situationally powerful, it’s always useful.
While it’s not quite A-Tier (or S-Tier for you gaming fans) it is an outstanding feat that deserves a high grade, high consideration from players, and gets both. The 5E Mobile feat is an excellent option.
Mobile Feat FAQ
Is there any way to counter the Mobile feat as a DM?
The polearm + Sentinel combination still has a chance since the polearm master allows a potential hit before the monk gets in range to attack, meaning a hit could stick them where they are. Having spellcasters with spells like thunderwave, which shoot out from where the caster is standing could potentially help, as well.
Your other option is having a flying monster or spellcaster who can use the z axis to fly and just get out of the reach of the monk who can run everywhere.
Does the Mobile feat stack?
The Mobile feat stacks with other boosts or character boons. This means the +10 from the feat adds up on top of the extra movement that both monks and barbarians get, giving them the ability to really cover ground at a high level.
Does Sentinel work against Mobile in 5E?
No. Jeremy Crawford answered this directly that Sentinel was designed to deal with disengage and does not negate Mobile. However, polearm master still gives the chance to hit with that first attack, at which point sentinel could actually kick in based on DM ruling.
Can you take the Mobile feat twice?
No. The Mobile feat can only be taken once and is more than powerful enough as is.
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Proud to embrace the locally created moniker of “Corrupt Overlord” from one of the all time great Lords of Waterdeep runs, Shane is one member of the Assorted Meeples crew and will be hard at work creating awesome content for the website. He is a long-time player of board games, one time semi-professional poker player, and tends to run to the quirky or RPG side of things when it comes to playing video games. He loves tabletop roleplaying systems like Dungeons & Dragons, Pathfinder, Werewolf, Fate, and others, and not only has been a player but has run games as DM for years. You can find his other work in publications like Level Skip or Hobby Lark.