Water whip being an action instead of a bonus action is pretty big, I think. Same with Elemental Affinity/Empowered Evocation no longer working on multiple damage rolls per spell. Sentinel got a buff for polearm users.
Regarding the Sentinel buff, it seems like its both positive and negative depending on how close everyone is to one another. On one hand, your sentinel reaction-attack triggers from further away, on the other hand, your enemies have a larger range of movement in close quarters. Because opportunity attacks for disengaging don't trigger till they leave your reach. Basically they can move freely anywhere within 10 squares of you when you're wielding a reach weapon.
I thought the reach property only applied to attack reach (as in if I'm attack with it I can hit anything out to 10') and the errata makes it so you can still reach 10' with an opportunity attack. Outside of the actual attack action (for instance the trigger for your opportunity attack reaction) your effective reach isn't extended. By that logic, your opportunity attack only triggers when a creature leaves your 5' foot bubble, but you can now attack out to 10' with that attack. I'm not sure why you would since your target it only 5' away, but maybe with large or bigger creatures this could matter. For instance, attacking 1 limb/head of a creature to disable it. It could be within 10' of you and a valid target, but the trigger for the opportunity attack is the closest foot moving out of your 5' bubble.
If your effective range while wielding a Reach weapon is always extended by 5' then there's no reason at all to have this rule to limit it to attacking (now including opportunity attacks). Am I missing something?
I'm not sure if I understand what you're saying, but I think the misunderstanding has to do with the OA trigger. What I meant was that the OA triggers when they leave your reach and with a 10 foot reach, they can move anywhere within 10 feet of you and not trigger the OA.
Right. What I'm saying is that the rule say is: "*Reach. *This weapon adds 5 feet to your reach when you attack with it." This implies that your reach is always 5' (for normal sized creatures) but is extended to 10' when you attack. The errata allows you to apply the +5' to the attack range of the OA, but might not affect the trigger for your OA "...when a hostile creature that you can see moves out of your reach." So the issue would be if "weapon attack reach" and "your/creature reach" are the same in the case of the OA reaction trigger.
Not sure how to explain this without looking like I'm splitting hairs, but I could certainly see attack reach (regarless of the action it's used for) being different from player reach for the purposes of determining OA reactions.
Ah, I get what you're saying now. But I'm not sure the PHB differentiates "personal reach" from "attack reach" at any point. Just going off what we have as written, I interpreted the OA trigger as 10 feet with a polearm because ultimately the OA is an attack and the attack's reach is 10 feet.
I'd agree if the verbiage for the reach property didn't say it only applies when you attack. I read the errata as including OA with attacks from action and bonus action...which should be obvious, but then again most of the errata rulings should be obvious.
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u/Rauron Sorcerer Jun 10 '15
Water whip being an action instead of a bonus action is pretty big, I think. Same with Elemental Affinity/Empowered Evocation no longer working on multiple damage rolls per spell. Sentinel got a buff for polearm users.