The spell literally named after running away is a kiting engine, and a level 1 warlock holding it is scarier than the same warlock holding Hex. Come fight me about it.
Today we’re looking at a 1st level transmutation spell called Expeditious Retreat. Available to Sorcerers, Warlocks, and Wizards, plus Artificers, who’ve had it since the class showed up in Eberron and again in Tasha’s, plus the Eldritch Knight who spends a free-school pick on it and anyone with a Mark of Passage from Eberron, this spell does one thing. It hands you the Dash action as a bonus action, every turn, for ten minutes. You cast it, you move double, and your action is untouched.
Sitting at a range of self, a casting time of one bonus action, and a concentration duration of up to ten minutes, Expeditious Retreat is a rogue’s Cunning Action for anyone willing to burn a 1st level slot. And it’s ten minutes. Bless lasts one. Haste lasts one. This thing lasts a hundred rounds, which means you cast it before you kick the door and it is still running when the fight is over and you are looting the room at a jog.
The community angle on this spell is a fight about whether it’s any good at all. One camp says it’s a first-level slot and a bonus action for a huge chunk of movement, take it every time. The other camp says it’s concentration, it only moves you, and Longstrider exists. Both camps are right about something, and we’ll sort out which one is right about your character. There’s also a never-ending math argument about how far you can move with it, so we’ll do the numbers.
Let’s take a look at the rules as written, and remember, you can always fight me in the comments if you read it different.
RAW
- Casting Time: 1 bonus action
- Range: Self
- Components: V, S
- Duration: Concentration, up to 10 minutes
Here’s the 2014 text, straight from the Player’s Handbook, page 238:
“This spell allows you to move at an incredible pace. When you cast this spell, and then as a bonus action on each of your turns until the spell ends, you can take the Dash action.”
Two sentences, and the second one is carrying everything, so let’s slow down.
“When you cast this spell.” People ask about this clause constantly. The Dash is part of the casting. You spend your bonus action to cast Expeditious Retreat, and as part of that same bonus action you get to Dash right then. You do not wait a round for the buff to kick in. Cast it, run, same bonus action, same turn.
“And then as a bonus action on each of your turns until the spell ends.” Every turn after that, your bonus action buys you another Dash. Your action is untouched the whole time. Fire Bolt and move 60. Eldritch Blast and move 60. Disengage and move 60 without a single opportunity attack, which is the escape hatch the name promises.
“You can take the Dash action.” This is where the math arguments start, so let’s be exact. Dash does not double your speed. Dash gives you extra movement equal to your speed. Speed 30 and you take the Dash action, you can move 60 feet this turn. Take a second Dash with your action on top of the bonus action Dash, that’s another 30, so 90 feet total. That is the ceiling. People show up on Reddit asking whether Expeditious Retreat lets them move four times their speed, and the answer is 30 plus 30 plus 30, 90 feet, every turn, as long as you’re willing to spend your whole turn running. The Dash action also says “after applying any modifiers,” which matters in both directions. Longstrider bumps you to 40, so each Dash is worth 40. Dragging someone you’ve grappled halves you to 15, and that halves every Dash too.
Let’s put it on the table. Your level 2 wizard has 30 feet of speed and three zombies have just shambled up and surrounded you. Bonus action, cast Expeditious Retreat and Dash as part of it, so you’ve got 60 feet of movement this turn. Action, Disengage. You walk 60 feet away and none of the three gets a swing at you. Their turn, a zombie’s speed is 20, so even a Dashing zombie covers 40, and the closest one ends its turn 20 feet short of you. Your next turn, bonus action Dash, move 60 again, and this time your action is free, so Fire Bolt the lead zombie over your shoulder. They Dash again and now they’re 40 behind. You do it again. Ten minutes of this. The zombies never get to roll an attack, and you are a level 2 wizard who just solved three zombies with a 1st level slot and some jogging. Against something with your own speed you’ll be spending the action on Disengage every turn instead of Fire Bolt, but that’s still a fight where nobody ever touches you.
Range is self. You cannot cast this on the fighter. You cannot cast it on the rogue who already has a bonus action Dash and doesn’t need it. It is you, and only you, and if you wanted a mobility buff to hand out, Longstrider is a touch spell and this one is a selfish spell.
At Higher Levels
There isn’t one, and that hurts one class in particular. Expeditious Retreat does the same thing out of a 1st level slot and a 9th level slot. Nothing scales. For a sorcerer or a wizard that just means never upcast it. For a warlock it’s a real problem, because Pact Magic slots are always your highest level, so a level 5 warlock is spending a 3rd level slot on a spell that wanted a 1st. That’s why the optimizer crowd loves it on a warlock at levels 1 and 2 and swaps it out the moment the slots grow up. Same spell, higher price.
Limits and Cheeses
The quick version, because the good stuff lives in the companion uses post.
The big limit is concentration. You hold Expeditious Retreat or you hold Hex, Bless, Faerie Fire, or whatever else your build lives on, and for most casters past the first few levels that trade is a loser. That’s the case against the spell, and it’s a fair one.
The second limit is that it’s a self buff. The party doesn’t get faster. This spell helps exactly one person get away, and that person is you, which is a little awkward when the fighter is still back there.
Third, you do not get a second action. Reddit asks this one every month. The spell gives you Dash as a bonus action and nothing else, no extra attack, no extra spell. And because it’s a bonus action spell, the 2014 rule says you can’t cast another leveled spell on the same turn, only a cantrip with a casting time of one action. Eldritch Blast then Expeditious Retreat, fine. Expeditious Retreat then Jump, no.
The cheeses are where it gets fun. Warlocks with Repelling Blast push a melee monster back ten feet per beam while walking away 60, so the monster never gets to swing. Grapplers drag people at Dash speed. Flyers in 2024 get to Dash with their fly speed, in writing. The Mobile feat turns every one of those bonus action Dashes into a difficult terrain ignorer. Charger in 2024 hands you ten extra feet per Dash. All of that, with the real Reddit threads and a few ideas nobody should try, is in the Expeditious Retreat uses post. This one’s about the spell itself and where it came from.
The 2014 version versus the 2024 version
Did Expeditious Retreat change in the 2024 Player’s Handbook? The spell itself, no. The rules around it, a little.
Same 1st level transmutation, same one bonus action, same range of self, same verbal and somatic components, same concentration up to ten minutes, still no higher-level scaling. The text got trimmed. The 2024 version, page 270, reads: “You take the Dash action, and until the spell ends, you can take that action again as a Bonus Action.” The flavor sentence about moving at an incredible pace is gone. The 2014 “you can take the Dash action” when you cast became “you take the Dash action,” so the first Dash is automatic instead of optional, which changes nothing unless you were casting the spell and then choosing not to run. The turn-by-turn bonus action Dash is the same.
Two things near the spell did move. First, the 2024 Dash action explicitly says that if you have a special speed, a fly speed or a swim speed, you can use that speed when you Dash and you pick which speed every time. In 2014 that was the common ruling; in 2024 it’s printed. So a 2024 sorcerer with Fly up and Expeditious Retreat up is Dashing 60 feet of flight as a bonus action every turn, and nobody at the table gets to argue. Second, the 2014 “bonus action spell means no other leveled spell this turn” rule was rewritten as “you can expend only one spell slot per turn.” For Expeditious Retreat the result is the same, one slot spell on your turn, cantrips fine. And for the Eberron people, the 2024-rules Artificer in Forge of the Artificer still has it on the list.
If you know the 2014 spell, you know the 2024 spell. The Dash action around it got a little friendlier.
History
Now the part I love, because Expeditious Retreat has a sneaky history. It is not one of the 1974 spells, and it is not in the AD&D 1st edition Player’s Handbook either, so if you assumed it was a 3rd edition baby you were close, but you were off by one book.
The spell first shows up in AD&D 2nd edition, in the 1996 Player’s Option: Spells and Magic supplement rather than the core book, page 141, as a 1st level wizard Alteration spell, and the flavor text credits it to a wizard named Kerith, “noted for his astounding lack of courage in the face of even the most insignificant dangers.” I am not making that up. The spell was invented in-fiction by a coward, to help him flee, and the mechanics matched. It tripled your movement rate, so a wizard with a movement of 12 ran at 36, and it let you jump 5 feet up or 15 feet across with ease. But if you moved at all, you could do nothing else that round. No half move and throw a dagger, no casting, no charging, just running. It lasted 3 rounds plus 1 per level, and you could not stack any other movement boost on top of it. It got reprinted in the Wizard’s Spell Compendium a year later. The original was an all-or-nothing sprint.
3rd edition in 2000 brought it into the core Player’s Handbook as a 1st level sorcerer and wizard transmutation, and the design flipped. Gone was the “you can only run” restriction. Instead it gave you a flat plus 30 feet to your base land speed as an enhancement bonus, so a 30-foot human ran at 60 and still got to act. It took your action to cast, personal range, and it lasted a minute per caster level. The 3.5 revision in 2003 kept all of that and added it to the bard list, and it spelled out that the bonus did nothing for your burrow, climb, fly, or swim speed. This was the era where it was a reliable escape button until you got Fly.
4th edition, 2008, folded it into the powers system as a wizard utility 2 daily power. It was a move action, and the effect was “shift up to twice your speed,” which in 4e terms means you moved double and did not provoke. One use a day, one big free disengage. Very 4e.
Then 5th edition, 2014, gave it the shape you know. Instead of a speed bonus, it hands you the Dash action as a bonus action, which keeps your real action free and scales with whatever your speed happens to be. It moved to a bonus action cast, it picked up concentration, and the duration jumped to ten minutes. And 2024, as we covered, left the spell alone and tidied the rules around it.
So the arc is a coward’s sprint in 1996, a flat speed buff in 2000, a once-a-day double shift in 2008, and a ten-minute bonus action Dash in 2014. Thirty years, four editions, and the name never changed, which I appreciate, because “Expeditious Retreat” is the most honest spell name in the book.
Opinion
Expeditious Retreat is a build spell. It’s a bad default pick and a great pick for the right character, and the whole internet fight about it is people from those two worlds talking past each other.
If you’re a sorcerer or wizard who stands in the back and throws leveled spells, this is a wasted slot, because your concentration is worth more than your footspeed and Misty Step covers your emergencies. If you’re a low-level warlock who lives on Eldritch Blast, or an Artificer on a DM’s giant battle map, or any caster whose plan is “never be in melee, ever,” this spell is the best use of a 1st level slot you have, because the thing it buys you, a free action and 60 feet every turn for ten minutes, is the whole game for a kiter. And on a level 1 or 2 warlock I will take it over Hex without blinking, because Hex at that level is a d6 on one beam and this is never getting hit.
Tell me where you land. Is Expeditious Retreat a dead slot on your caster, or have you kited an entire encounter to death with it? And be honest, have you ever used it to leave the party behind? Let me know in the comments below, go read the companion post for all the ways to squeeze this thing, and until next time, roll high and stay ridiculous.
