Does the extra movement you get from the Travel Devotion Feat provoke attacks of opportunity?

Question

If you employ the domain feat Travel Devotion (Complete Champion, p. 62) you can

Once per day as a swift action, (...) activate this ability to move up to your speed as a swift action each round.

The benefit granted by a domain feat usually is a spell-like ability (Complete Champion, p. 52). Since it is also a swift action it should be treated as a quickened spell-like ability, which according to the Rules Compendium (actions in combat, p. 8) does not provoke attacks of opportunity.

So my question is: Does this mean that the extra movement you get from this feat does not provoke attacks of opportunity?

Or is it just the activation of this ability which does not provoke attacks of opportunity – and the movement still does?

(I know that this feat has already been discussed quite a bit, but I haven´t found anything about this particular detail.)

Answer 1

The rules are pretty consistent—though not remotely clear—about “provocations” being things that can happen repeatedly during a single action. For example, spellcasting or making a ranged attack both provoke attacks of opportunity, and that means if you cast a ranged-attack spell, you provoke twice—even though you are casting with a single standard action.

Likewise, a spell-like ability that allows you to move provokes twice, once for the casting and once for the moving. Travel Devotion falls under this category—so even though the activation itself doesn’t provoke, the resulting swift-action movement can and will.¹ There is no rule that swift actions generally fail to provoke, after all, just that swift-action spells don’t.

On which point, be careful about cross-applying rules about spells to spell-like abilities—despite the name, spell-like abilities are rather unlike spells in a number of ways.² Rules Compendium fails to make the same statement about swift-action spell-like abilities that it does with swift-action spells. This is probably an oversight—after all, it does list Quickened spell-like abilities with a “No” in the AoO column—but you cannot generally assume that rules that say “spells” will also apply to “spell-like abilities.”

1. _{Depending, of course, on how you move.}

2. _{The term “spell-like ability” refers to the fact that spell-like abilities usually mimic some particular spell, making a specific spell-like ability “like” that spell except for all the ways in which spell-like abilities are not spells.}