Am I reading the Leucrotta's abilities correctly?

[tchntm43]

I'm planning for the party (4x level 4) to encounter a leucrotta during the next adventure. It's in a wide open area with plenty of space to run around. They are also with an NPC who is a cleric without a weapon on hand. It's meant to be a fairly easy fight (Leucrotta is CR 3). However, some of its abilities have me wondering. It says that if it makes a Hooves attack, it can use Disengage as a bonus action.

Normally, you can move up to your Speed in feet and use an action in a turn. Disengage is normally an action that allows you to move your full Speed without provoking an opportunity attack. The leucrotta has a high Speed of 50. So... basically this thing can run up to a character, use Multiattack to bite and use its hooves, and then that allows it to Disengage as well as a bonus action, taking it 50 ft away by the end of its turn. That's far enough away that nobody in the party can reach it and attack in one turn. It sounds like this makes it nearly impossible to hit with melee attacks. Am I reading it correctly?

[Cicciograna]

Disengage is normally an action that allows you to move your full Speed without provoking an opportunity attack.

This is not correct. The Disengage action allows you to move without provoking attacks of opportunity, it doesn't give you additional movement. The leucrotta is still limited to 50ft per turn, so it cannot Disengage to move 50ft away, unless he was already in melee range with its opponents.

[tchntm43]

Ah, I see, that makes sense. I thought Disengage included the movement as part of the action. Thanks!

[Corran]

What you are saying will be harder to do in practice, because the leucrotta is lacking ranged attacks. So it will need to spend movement to approach each round, assuming it sent movement to go back. Unless the melee PC's do sth stupid like constantly trying to hunt down the leucrota and somehow achieving to always end their turns no more than 15 feet away from it, its disengage ability combined with 50' of movement will only be good at engaging or fleeing. Switching targets after you lure the melee pc's away enough from the squishies is the only worry, but once again this is not that easy to pull off (especially if you don't pay attention to terrain beforehand; and still, you rely on pc movement a lot for it to work), but seeing it's only a CR3 and your group is 4x4 plus a healer npc, I wouldn't worry at all.