They’re the pugilist-style fighters mixing unarmed strikes with other weaponry in perfect harmony. This core concept is front and center of all the mechanics the class brings to the table. They are martial artists who have perfected their form over years of study and patience, masters of the self more so than any other class.
Through raw willpower, they can withstand the most horrific conditions like they were nothing. Their bodies are lethal weapons, with a sharpened mind capable of shrugging off temptations. Stunning Strike is the only thing keeping the Monk from slipping below even the Ranger.Guide by Sam West, person with perfect complete control over every element of themself defines the identity of Monk. You don't kill a dragon by Evading its breath weapon, you kill it with a vorpal sword or after a Forcecage spell. And that's nice! It really is! But as the 3e Monk already showed us, being able to survive through some stuff is not actual agency. Some immunities, cleansing conditions, Evasion, Deflect Missiles, that kind of thing. The only thing the Monk is genuinely good at is stacking up secondary defenses. It's kind of impressive how self-sabotaging the Monk is. You're not fantastic at any of them, and you can only really do one of those three well at a time.
You can be fairly mobile, fairly defensive, or fairly offensive. There's this whole anti-synergy drenched throughout the base Monk (I haven't experienced all the later sub-classes). Several nice bits that don't go well together. Oh and the enemy mage has to be in dim light or else your trick can't even work in the first place.Īnd that kind of sums up the 5e Monk for me. So you have kind of sub-par damage (every other martial type can do more even at level 5, and the difference only goes up from there) for a chance to maybe stun, but definitely get wrecked on the counter-attack. Which is not bad as such, but your attacks can still miss and the mage's saving throw can still succeed. Which are honestly not all that hot, you've got medium AC and HP and probably can't take that line of fighters collapsing on you.Īlso, you can't use the bonus action to make any additional attacks, so you have only two attacks (from the Extra Attack feature). But in this scenario you've already spent your bonus action on Shadow Step, so you're left with just your regular defenses. The problem here is, "going into bullet-time" would require the Dodge action, I'd think? And for a point of ki you can do so as a bonus action. It would be nice to see more mechanics that reward and incentivize monks moving around a lot.Īnd yes, the elemental monk competes with beastmaster rangers for weakest subclass in 5e. I mean, it isn’t bad to be mobile obviously, and there are ways to abuse it by kiting if the environment allows (though again that tends to get unfun pretty quickly) but as a major part of class identify it feels like it has diminishing returns on what it can achieve-getting faster and faster stops mattering outside of edge cases at some point. Monks also suffer a bit because mobility isn’t that useful in 5e. I wouldn’t mind seeing some of the power of stunning stroke reduced in exchange for buffing other parts of their kit. A 5th level monk can make 4 attacks in a round and potentially stun on every one of them (and because they decide whether to stunning strike after they hit, they don't have to burn any ki points beyond what it takes to land a stun), which can trivialize many encounters, particularly against single strong opponents who even with legendary resistance and good saves may struggle to make that many saves in a row.īut while spamming stun is effective it isn’t that fun for anyone, nor is it something I think of as being iconic to the archetype of fantasy martial arts.
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