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What do we think of the new Monk?
(lemmy.world)
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I'm lukewarm on it. By my measure, the critical flaw in the monk's design is stunning strike. Any discussion on the monk that I've had has invariably been pulled to that singular ability.
It's an incredibly swingy ability that only costs one point. As a result all monks need to weigh all their point-cost abilities against it, and in combat either the monk is a mediocre contributor or they undermine the whole encounter by disabling key actors. SS was nerfed, but I'd like to see a version where it was removed entirely and it's power was distributed throughout the class.
A key compromise that I think would be healthy is to transplant stunning strike into a subclass. That way players who enjoy that playstyle can opt for it, and DMs who dislike running games for those builds can disallow them at their table.
As for all the other details, I'm uncertain. There are some improvements, but it's hard not to see the system bending over backwards and straining to fit around stunning strike.
I like the monk as the class who applied status conditions to enemies. The guy who runs around the battlefield who supports his allies but debuffing the enemies. So stun works with that fantasy but if it's in a subclass like open hand that allows the others to have a cool signature ability at like 5th level.
Since I doubt that will happen I enjoy the changes now. You can do stun once and then use your discipline points elsewhere.
I absolutely agree with you on the Stunning Strike matter. The nerf has helped - it's gone from "Use almost all my Ki on Stunning Strike." to "What can I afford to use Ki on while Stunning Strike is on cooldown?" But it's still the wrong kind of question to be asking, and IMO it's exactly the kind of debilitating ability that makes DnD unfun.