Yesterday, I did a bit of napkin math to see, roughly, how a Monk versus a Barbarian would do damage-wise under sort of controlled circumstances. This ignored all subclass features, and assumed that each character began with a +3 to their primary attack stat (Strength for Barbarian, Dexterity for Monk). It also assumed what I thought was a reasonable "boss level" Armor Class, with 16 for tier 1, 18 for tier 2, 20 for tier 3, and 22 for tier 4, and calculated it as if they were at the last level of each tier - 4, 10, 16, and 20. I also had each get a magic weapon starting with tier 2 - a +1 Greataxe or Quarterstaff, then +2 at tier 3, and +3 at tier 4.
I calculated the average damage that each class should do going all-out - the Barbarian was raging (though not, admittedly, doing reckless attacks) while the Monk was doing Flurry of Blows each turn.
In the end, the Monk kept ahead of the Barbarian until level 20, when the Primal Champion feature boosted both damage and the chance to hit enough that it overwhelmed the extra damage of the Monk's unarmed strikes.
This is a narrow and somewhat contrived situation of course, with a lot of unexplored factors.
Perhaps the biggest of those factors is Stunning Strike.
Stunning Strike is a potentially devastating ability - if you stun a monster, they get taken out of commission for an entire round, and during that time, the party will be significantly more likely to rain down heavy damage upon that target, meaning there's a good chance it'll be taken out before it gets its next turn.
However, there are a couple mitigating factors that undercut the ability.
The first is that the DC is set by Wisdom, rather than Dexterity. While a Monk that starts off with the Standard Array could get their Wisdom maxed out eventually, chances are they are unlikely to boost Wisdom at the same rate that, say, a Wizard would do with Intelligence. So their DC is unlikely to be quite as high as a caster's would.
On top of that, Constitution, as far as saving throws go, is a tough one. In all of (officially published) 5th Edition, only 38 stat blocks have a negative Constitution modifier, and only one of them, the Eidolon, is of a CR above 2. And 5 of those are immune to the stunned condition anyway.
So, while a Warlock might pick something like Synaptic Static, which requires an Intelligence save, against any number of monstrosities, beasts, or other monsters that aren't terribly bright, Monks aren't going to have a ton of monsters that are easy to stun.
Now, here's a question to consider: what is the unique thing that a Monk brings to a party? Stunning Strike is probably it. In terms of melee damage dealers, certainly Monks can hit many times, but they generally hit for less than other melee classes, and on top of that, they often have fewer hit points due to being a d8 class.
I will note that perfect balance is not something I think is quite as important in D&D as it is in a game like World of Warcraft. It's also a game where the sample size is small enough that any really tight balance tuning would get lost in the noise of big swings like critical hits. And I think that the Monk primarily exists to allow a player to feel like they're really getting that fantasy about the expert martial artist - someone who can fight monsters effectively with nothing but a stick - and even without the stick, if they lose it.
I do wonder, though, about the effect Stunning Strike might have on the balance decisions for a Monk.
As I see it, the Fighter's big strategy for dealing lots of damage is to hit many times - this is why they get action surge and their extra attack eventually gives them four attacks.
But a Fighter is also generally hitting with heavier weapons, and their subclass features often boost the damage in some way - such as through the Rune Knight's runes, or a Battle Master's maneuvers.
Monks actually get the ability to unleash a ton of attacks pretty early on - indeed, by level 2, they can do three attacks in a round (albeit only twice per short rest).
To me, I think the most glaring issue with the Monk is its lack of "scaling" with magic items. It's not that it doesn't have any - the attack action itself can use any magic weapon the class can access. And so, like most martial classes, you get two attacks you can do with a magic weapon. The unarmed strike or strikes that follow are technically just gravy.
But it seems to me that an obvious magic item that we have somehow not yet seen in 5th Edition is one that would increase the attack and damage bonuses to unarmed strikes. Such a thing would give players the option to fully forgo their melee weapons once their martial arts die got high enough, and it would also make the class feel somewhat less disjointed.
In Fizban's Treasury of Dragons, we got the first (I believe) magic item that is designed specifically for Monks, the Dragonhide Belt. However, this boosts the other half of the Monk's toolbox - namely, it increases their Ki saving throw DC. This, of course, makes it more likely that a foe will fail their Stunning Strike save.
And again, Stunning Strike is a hugely powerful ability when it goes off. But I wonder if the Monk would be allowed to get crazier as a damage-dealing option if the focus of the class were moved away from that.
How do you fix it?
So, what we're proposing here is nerfing Stunning Strike in some way with the intention of then improving the Monk's damage-dealing capabilities - none of this nerf would go into effect if there weren't a buff.
The first thing that came to mind was simply making Stunning Strike come later - perhaps even as a level 11 ability (currently it's level 5). This would mean that in adventures that only go up through tier 2, you wouldn't get the ability. This is, to be honest, somewhat harsh, and it might discourage players from actually picking up the Monk if they have to wait that long to get such an iconic ability.
The next thing I'd considered was making Stunning Strike cost 2 ki points instead of 1. This would mean you'd have to be a lot more conservative with the ability - higher risk for the same reward. Ideally, the design would then create more 1-ki options that are attractive. For example, the Way of Mercy's Hands of Harm is actually a more efficient use of ki points than Flurry of Blows until you hit level 6 and get a free one when you use Flurry of Blows. Stunning Strike is huge, but maybe the designers could explore other options that might seem more appealing.
The final proposal here is to simply limit how many Stunning Strikes you can do to one per turn. In this case, a Monk would likely attempt one any turn they hit, but they would naturally be forced to save more Ki, which they could then spend on damaging abilities.
Alternatively, if Stunning Strike is to be the major defining feature of the class, perhaps there needs to be more built into it. Indeed, perhaps the Monk could be the "debilitator," with many abilities that disempower their foes. Stunning might just be the most dramatic of these, but maybe the kind of trips and shoves that an Open Hand Monk can do should be available to the class as a whole.
If this is where they would take the class, I'd suggest that there need to be some things that either use different saving throws or perhaps activate automatically on a hit - you could spend a ki point when you hit a target and they have disadvantage on their next attack, for example.
Stunning Strike is such an enormous all-or-nothing ability that it's hard to make it feel good to use without it feeling too insanely powerful. The DM wants to use their monsters, but the Monk wants to feel like they've done something cool. So there could be some compromise.
The thing is, I find playing a Monk very fun. But while super-tight balance tuning isn't necessarily that important in D&D, I think there is always that potential for frustration if you pick a really cool class and it just... doesn't quite perform as well as you thought it would.
Monks absolutely fit a major fantasy archetype (and one that isn't Western-centric, though admittedly a lot of the concepts here are filtered through a Western lens,) and I think it's great that they're in the Player's Handbook. But I'm very eager to see the kind of changes Wizards have in mind when they come out with the 2024 PHB.
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