As it turns out, the simple addition of Weapon Mastery to Fighters and Barbarians will be enough to give them a significant damage boost, or a great deal of battlefield utility, with effects like Push, Topple, Slow, and Sap.
In the 2024PHB, Monks will be classified as Warriors, gaining access to these weapon masteries along with, presumably, the Fighting Style feats. Truthfully, though, it appears that Rangers and Paladins are likely to also get the benefits of these Warrior traits (no word on Rogues, but as the last obligate weapon-based class, it would seem unfair to deny them weapon mastery).
Now, two things strike me about Weapon Mastery when it comes to the Monk. The first thing is that Monks are famous for their unarmed strikes. While any Monk with a magical weapon (and, before tier 3 or so, any quarterstaff or spear) is going to be using that weapon for their primary attacks, Monks are built around the utility of their unarmed strikes.
Now, you could argue that the bonus hit (or hits with Flurry of Blows) are icing on the cake, and don't deserve to get the weapon mastery bonuses. I'm not really here to offer solutions in this post, but only to suggest that there might be a reason to let Monks do something special with those masteries.
Indeed, one could imagine that when you choose a mastery at the start of your day, your unarmed strikes benefit from the same one - you might get Vex, or Slow, for instance. On the other hand, some, such as Flex or Nick, don't really make sense for unarmed strikes.
As an alternative, there might be a selection of specific "unarmed strike mastery options," and perhaps a Monk could get access here to things they normally wouldn't get on their weapons, such as Graze, Push, or Topple.
The Monk is far more fragile than most classes that are built to be in melee all the time - they have only a d8 hit die, but unlike Rogues (who are often at range anyway), they do not have anything like Uncanny Dodge. In order to gain a defensive benefit, they need to sacrifice both damage and a resource for something like Patient Defense.
I've always suspected that the reason for this is that the Monk's Stunning Strike is such a powerful effect when it goes off. You can more or less take a foe out for a full round, during which your party is set up to much more easily kill them. But Stunning Strike is not reliable - it requires a Constitution save (something almost every monster has at least some bonus to) against a DC set by a stat you might have as your secondary or tertiary priority. I think it's fine that this doesn't go off reliably, but because it's so powerful when it works.
However, we've got a new condition that's still powerful, but not so profoundly powerful that we would need to nerf Monks' defensive abilities in response. And that is Dazed. The Dazed condition limits the creature to either moving or using an action, preventing bonus actions and reactions.
This will not fully prevent a foe from making any attacks, but it will, for instance, allow the Monk to strike them and then run away safely, and keep the foe either locked down or unable to attack, severely lessening it as a threat, but not allowing the party to pile on with a bunch of attacks at advantage.
Dazing Strike could thus free up a lot of design space to make the Monk a tougher class to kill, and bring them in line with the other melee classes.
So, now that we're committing to that, where do we look to improve a Monk's survivability?
Let's compare a Standard Array Monk with a Standard Array Fighter. We'll assume each has a +3 to their main stat (Dexterity for the Monk, Strength for the Fighter) and +2 to two secondary stats (say Wisdom and Constitution for the Monk, and Intelligence and Constitution for the Fighter).
The Fighter at level 1 can get Chain Mail for an AC of 16, and has 12 HP. The Monk, using Unarmored Defense, gets an AC of 15, and has 10 HP.
Now, the Fighter can also pick up a shield, but let's assume that they're both more focused on damage-dealing (actually, the Monk isn't really choosing one or the other).
The balance of damage to survival is not precisely the same (and remember, we want the game to have these weird trade-offs where neither option feels strictly better than the other while still feeling distinct) but right now the Monk is taking more damage due to the lower AC and also has only 5/6 of the Fighter's HP.
Now, contrasted with the Barbarian, the Barbarian does tend to have lower AC than the Fighter (outside of magic armor, a Barbarian can technically reach higher AC, but it's unlikely) but they also have Rage and higher HP to compensate for these things. The Monk, usually at lower AC (with those starting stats, they're not going to hit the Fighter's nonmagical maximum until level 12 at the earliest) does not have any ongoing damage reduction.
And, if we're encouraging players to take feats rather than the standard ASI, they'll increase their ACs at a slower rate, and likely not getting to 18 AC until level 20.
So, how might we fix this?
The first is simple: we give the Monk a d10 hit die. Now, the Monk is keeping pace with Fighters, Paladins, and Rangers (who honestly would probably be fine with a d8) in terms of HP. Given their reliance on both Dexterity and Wisdom, it might be difficult for them to boost Constitution over time, though, so even here, they're likely going to lag a little behind on HP. That's not so terrible, though, if we expect them to be a little better at damage-dealing.
But if the AC and the HP are both lower, do we need something else?
I suggested in earlier posts that the Monk could have some subtractive damage reduction. A Barbarian halves the damage they take from most standard weapons, which makes them much better at tanking the massive hits of a giant monster, but a subtractive system would, by contrast, be more effective against lots of small attacks.
The Heavy Armor Master feat, in One D&D, reduces incoming "BPS" damage by an amount equal to your proficiency bonus. We could explore this as a model.
A Zombie hits for an average of 4.5 damage (1d6+1,) so if we gave Monks the same style of damage reduction, they will only take any damage in tier 1 if they the Zombie rolls a 2 or higher. I believe that the average here is 2.5, but just to check: we've got 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 damage, averaging to, yeah 2.5.
A Barbarian, on the other hand, using Rage, will simply take half the average, for 2.75.
Now, if we go to higher-level foes, a Marilith makes six Longsword attacks for an average of 13 damage each, and a single tail attack for an average of 15.
Our tier 3 Monk we'll say is knocking 5 off of each of these, taking a total of 48 from all the longsword attacks (if they all hit) and then 10 from the tail, for a total of 58.
The Barbarian it simply taking the full 78 from the swords and 15 from the tail, but halving both to 38+7, or 45.
By contrast, an Iron Golem (same CR as the Marilith) is dealing 23 damage with each of its two sword attacks, for a total of 46.
The Monk in this case is reducing the swords to 18, for a total of 36 damage, while the Barbarian is just halving both attacks to 11, taking only 22.
Now, in fact, both of these scenarios favor the Barbarian, but we could imagine that if it's not one big scary monster but just a ton of smaller ones, the Monk might come out ahead. Still, we create two classes that are better in different scenarios.
We could adjust the damage reduction to fine-tune it, perhaps decoupling it from PB.
I honestly don't think the Monks have too much trouble in terms of damage output, and as we looked at earlier, the new version of dual-wielding, now tied to the Nick weapon mastery, can give them a crazy number of attacks per round, and their access to two weapon fighting as a Fighting Style on top of that gives them a very solid damage output.
I don't know how long it will be before we get the One D&D version of the Monk, but I could imagine some big upgrades.
One thing I do wonder about is Ki Points - which are evidently being renamed "Spirit Points" in an effort to avoid drawing as strong a connection between the class an East Asian culture (the logic here is a little convoluted, but the idea is, I think, to make it less "the Asian class" and thus make the other classes equally work for Asian-inspired settings and characters... I'll let people connected to those cultures make the judgment call of whether this is a good move or not).
Currently, Ki Points (while they're called that) recharge on a short rest, and you get a number equal to your Monk level starting at level 2 (making them similar to Sorcery Points, except that those recharge on a long rest). Now, while it looks like they're migrating a lot of "short rest recharge" mechanics toward long rests - such as Second Wind and Warlock spell slots - they aren't entirely getting rid of them either - a Fighter's Action Surge is still recharging on a short rest, for example.
Monks do get a fair number of cool things outside of resource-consuming abilities, such as their super-fast movement speed, their Martial Arts bonus attack, and stuff like slow fall, deflect missiles, and eventual immunity to all poison damage and the poisoned condition. But I do think that it's easy enough to run out of Ki Points pretty quickly, and so if this does become a long rest recharge, I think we'll want to give Monks a higher total amount - perhaps doubling them.
I'd bet that there are going to be some radical changes to the Monk, given their exclusion from the PHB 5 packet. But if they are going with radical changes, it makes a lot of my speculation less likely to turn out true. So, we'll see.
No comments:
Post a Comment