I think the next monk I play will be a Way of Mercy monk. While I'm not super-drawn to healers, I love the Monk class and I also have a longstanding obsession with masks from Renaissance Italy (specifically the Bauta, but also the Plague Doctor). I also love how the Mercy Monk can be a genuinely heroic and good healer who is nevertheless creepy as all hell.
A Mercy Monk is never going to replace a dedicated Cleric or Druid healer, but they can be a great supplement to the party's healing. However, they should also be able to do what a Monk is primarily meant to do - which is to kick a whole lot of ass.
One of the odd considerations to make is the efficiency of spending ki points to deal damage with the Way of Mercy. As a related example, the extra feature introduced in Tasha's, Quickened Healing, is actually strictly worse than a Mercy Monk just using Hand of Healing on themselves (both do nearly the same healing, using your martial arts die and either your Wisdom modifier (Hand of Healing) or Proficiency Bonus (Quickened Healing) but Quickened Healing costs 2 ki and Hand of Healing only costs 1 - so even if your Wisdom modifier is a little low, you should still get more healing per ki out of your subclass feature.)
At higher levels, a Monk can be fairly liberal with ki points. But at lower levels, especially at 3rd level when you get this subclass feature, you might want to figure out the best way to spend your ki.
The most common thing to spend ki on before you hit level 5 is Flurry of Blows. Normally, a Monk can make a single unarmed strike as a bonus action after using the attack action. Flurry of Blows gives you a second strike - meaning that for 1 ki per turn, after you get Extra Attack, you can make four strikes per turn. But you still get 3 for free.
Hand of Harm allows you to add necrotic damage to a hit when you land an unarmed strike. This is equal to your martial arts die plus your wisdom modifier.
Now, especially at lower levels, you probably have a higher Dex than Wisdom modifier. As such, a flurry of blows second strike that lands will probably do more damage (at least on average).
But I've seen it pointed out that there are some major benefits to saving that ki for a Hand of Harm.
The first is crit-fishing. Like Divine Smite, the die rolled for Hands of Harm is also doubled when you tack the damage onto a crit. You don't have to choose whether to spend the ki on the attack until you see the roll, meaning that if you land a crit, you can use the ability, but potentially save it if you don't.
The other, related aspect here is that Hands of Harm is never wasted (unless the target is immune to necrotic damage or was going to die to the regular hit anyway). Flurry of Blows, in a frustrating turn, might not wind up actually giving you any damage if you have low attack rolls. Thus, you could find yourself very frustrated after spending a ki point and getting precisely nothing out of it.
Now, of course, there's nothing here stopping you from doing both except for the limits to your ki as a resource. But in the early levels, or in campaigns where you have a lot of combat between even short rests, you might want to try to be efficient as possible.
Let's actually see if we can calculate the average damage here and see if these assumptions are correct.
I'm going to look at this at level 3. Once you hit level 11, you can spend a single ki for both a Flurry of Blows and Hands of Harm. While this still runs into the pitfall of potentially leaving you high and dry with a bunch of misses, we're going to keep things simpler for now.
At level 3, you haven't had any ASIs and your proficiency bonus hasn't gone up, so you should have the same attack stats as you did when you first rolled up at level 1. I think most Monks will start with a +3 to Dex and either a +2 or +3 to Wisdom (I think with the Standard Array you can either get both Wis and Con to +2 or have one at +3 and the other at +1. For the sake of argument, let's assume that our Monk has spread the love).
A nice tier 1 major villain might have an AC of 16 (generally I've calculated these as starting with 16 and going up by 2 AC each tier for a major, challenging fight in which the monster is likely to live for multiple rounds.)
We've got a +5 to hit, so we hit the target on a roll of 11 or higher.
Now, we also have another thing to consider: while our bonus action attacks are always unarmed strikes, we might be using something like a two-handed quarterstaff for our primary attacks. As a d8 weapon rather than a d4 weapon, that's 2 extra average damage per round. But we can't Hands of Harm with the Quarterstaff.
As such, for now, I'm going to assume we are using the quarterstaff, which means that we're really only paying attention to the bonus action, as the main action is going to be the same either way.
So:
We have the following hit array:
Miss 1-10 (50%) Hit 11-19 (45%) Crit 20 (5%)
The Flurry of Blows is a bit more traditional to calculate.
Each hit with a Flurry of Blows should be 1d4+3, or 5.5 average damage
A crit is 2d4+3, or 8 average damage
So, our total damage per attack is 2.475 + .4, or 2.875 (if that looks low, remember that we're missing half the time).
Because we get two of these, that's 5.75 damage per bonus action.
Now: we're not just looking for that. We're trying to see what that 1 ki point buys us. And typically, it buys us about 5.75 damage.
Here's where it gets tricky:
Hands of Harm also costs 1 ki. But in this case, we only ever spend that ki after the attack roll is made. Let's assume that the player does not have any reason to think that they're going to crit - after all, one out of twenty is somewhat rare, and they'd rather feel like they're using their resources when they can than simply waiting around for something that might not happen. So, they're going to spend this on both hits and crits. (Also, since we're contrasting this with Flurry of Blows, we only have one unarmed strike to put this on, which simplifies things).
What this means is that we can fully excise any misses from this equation.
So, the array is now Hit 11-19 (90%) and Crit 20 (10%)
The damage we add with a hit is 1d4+2, or 4.5 damage.
On a crit, we're adding 2d4+2, or 7 damage.
That comes to 4.05 + 0.7, which is, you know, 4.75.
But I'm a goober! Because the Flurry of Blows doesn't actually buy you two strikes!
While Flurry of Blows does replace your normal Martial Arts bonus action, that free bonus action always gives you that extra strike.
As such, we should have never doubled the 2.875 damage that the ki point bought with Flurry of Blows. Half of that 5.75 was always there for you anyway.
And that means that yes, the Hands of Harm is a significantly more efficient use of your ki.
Now, what if you got +3 to Wisdom from the start?
Now, the average damage of hits and crits each goes up by 1. Actually, thanks to the 50% miss chance, the math here is, I think, very simple, because by ignoring misses, we just get my original erroneous result for Flurry of Blows - and thus you get twice your bang for your ki buck.
Of course, this is all about ki-to-damage efficiency. If you actually want to pump out the most damage per round, you probably just want to use both of these in tandem, though at level 3 you'll run out of ki points halfway through the next turn. Finding a balance between damage output and resource efficiency is kind of going to be up to you - feeling out how important it is to conserve your ki.
At level 3, in fact, I might even suggest you really do hold off until you crit unless you desperately need to take down a monster quickly. But I do think that if you're wondering which ability you should spend the ki points on, this math should make it clear that Hands of Harm is the right one to prioritize.
EDIT:
As a note, when you hit tier 3 and get Flurry of Healing and Harm, you now get a free Hands of Harm when you Flurry of Blows (you can also use both Flurry of Blows attacks to instead do a Hands of Healing, but that's neither here nor there - it's just very efficient for ki use. Actually, it makes me think that if you're using it out of combat you should just find a tree to hit next to the people you're healing, as it's more efficient than just using Hands of Healing itself - but that's neither here nor there).
Now, technically, there could be situations where it's actually more ki efficient to just keep the ki point for a Hands of Harm. While you get a free one with Flurry of Blows, there's still a chance that that ki point goes to waste if you miss with both attacks.
At this point you likely have a +9 to hit (with 20 Dexterity and a PB of 4). But a tier 3 foe could easily have 20 AC (though perhaps you're not facing real bosses until your PB has gone up to 5). This actually means that... yep, it's the same array of hits and misses.
Now, I think that even with a 50% chance to miss (and thus a 25% to miss with both attacks) you're probably still getting way too much damage out of hits to make it worth it to hold the ki back for guaranteed hits. You also have 11 ki poinits at this point, so you can afford to be a little more liberal with them.
The math does get a little more complex, though, as the free Harm happens if either attack connects (for the sake of argument, we'll assume that the player will use the Harm effect if the first one hits, regardless of whether it's a crit or not, and not just hope the second one will crit.)
This is a bit like a calculation I was doing earlier involving Sneak Attack and dual-wielding Rogues.
So, if we spend one ki for a Flurry of Blows at this level, here's what we get:
Hit 11-19 (45%) Crit 20 (5%)
Hit Damage: 1d8+5, or 9.5 average damage.
Crit Damage: 2d8+5, or 14 average damage.
So, each given attack, we get 4.275 + 0.7, or 4.975 damage.
We don't double this, because we're only getting one more of these attacks. (I almost made that mistake again).
The tacked on Hands of Harm damage looks like this:
It's got the same chance to hit or crit on the first attack. The damage looks like:
Hit Damage: 1d8+2, or 6.5 average damage
Crit Damage: 2d8+2, or 11 average damage.
So, we apply the same coefficients to get the damage from Hands of Harm on average from the first attack:
2.925 + 0.55, or 3.475.
However, given the 50% chance to miss on the first attack, we need to see how much it will do on average on the second attack. Luckily, 50% is an easy fraction to work with. So, we halve the previous value and get the new one: 1.7375 (remember that this number also accounts for the 50% chance that the second strike will also miss, dragging down the average damage overall).
Thus, the total Hands of Harm average damage we get is 5.2125.
We now total up that with the extra Flurry of Blows damage to get our total ROI on that one ki point. It amounts to, on average (and again, assuming my calculations and methodology are correct) 10.1875 extra damage granted by that ki point. Not terrible!
Now, let's look at what we're getting if we only spend the ki for Flurry of Blows. Again, we don't have to incorporate misses given that we don't spend the ki if we miss. And we're only making one unarmed attack (at this level our Martial Arts die has caught up with a two-handed quarterstaff, but we also might have a magical weapon of some sort - my Drunken Master has a Sun Blade, which he could technically count as a Monk Weapon thanks to the new Dedicated Weapon feature - he's also a Wood Elf, so he has longswords, even if the Sun Blade didn't already cover that issue).
So, spending this, there's a 90% chance we're spending it on a hit and a 10% chance we're spending it on a crit.
Hands of Harm Hit: 1d8+2, or 6.5
Hands of Harm Crit: 2d8+2, or 11
That gives us 5.85 + 1.1, or an average of 6.95 extra damage for this investment of ki.
So yes, even with a relatively tough AC to hit, it's definitely worth it to spend that ki on Flurries of Blows at this level - even while there will be turns where you get two misses, the chance that you do hit and get a ton of damage out of it will make up for it.
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