As we skip past the Fighter, which did not get any subclasses in TDCSR (to be fair, it got the Echo Knight in the Wildemount book,) we come to The Way of the Cobalt Soul for Monks.
Unlike most of these, we got plenty of exposure to the Cobalt Soul subclass thanks to the character of Beauregard in campaign 2 of Critical Role, and saw, essentially, the long-form playtesting of this subclass. While Monks are a class that favors Dexterity and Wisdom, monastic traditions in the real world tend to involve a lot of study, and the Cobalt Soul Monk is all about getting power from knowledge.
At level 3, you get Extract Aspects. When you hit a creature with one of the attacks granted by your Flurry of Blows, you can analyze it. An analyzed creature remains analyzed until you finish a short or long rest. When the analyzed creature misses you with an attack, you can immediately use your reaction to make an unarmed strike against the creature if it's within your reach.
Additionally, when you analyze the creature, you learn all of its damage vulnerabilities, damage resistances, damage immunities, and condition immunities.
Ok, so: I freaking love this. As a DM, I'm often tempted to play coy with the mechanical nature of monsters, hiding important and actionable information from players lest they run roughshod over my precious monsters. But I have to fight that temptation and, for example, make those high Arcana, Nature, or Religion checks actually count for something tangible. This is a different avenue toward that knowledge, but it's the sort of thing that players should be able to gain if they work for it. The retaliatory attack is fine, but gets better later on.
Also, the fact that this doesn't simply go away when you use it on other foes is quite nice.
At level 6, you get Extort Truth. This essentially allows you to get the effects of Zone of Truth on a single target if you hit them and spend 1 ki (you can also choose not to deal damage with this, if you're not actually fighting the creature), with the target making a Charisma save against it. While affected, any Charisma checks against the creature are made at advantage. While its use in combat is questionable, other than trying to intimidate the target (Berserker Barbarians and Swashbuckler Rogues might be able to get some use out of it) Monks are often a little short on abilities that can be useful in social encounters, which is why I think this is a cool thing to get. It's also relatively cheap at 1 ki.
Also at 6 you get Mystical Erudition, which allows you to learn a new language and gain a new skill proficiency from among Arcana, History, Investigation, Nature, or Religion, or, if you already have proficiency in one of those, you can get expertise in it.
Again, this emphasizes Cobalt Soul as the "smart" monk, even if you don't have high intelligence. I think this feature is fine. The only issue I can see here is that neither of the level 6 features have combat implications, which is usually the case for other Monk subclasses.
At level 11, your Mystic Erudition gives you another skill or expertise from the same list.
Also at 11, you get Mind of Mercury. This is probably the biggest deal: once per turn, if you've already used your reaction, you can spend 1 ki to take an additional reaction - so no, you can't use this to turn Extract Aspects into a machine gun by spending all your ki, as it is limited to one per turn and one per triggering effect, but this can make you a lot more flexible, getting to make opportunity attacks or use Slow Fall even if you've already done something. Pairing this with a feat like Sentinel (as Marisha Ray did with Beau) can be quite good.
At 17 (a level that CR2 didn't get to, as they finished out at level 15) you get a third Mystic Erudition.
Also at 17, you get Debilitating Barrage. If you hit a creature with an unarmed strike, you can spend 3 ki points to cause the creature to gain vulnerability to one damage type of your choice for 1 minute, or until the end of a turn in which it has taken the damage of that type. If the creature is resistant to that damage, the resistance is suppressed for 1 minute, rather than gaining vulnerability. A creature that is immune to the damage type is unaffected. And a creature can only be affected by this feature once, gaining immunity to it for 24 hours.
Ok, so here's the weird math: Normally, vulnerability and resistance merely cancel each other out - much as advantage and disadvantage do. And thus, normally, adding more onto the pile doesn't change that flat state. But in this case, you're not piling vulnerability on resistance, but rather just removing the resistance. Thus, say, a Grave Cleric, would be able to use Path to the Grave, and now that you've removed the resistance, the full effect makes them truly vulnerable.
Technically, I believe you would be able to use this as something of a Monk smite, as it's triggered when you hit the target and not when you damage it, creating a small window to burn the ki points on a crit and then do double damage with that crit.
Also, of note, the effect persists to the end of any turn in which it takes the chosen type of damage. As such, if you use unarmed strikes for your main attacks and pick bludgeoning damage, the rest of your hits will also benefit. But strategically, you could also instead choose something like force damage in order to set up your Wizard's Disintegrate to do an absolutely obscene amount of damage.
Monks are, I think, one of the most underrated classes in D&D - sure, they might not look as good as other melee classes when you calculate their average damage on paper (though if they can rest up regularly and get those ki points back, they're still pretty awesome just with Flurry of Blows) but in practice, they just have so many cool things that I really encourage skeptics to give them a try.
The Cobalt Soul monk is, I think, a pretty cool subclass. Its emphasis is, like Monks in general, I think, setting up your allies to kick a lot of ass, which can be very useful. In terms of raw power potential, this might not match, say, the Way of Mercy, but I think there are a lot of fun and useful abilities here that empower the already fairly strong (and fun) Monk base class.
No comments:
Post a Comment