The Last Monk Thread

[Doc Roc]

Well, I've finally snapped. Here's my attempt to lay out a single thread that can serve as a jump-off point for a reasonable discussion of the perennially caroused Monk. I know, I know.... My position is well-known. As such, the burden of proof rests firmly with those who propose that the core-only monk is balanced, or that outside of core, more than four levels of monk are beneficial.

Here are the ground rules:


Keep your points to the readily defensible regions of the game, either strict RAW readings adhering to an exclusionary policy, or cases where the RAI of the ability in question is generally agreed on. The opinion of the CO community will be used as a primary meter for overall correctness of rules interpretations.
No name-calling. I'll be happy as any to see this thread locked should it need it.
Passive aggressive behavior will DQ you from getting your points first posted.
No mention of homebrew or house-rules except in passing.


Assume a reasonable set of gentleman's agreements:

No assume supernatural ability.
No non-associated class levels.
No out and out game breaks, so no mention of His Koboldness or TBoS or Algernon, etc.
Full access to magical items as per life in a planar metropolis.
For our purposes, wands come in 50 and 10 charge increments.

Assume, basically, that you were building a character for an environment fairly similar to the ToS. Comparisons at 20 will result in docking of points.

Basically, scoring:

Full build: +20
Unplayable at 5: -10
Unplayable at 10: -20
Unplayable at 13: -15
Target is epic: Disqualified.
Uses controversial material: -12
Uses Core Only: +30
Uses generally accepted items: +10
Does not abuse known problem-spells: +15
Damage output greater than 48 a turn: +10 at L5, +8 at L10, +5 at L13
Actively disables multiple combatants in a verifiable set of trials: +20
Can handle out-of-combat healing: +8
Can provide in-combat buffing: +12
Uses less than four sources: +10
Low resource usage per combat, ~200 gold: +10
No reliance on UMD: +10
Limited reliance on UMD: +5
Strong Self-buff capacity: +5
Long operating period: +15
One of various means of offense that provide no save or generally no opportunity for meaningful avoidance: +25
Reliant on grappling, presuming no fixes for dealing with huge or larger foes: -10

[Doc Roc]

Points well-made by those who cannot agree that monks are any good will go here.

[Doc Roc]

Opinions and points well articulated by the other side will go here.

[Doc Roc]

This post will contain what amounts to the expected minimum reading for new posters.




My Side, or How Casters Fight:
Treantmonk's Wizarding guide. (http://forums.gleemax.com/showthread.php?t=956548)
Sorcerer's Guide (http://forums.gleemax.com/showthread.php?t=1184568)


The Other Side:
Giacomo's Take (http://forums.gleemax.com/showthread.php?t=1032986)
Zenzei's Take (http://forums.gleemax.com/showthread.php?t=978174)


The high bars:
President of Smack (http://forums.gleemax.com/wotc_archive/index.php/t-519517)
Tashlatoran Example. :) (http://forums.gleemax.com/wotc_archive/index.php/t-883674)
Old Stunning fist optimization. (http://forums.gleemax.com/wotc_archive/index.php/t-616706)

Links added as submitted. Links may be to builds, guides, or even posts within this thread. We're aiming to make a resource here, one that will help calm this long standing and painful debate. It's been a divisive argument for long enough.


Let's lay it to rest.
You may begin!

[Sir Giacomo]

Well, I applaud your initiative.

Unfortunately, I'll be on vacation from Monday for 3 weeks, so I guess this thread will have to get by without me for a while.

First hints are in the Giamonk core 1-20 guide (sig). But that has been discussed already at length.

Will bring up more stuff at a later point, then.

- Giacomo

Edit/PS: I actually think that outside core, taking more than 4 levels of monk (or even 2) may not be the best unarmed warrior there is. But I'll also try to provide some arguments to exit at level 6,11 or even later.

[Kelpstrand]

Don't you have the feeling that I would have built the monk differently if the rules had been set differently?

So I'm confused, would you devote an inordinate amount of resources such as but not limited to feats, ability points, and large amounts of cash into fighting in a polymorphed form aware that for a variety of reasons you may not have access to polymorph during combats, and in fact all your large amounts of cash to gain polymorph would have been in the form of expendable resources that once spent can never be regained, but do in fact disappear?

Giamoco. I have a challenge for you:

WLD with one houserule. It is a giant dungeon challenge provided by a jerk God, who specifically is doing it as a challenge. This means a few things:

1) If you try to leave the dungeon, he just brings you back.
2) If you or any Wizard or whatever attempts to use Planar Binding spells or Gate, the spells are negated by the God.
3) Any time you want, you can snap your fingers and a Noble Djinn will appear. He will be invisible to all non PCs on the dungeon, and will never take part in combat, you have no power over him and he may leave at any time, any attacks on him, including spells such as Dimensional Anchor will result in the God teleporting him out.

His sole purpose is to accept from you any items in your possession and in return give you gold equal to half it's DMG value, and to take an amount of Gold, and provide to you any DMG item that you specify (for these purposes, any wand or scroll at different from normal CL will be considered a DMG item, as long as it is of a Core spell). (EDIT: However, as per the DMG rules, all Wands are created at 50 charges, while lower ones might exist, they are definitionally not DMG items. You are welcome to get 50 charge wands though, and as a matter of fact anything you need 10 of, you'll need 50 of, the WLD has many more fights than your average dungeon to level. But I will be ignoring all houserules about gaining less XP, so you should be able to skip half of them easily without falling behind where the module expects you to be.)

If you are not familiar with WLD, it is a huge dungeon, it has a bunch of traps and monsters and stuff. Everything in it is Core or made up DM fiat, and I will be attempting to negate or remove as much of the DM fiat as possible.

[Pharaoh's Fist]

First hints are in the Giamonk core 1-20 guide (sig). But that has been discussed already at length.


Uses controversial material: -12

[Keld Denar]

So...I hear a Monk can be pretty successful when he rides on PsyWar's coat tails. Is Secrets of Sarlona considered "controversial material"?

[Doc Roc]

No, it's considered strong evidence that monk is a two level long class. Let me post the Tash-lord builds...

[Pharaoh's Fist]

So...I hear a Monk can be pretty successful when he rides on PsyWar's coat tails. Is Secrets of Sarlona considered "controversial material"?
At least Secrets of Sarlona exists.

[Admiral Squish]

Warforged monk, with application of battlefist and mithral plating feat works pretty well for a monk, depending on how you want to call the plating = armor conundrum.

[Arakune]

Warforged monk, with application of battlefist and mithral plating feat works pretty well for a monk, depending on how you want to call the plating = armor conundrum.

Plating normaly is considered armor, since is subject to ACF, Armor penalties, etc. I could be wrong, but it's a reasonable assumption.

[Talic]

I would purport that the "Giamonk Monk Guide" is not a monk guide, persay.

Guides show useful optimization advice for a variety of ways that the class can be built. They show useful abilities, and assist players in the why of the class, the what does it do, and assist in helping a player build a character of the class to a specification designed by the player.

Giacomo's "monk guide" is actually an individual build. Interesting, perhaps. But no more indicative of the class than Shadowcraft mage is of wizard.

Now, the individual points brought up (Namely: UMD, and how it is the saviour of all sub-par class abilities), are simple. Encounter rewards are not designed to offer the amount of wealth a monk will need to remain within WBL as he progresses, at the expenditure level he uses.

In other words, it's like buying a new car every time you go to the grocery store. It can't be sustained. This is one of the primary reasons that the Giamonk is hard to discredit. The long term results are only shown by math.

[ColdSepp]

Plating normaly is considered armor, since is subject to ACF, Armor penalties, etc. I could be wrong, but it's a reasonable assumption.

Considering there is a feat that removes it specifically for this reason, I'd say its more then an assumption. Plating doesn't work with monk abilities.

[Pharaoh's Fist]

In other words, it's like buying a new car every time you go to the grocery store. It can't be sustained. This is one of the primary reasons that the Giamonk is hard to discredit. The long term results are only shown by math.

Or by using his monk's tactics against him.

Giacomo: I will evade until the wizard's buffs run low, then attack!

Problem is...

Monster: I will evade until his Polymorph runs out. I can fly/burrow/teleport/climb/turn etheral, and he can't.

[Indon]

1.This is not the last monk thread.

2.By 'balanced', do you mean that you expect someone to demonstrate that the Monk is tier 1? I mean, we're undoubtedly going to get some well-built Monks, Tier 3/4 material, but what's your criteria for 'balance' here?

3.Stronger and weaker classes all have their place in the game, so long as they fit in well with at least a few other classes - and the Monk fits in well with most of the other noncasters (Tiers 4 and 5).

4.If you advocate that you might as well replace the Monk with another class entirely (a monk-flavored Swordsage) for power (or 'benefit'), then you might as well replace the Swordsage with another class entirely (a monk-flavored caster such as a Sorceror or Psion, reflavoring their abilities to Ki use and picking thematic spells/powers - honorable mention to the Druid for being the Druid) for power. Sorcerors are core and Psions are SRD material, so in addition to both being Tier 2 classes (And maybe Tier 3 if you intentionally restrict them to Monk-ish powers), they require less source material.

In fact, the very paradigm that you can subtly reflavor a character concept and run it as a different class than would be obvious can allow you to play D&D mostly with Tier 1 and 2 classes, and frankly, probably mostly in core too, unless you want something really obscure.

So, provided you aren't willing to play D&D as Druids&Druids, why not let people play their Scouts and Monks and Fighters and Rogues and Paladins?

[mikethepoor]

For the purposes of the "uses less than four sources" scoring criterion, does core count as one or three?

[Roland St. Jude]

Sheriff of Moddingham: This is a discussion forum. It's not a debate society or even a CharOp forum. Posters passing judgment on each other, including what is or isn't acceptable as argument or assigning points/demerits/etc., are not conducive to an open discussion. While an unusual type of flaming, telling someone their comment is -12 is flaming. We have a longstanding practice here that, except in PbP, the OP is not the master of the thread. Moreover, discussions tend to go very poorly (meaning many rules are violated many times) when people think of these discussions as about winning points (literal or figurative). Thread locked. I would have no problem with a collection of arguments, builds, and resources regarding the monk and I welcome a proposal from the OP (via PM) regarding elimination of the competitive, judgmental aspects of this thread to do that - if that's of interest.