Qinggong Monk Homebrew Question

[TheMADMonk]

Alright so my DM who is one of my friends and has been gaming in total for little over a year and a half has decided monks need a major power upgrade. Which I agree with. His method however is a little wield and I want to ask what people think of this and if maybe its too out there to be good for the group.

We all know the Qinggong monk. However, what if instead of selecting a new class ability from their lists when you level up. What if you selected them daily? You can only change them out after a 24 hour period or a solid 8 hour rest and 1 hour meditation and focusing session.

But that you could one day switch out your level 4 ability for Scorching Ray and then the next day for Throw Anything and the next day switch it back for Slow Fall.

Is this game breaking?

EDIT: as far as Archetyping if another Archetype replaces that class feature its already preset and you cannot change it. But because most of those abilities are on the selective lists you can re-acquire them later.

[StreamOfTheSky]

Most of the Qinggong abilities are crap and there's barely more worthwhile options than there are swap-out opportunities as it is. And the abilities themselves, even the good ones, are limited in scope and not really situationally useful and campaign-shattering like a long range teleport or a scry is.

So whether you can change them out daily or not, you'd be cycling through the same 7 or so ki powers in 4-5 slots anyway.

Here's what I worked on to help push monk up to low tier 4 (http://www.minmaxboards.com/index.php?topic=416.0). It's still probably not enough...

[TheMADMonk]

Ok well I was thinking if a class feature you might want is swapped out for a good one on an archetype you want you can still use it. I know most suck and most should be much much lower on the list but still I was curious if it was too much.

[StreamOfTheSky]

Ok, look at it this way: there are three types of ki powers.

1) Ones that give a feat. These suck. They only last for ONE ROUND, they're pretty much all combat feats you could've acquired anyway, and you're paying a permanent class feature an ki (in many cases, more than one point!) just to access the feat for that one round. There's like two that cost 0 ki and are actually like getting a bonus feat...but they're also not that great.

2.) Ones that give back lost monk class features that you swapped out previously. These are irrelevant, since a non-qinggong monk would've had them any way. Also, the only thing that sucks worse than monk class features is monk class features you get at a delayed level. :smallwink:

3.) Ones that emulate spells. These are the only *real* options, and there aren't that many of them to choose from. And several cost exorbitant amounts of ki or come way too late (special mention to Strangling Hair, which you can pick up TWELVE levels after the wizard could), on top of the ones that are just outright weak. Further narrowing down the good choices.

I guess I might as well just link my mini-guide for reference at this point: http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?308138-Guide-to-the-Qinggong-Monk-%28Ultimate-Magic%29
(I really should downgrade Slow Fall now that the nerf errata for cloud step seems to be accepted by almost every group and I've discovered how few groups allow 3E content)

[Feint's End]

Some of the more elegant ways to "fix" the monk and/or improve the Qinggong Monk are:

1. Tuck on the Gifted Blade Progression. This is a very simple and fast fix which helps the monk somewhat to scale up into higher levels.

2. Leave the Qinggong Monk as it is but add some interesting psionic powers to the mix. For example give the option to manifest hustle as a pla for 1 ki point. This way monks have easy access to move+attack. Also give them 1 pp to make them psionic creatures and open up psionic feats.

3. Combine 2 with your propose method. Maybe even allow them to swap powers as a standard action a few times a day


The option your DM proposed is (as Streamofsky has mentioned) barely any better than the standard Qinggong monk because the standard Qinggong monk has a very limited number of actual useful abilities. Barkskin, Gaseous Form and ... uhm .... Scorching Ray maybe? There are a few others but very few of them are actually worth it.


To sum it up. If you want to increase the monks utility expand the Qinggong list and give monks the opportunity to swap them out on a daily (or even round by round) basis.
To be honest I'd just give them one new Qinggong Power at level 2 and every 2 levels thereafter (similar to rogue talents) not making them lose any classfeatures.