mabriss lethe
2020-11-02, 09:22 PM
Welcome to my second installment of Monkday Meditations, what I hope will be a silly little weekly tradition of posting musings on various aspects of the everyone's favorite punching bag, the deservedly much maligned Monk.
Life got in the way and I haven't been able to continue the Monkday Meditations like I planned. I have several longer pieces in various stages of half written, but I thought I'd drop a short one today and continue fleshing them out for later intallments.
One of the less useful of the standard monk weapons is the Siangham. It does piercing damage. That's what makes it special. That's it. It makes it worth having in your kit for rare occasions but it's probably going to be forgotten in the bottom of your Handy Haversack before long. BUT! A siangham can be a viable tool in a monk's kit. It just needs some magic. I wanted to muse on what special abilities would be useful and which ones to avoid.
The best outside the box combination that I can come up with as a jumping off point is Impaling and Fleshgrinding. Impaling lets you treat an attack roll as a touch attack three times per day (but requires a piercing weapon) and fleshgrinding lets you leave a weapon stuck in your opponent to deal automatic damage on the next five rounds (or until they waste an action and make the strength check to remove it) You can pummel your foe with unarmed strikes or other weapons for the first part of a flurry, then stick them with the siangham as a touch attack for your last strike and still have a good chance to hit, then let fleshgrinding work its magic, effectively granting you bonus attacks on subsequent rounds and optimizing your attack chain. The one downside is that Fleshgrinding doesn't work on undead or constructs, but that still leaves a fairly open playing field.
There are a few different optimization paths open to you.
You can either go for quantity or quality. If you go for quality, you spend as much wbl as you can spare to improve its damage output (seeing as none of your feats will work with fleshgrinding attacks) all of your basic damage boosting special abilities are more or less equally good here. Weapon augment crystals and special materials like Baatorian Greensteel can be a less expensive way to boost damage, or something to throw on top of permanent enhancements. Quantity is the other approach. At higher levels it might be more advantageous to have several lesser weapons and literally turn your enemies into pincushions. You can forgo impaling on most of them, since you can only impale once per round and focus on dumping as many fleshgrinding skewers as you can into a single foe. If you take this method to extremes you'll want the quickdraw feat or an equivalent to maximize your ability to deal damage in the second round.
What to avoid: Anything extra that activates on a critical. You shouldn't be rolling to hit with this weapon very often and it has a terrible crit range. That's money better spent elsewhere. Likewise avoid any special ability that has language that causes it to triggers off of a successful hit. Again, you won't be hitting with it very often.
Extra consideration: Anything that can slap a strength penalty on your target like poisons, Ray of Enfeeblement, Bestow curse, or the like has good synergy with this tactic, since it makes it less likely that a foe can remove the siangham and will waste actions. Aside from poison, which a monk can make decent use of despite its limitations, you'd have to rely on party cooperation to set it up. Of course, party cooperation is always a good way to play anyway. Barring all of that, your own version is Stunning Fist. A successful stunning attack will at least buy you a free round of pain before the target can start trying to pull it out. Tripping is also a good way to prime it, that way the opponent has to waste even more actions to undo what you're doing to them.
That's all for today, Next week I hope to have Part III up, though I'm not sure if it will be a quicky or one of the more in depth installments.
Life got in the way and I haven't been able to continue the Monkday Meditations like I planned. I have several longer pieces in various stages of half written, but I thought I'd drop a short one today and continue fleshing them out for later intallments.
One of the less useful of the standard monk weapons is the Siangham. It does piercing damage. That's what makes it special. That's it. It makes it worth having in your kit for rare occasions but it's probably going to be forgotten in the bottom of your Handy Haversack before long. BUT! A siangham can be a viable tool in a monk's kit. It just needs some magic. I wanted to muse on what special abilities would be useful and which ones to avoid.
The best outside the box combination that I can come up with as a jumping off point is Impaling and Fleshgrinding. Impaling lets you treat an attack roll as a touch attack three times per day (but requires a piercing weapon) and fleshgrinding lets you leave a weapon stuck in your opponent to deal automatic damage on the next five rounds (or until they waste an action and make the strength check to remove it) You can pummel your foe with unarmed strikes or other weapons for the first part of a flurry, then stick them with the siangham as a touch attack for your last strike and still have a good chance to hit, then let fleshgrinding work its magic, effectively granting you bonus attacks on subsequent rounds and optimizing your attack chain. The one downside is that Fleshgrinding doesn't work on undead or constructs, but that still leaves a fairly open playing field.
There are a few different optimization paths open to you.
You can either go for quantity or quality. If you go for quality, you spend as much wbl as you can spare to improve its damage output (seeing as none of your feats will work with fleshgrinding attacks) all of your basic damage boosting special abilities are more or less equally good here. Weapon augment crystals and special materials like Baatorian Greensteel can be a less expensive way to boost damage, or something to throw on top of permanent enhancements. Quantity is the other approach. At higher levels it might be more advantageous to have several lesser weapons and literally turn your enemies into pincushions. You can forgo impaling on most of them, since you can only impale once per round and focus on dumping as many fleshgrinding skewers as you can into a single foe. If you take this method to extremes you'll want the quickdraw feat or an equivalent to maximize your ability to deal damage in the second round.
What to avoid: Anything extra that activates on a critical. You shouldn't be rolling to hit with this weapon very often and it has a terrible crit range. That's money better spent elsewhere. Likewise avoid any special ability that has language that causes it to triggers off of a successful hit. Again, you won't be hitting with it very often.
Extra consideration: Anything that can slap a strength penalty on your target like poisons, Ray of Enfeeblement, Bestow curse, or the like has good synergy with this tactic, since it makes it less likely that a foe can remove the siangham and will waste actions. Aside from poison, which a monk can make decent use of despite its limitations, you'd have to rely on party cooperation to set it up. Of course, party cooperation is always a good way to play anyway. Barring all of that, your own version is Stunning Fist. A successful stunning attack will at least buy you a free round of pain before the target can start trying to pull it out. Tripping is also a good way to prime it, that way the opponent has to waste even more actions to undo what you're doing to them.
That's all for today, Next week I hope to have Part III up, though I'm not sure if it will be a quicky or one of the more in depth installments.