4-elements Monk

[HiveStriker]

Also, I will say that I really don't understand where the whole "if you aren't in melee" stuff is coming from. You're a Monk. By 6th level you have a +15ft bonus to all of your speeds, and you have Step of the Wind if you need to cross 90ft in a single round to punch someone. As far as flying creatures are concerned... flying is actually pretty easy for PCs to pick up once they're in Tier 2. Ignoring magic items, Fly is a 3rd level spell that's on most arcane lists, and the party Monk is a really good target for it.

That's a usual, and sad, assumption made on these forums as soon as we start talking about any melee fighter.
Thing is...
1. There are many kind of obstacles, including walls (which you can't run over until level 9), chasms (which need at best Step of The Wind = no fallback and no Flurry, at worst prevent any reach to melee) and flying capabilities.
2. You're a frigging MONK. You will have 16 starting AC, 17 at level 4 and 18 at level 8 if you follow the classic track. You don't have enough Ki to allow spamming Dodge/Disengage every round. Coming into melee without Mobile means if you don't leave a stunned enemy you'll risk an OA.
3. More enemies get nasty tricks as you level: CON/STR targeting effects (which you're not good at), multiple attacks (you're not *that* sturdy either), or even mental ones (at least you're relatively safe against dominance).

The Monk is not a frontliner, he's a skirmisher. That state changes in the last tier when he gets good enough AC, great saves and ultimately damage resistance, and large enough Ki pool that he can afford a handful of Stun attempts without feeling like a lesser Fighter for the rest of the fight. Things many players will never even taste in regular campaign with lvl 1 starting players.
If you play Monk like a Barbarian and enjoy your victory at the end of the day, either your enemies are stupid, or you have a great party covering your hide, or your group is exceptionnally adept at strategizing and coordinating (in which case treasure them, it's rare XD).

As for Fly... Only Sorcerer, Warlock and Wizard can learn it (or Lore Bard). It uses up a precious spell known, uses the highest level slot for two levels, uses up concentration, whereas same caster could instead try an Hypnotic Pattern, Slow, Fireball or whatnot: the number of cases where "delegating" to a martial by Flying him is the best option is very probably low.
I could see a Warlock specializing in this though, for a 3-man party (so you can Fly everyone at level 9). ^^

Eh, most of this runs into the following issues:
1) Stunning Strike is dirt cheap. For the same 2 ki as Fist of Unbroken Air, you can potentially force two Con saves vs. a decent DC. Even if your target has, say, an 80% chance to pass those saves, spamming stunning strike would drop that to a 64% chance. Sure, you have to hit twice, but you get 3-4 attacks per round once you hit that level. Also, I'm unsure where you're getting your data on monsters having better Con scaling than Str or Dex scaling - care to share that source?
2) Stunning denies actions and gives all your allies advantage on their attacks (including ranged attackers) and makes the target automatically fail Strength and Dexterity saves and makes grapples automatically succeed. Meanwhile, knocking someone prone helps out your melee allies and utterly screws over your ranged allies (who now have disadvantage on their attack rolls).
3) It's true that Monks aren't good grapplers, but why would they need to be? If you want to knock people over, go Open Hand and potentially force two saves against going prone per round.
4) Sure, Stunning Strike requires you to hit with your attack, but... you have 3-4 attacks per round. Even if you only have a 50% chance of hitting with a given attack, you'd only have a 12.5% chance of missing with all of them if you don't flurry, and a 6.25% chance of missing if you do flurry.

However, I do agree that Stunning Strike's importance can be over-emphasized by these forums. Given the kinds of complaints I see about the Monk, I sometimes wonder if people had one bad experience with the class and swore it off forever, or just never actually played it and are going off the numbers.

1) Stunning Strike is not especially cheap: you need to make weapon attacks, you need them to hit, and then you need to spend one ki per attempt. "You get 3-4 attacks per round at that level" meaning you'd be ready to blow more than half your resources one a single turn, because you recognize yourself you usually need 2 attempts to have SS work reliably.
Meaning 2 (or 3 if Flurry) Ki, and possibly bonus action locked to this end too, and putting yourself much closer to threat in general.
And then you say that 4E is bad because abillities are expensive? That's a very biaised view here.

2) Yeah, it does all that. So what? You don't *always* need *all of that*. Confer my previous post, which apparently you didn't quite read. If just having allies attack at advantage before enemy's next turn is "normally enough to have it killed ASAP" (= unless real streak of bad luck), why "waste" attacks on Stunning Strike? In fact, why even use Ki at all? Unless a) two attempts at Shoving won't cut it whereas a saved based ability has a real good chance to work or b) you need to also deal regular damage...
Besides, if you really want to go that way: Hold Person does all that and more, from a distance, can last several rounds, and targets a save few enemies are good at until much later, for just 3 ki.

3) Do you realize you're basically saying "if you want to use basic melee options reliably you have to go Open Hand"? Which is a) plain wrong, b) reflecting a very rigid mindset. Reminder: Open Hand needs you to take Attack action, needs you to spend one Ki on Flurry, and can use only one effect on the same enemy.
I hope you see by yourself how much that can be limitating in an actual fight.
At least 4E has the option of either tryin regular Shove and possibly have advantage on several attacks himself, or prefer "accuracy" and use action on Air/Whip, which leaves him the ability to use Dash/Dodge/Disengage.
Anyways, in general, you should not, and you effectively do not, need to go Open Hand to use Shove. It's just that you usually have a crappy chance if you don't do anything about it, it does not mean you should never attempt.
Although that is definitely the benefit of 4E here, especially since on top of that, you don't need close contact to try and put prone.

4) Theory is nice. Practice is better. In practice...
a) You can be at disadvantage
b) You can face enemy with insane AC
c) You do not necessarily put yourself that close to that dangerous of an enemy (because if he's not really dangerous, why would you try to use Ki in the first place?).
d) You may simply not be able to reach enemy you want to hit, even as a Monk with great mobility (flying enemy, chasm too big to be jumped over, translucid/with openings wall taking too much speed to "run over"...
e) You do not necessarily want to spend ki on extra attacks (you don't have much left, you want to keep some for next turns or next fight, etc).

Meaning at most 3 attacks, possibly 2 because you want to keep bonus action for Disengage/Dodge.
Against an AC 16, you'll have 50% chance to hit per attack if "cookie-cutter" Monk (16/16, +2 DEX).
Against an AC 18? 40%
Against an AC 20? 30%.
Conversely, higher the AC usually pairs with either higher Constitution, or higher Strength.
Take a look by yourself at the bestiary. You can check by yourself that the following assertions are true until at least CR 12 (didn't check after too lazy for that but it should hold true until at least CR 17).
"A massive majority of monsters have lower effective WIS save than any physical save.
"A majority of monsters, especially the ones with high STR or CON, also have a weak DEX save"
"It's very rare past CR 4 that monsters have less than +3 on CON save".
"It's very rare until CR 9 that monsters have more than +2 (and often +1) on WIS".
"Even as soon as CR 3 having creatures with 18 AC is not uncommon."
"It's extremely rare that creatures have less than +3 modifier against a Shove, and it slightly but steadily goes up with CR".

At level 5 and until level 8, considering same Monk, your DC will be 8+3+3 = 14.
I'll suppose AC 18 on enemy (if lower, I'd strongly think about whether spending any ki at all is really necessary ;)).
Chance to hit 40%, chance for enemy to fail save 45%.
-> You need a succession of precise occurence of two events with each a less than 50% probability. And you may deal no damage at all.
Hold Person will usually have a much better chance of success, and does not require to be in melee, so you spare movement and threat.
Water Whip will usually have a slightly better chance of success, and does not require to be in melee either, so same benefits.

It gets much worse with higher, 9-12 CR creatures: bonus to STR is usually >6-7, CON save has a 5 baseline, and most get multiattacks of some sort and/or reach and/or higher speed than standard.
And they are usually not alone either.

So if you want to pace yourself to avoid risking your hide, it's 2 attacks at best. If you want a full-round of attempts, you only have your base speed (or rather, what's left of it) to try and put back some distance, with the risk of getting focused by enemy's friends.
Worst case, you went and did all 4 attacks, never landed Stun for whatever reason. Now you're fully exposed, without even Dodge.

4E's abilities are great because they allow you to still be effective in many kind of situations where other Monk would feel useless or would need to make some kind of "all-in" bets and hope for the best.

Time and time again, I have watched 4E Monks try to do something cool, but have the attempt completely whiff because it relied on a creature failing a save. That’s a lot times I had to hold my tongue and avoid saying “maybe try stunning strike instead?” It's easily the most disappointing official subclass (the only real competition is the beast master) because it has all the ingredients, but they don’t work effectively together.

I'm sorry to say, that's only a self-biais of perception of yours.
Because if the target creature made its save against a DEX/WIS or even a STR save, it would have certainly also passed the CON save in ~90% of all cases.
Which rolls back at the first point: Stunning Strike is awesome on paper, but realistically whatever level you play at you'll need at least 2 attempts to make it more or less reliable of a tactic. And it gets far worse with level because your DC doesn't progress as much as CON saves.