Dungeons & Dragons 5.1E — Monk

[luuma]

I fall into the silent majority that has played with a fair few monks and thinks they're completely fine - both when analysed from the perspective of player satisfaction and from the perspective of flat numerical analysis. There are plentiful tools at a DM's disposal to make the PHB monk work (short rest lots, provide foes with mediocre con, don't let players watch video by bald white youtube man). But either way, like, Monk is not issue-free, and you can't just hurl it at every single campaign ever and be certain that the player will enjoy it every time. I think this goes a good distance towards fixing that.

Here's my notes

• I like the unarmored movement change and would certainly lobby for it if they were rebuilding monk from scratch. However, you already get to disengage freely when using the drunken master, open hand, astral self, and arguably mercy and sun soul. It also basically negates the buff to step of the wind.
  Since it's kind of overlapping with benefits granted by other features I think I'd prefer a feature that had some kind of tradeoff, so that the subclass features listed above still feel strong. I've always liked the effect "you can expend 15ft of movement to move 5 feet without provoking opportunity attacks". Maybe that would be nice instead??
• The powerspike at 9th is absolutely huge. That should come at 11th instead! I'd move diamond soul to 11th, and tack the new abundant step feature onto unarmored movement.
• I would ignore what others are saying about Decisive Strike because it is a monstrously powerful effect and essentially grants one free attack per turn. Your monk's damage remains rock solid at higher levels. The fact it overlaps with Kensei doesn't matter too much because the two effects can proc off each other's bonus attacks.
• Personally I wouldn't add Wis mod to Ki, I'd allow monks to recover an amount of Ki equal to their Wis mod as an action once per short or long rest. This is because I'm hesitant about keeping their "nova potential" in check at about 5th level. I like the buff to multiclassing though, it's wise. Perhaps Level + Prof bonus instead??

All in all, I think it's just about sat in the goldilocks zone of reworks - it doesn't change too much, and doesn't change too little. If I had to guess where its power sat in the grand scheme of things, I'd say it is probably overshadowing rogue significantly in combat, and is easily keeping up with an average barbarian or fighter. Looks alright, and I prefer these changes to the ones in Tasha's. Much better focused on their issues at higher levels.