Making Monk Suck Less

[Deleted]

I think it's supposed to be monk levels are higher than the sum of the other levels (the majority of the levels taken).  Not sure.

[Edge]

Bella is correct. Total monk level must be greater than or equal to all other class levels combined.

So Monk 10/Fighter 5/WM 5 is legal, but Monk 7/Fighter 7/WM 6 is not because that's a total of 7 Monk levels to 13 other levels.

[Voice of Kerensky]

Dec 27, 2014 14:26:40 GMT -5 psappho said:

This is a PnP monk at level 20 with the Greater Flurry of Blows feat active, unarmed.

+15/+15/+15/+10/+5

This is an NWN monk at level 20 without the (redundant) Flurry of Blows feat active, unarmed.

+15/+12/+9/+6/+3

Notice something?

Sorry, wrong numbers! NWN is such a hack job at times.

Using these numbers, if you were to provide monk with a +5 attack bonus over the course of level (Not necessarily base attack, as then NWN's hardcoded UBAB bonuses would want to give them an unwarranted 6th attack), you would end up with:

PnP:

15/15/15/10/5

NWN:

20/17/14/11/8

It'd be a little more frontloaded than PnP monk (which is weak anyhow), and a little higher average, but in my opinion not out of hand.

Kama would use the same values, unless you did not give it the cumulative attack bonus (it would still have 5 attacks; 15/12/9/6/3 in that case). Which I would personally suggest due to possible multi classing and TWF shenanigans.

[onivel]

My main gripe with monks is that they dont get their improved attack numbers with a quarterstaff. What else is a more quintessential monk weapon than a staff?

[aazonis]

Something to consider, and fixing it requires no changes to classes or the haks, is that unarmed monks lose out on an item slot when compared to all other classes. In order to get an ab bonus to their unarmed attacks a monk must use monk gloves, but using them comes at the cost of not equipping bracers that have other beneficial stats. Fixing this just means adding monk gloves to the loot table that have more beneficial stats on them. For instance rather than just being +2 ab and 1d6 damage, they would now be something like +2, 1d6, +2 dex (and/or whatever). This doesn't effect monks that use weapons because then the ab and the damage on the gloves aren't used.

tldr;
make monk gloves that are like current bracers with weapon bonus stats added to them. Additionally make all spells that currently enchant weapons, work on unarmed (If they don't already?)

Fists of Siguard (Something) might fix this Aazonis, however.   str/dex with 2+ attack.  

Still, that's a teir 3 item.

[aazonis]

Yeah but it has no damage bonus or anything, so its still not comparable to an actual weapon

[Edge]

Jan 4, 2015 23:19:21 GMT -5 aazonis said:

Additionally make all spells that currently enchant weapons, work on unarmed (If they don't already?)

They do. You can put GMW/Elemental Weapon on gloves.

That's true Aazonis.  

[Nokteronoth]

Just making a small point here, max possible attack in NWN is 10 APR.

6 from a full BAB monk (16 before 20, though you can take 1 monk at -any- point in the build and get this, it doesn't have to be before 20)
2 from offhand and Improved Two Weapon Fighting
1 from Haste
1 from Flurry of Blows

(I don't count Circle Kick because that fucks everything up. or Cleave/great cleave.)

My personal feelings about the class are that it's very min-max. You can either be a frontliner with a kama dex/wis mix monk that tries to max AC, a shredder with STR, a fast, sneaky archer with WIS, or you can try to juggle versatility. The class can go quite a few different ways, which is what makes it interesting to me.

A lot of the abilities it gets are pretty crappy, though. I agree that Wholeness of Body is pretty darn useless. It's a full round use, but pretty much a free cure critical potion. This could and probably should be increased. Perhaps not to the level of fully healing the monk, but perhaps since they have d8 as HP, you can change it to d6*(Class level).

Maybe the concealment could be 5 rounds per class level? So then you don't have a massively long buff, but decently standing compared to a Displacement or Improved Invisibility spell. Maybe 3 per level, if that's too long. 50% concealment is a lot.

Quivering Palm - Perhaps, if it's not hard, once per day(Maybe twice) with the DC being changed to (10+ 3/4class level + WIS mod)? Then if you have a level 30 monk, your quivering palm is DC 25+WIS, which might one shot a lower level character, but level 30 is pretty godlike. Level 15 would get a 20+wis mod, which is a high roll for rogues/mages/other low Fort monsters/characters, but not too difficult for fighters or other beefy things.

I don't agree with the BAB change. Sorry Saph, but monks aren't specialists in combat. They're specialists in training their bodies, trying to find enlightenment, not in beating face in. Maybe if you could code a soft bonus for a pure class or something, but otherwise I can't see much reason for it beyond making a much better reason for multiclasses to take it for Tumble instead of Rogue.

And that's coming from a powerbuilder who's written stuff for the old ECBG when it was still active.

~BR

[trylobyte]

I do see a few problems with these arguments...

I don't agree with the BAB change. Sorry Saph, but monks aren't specialists in combat. They're specialists in training their bodies, trying to find enlightenment, not in beating face in. Maybe if you could code a soft bonus for a pure class or something, but otherwise I can't see much reason for it beyond making a much better reason for multiclasses to take it for Tumble instead of Rogue.

Monks aren't specialists in combat in fluff, but in crunch that's pretty much all they exist for.  The only thing they're good at that isn't fighting is getting into weird places (usually only needed to, well, kill things in weird places) and your rogue is probably better at that anyway since rogues have the skillpoints to use on stuff like Balance, Climb, and Jump, not to mention being better able to actually do things when they get there.  Compare to bards with their social skills, clerics with their healing abilities, druids with their tending to plants and gathering herbs and stuff, and rogues and wizards being pretty much able to do anything.  Monks just don't do much else other than fight because they don't have the stats, skills, feats, abilities, or mechanics for it.  So odds are if you have a monk they're gonna be focused on beating face in, regardless of the pseudo-Eastern philosophical bent to it, because that's all they can do outside of dispensing ice-cream koans.

Quivering Palm - Perhaps, if it's not hard, once per day(Maybe twice) with the DC being changed to (10+ 3/4class level + WIS mod)? Then if you have a level 30 monk, your quivering palm is DC 25+WIS, which might one shot a lower level character, but level 30 is pretty godlike. Level 15 would get a 20+wis mod, which is a high roll for rogues/mages/other low Fort monsters/characters, but not too difficult for fighters or other beefy things.

I'm not convinced that would make Quivering Palm all that much more useful.  It would make the level 15 Quivering Palm into a one-off Finger of Death from a same-level mage with a Greater Necromancy focus, and most people will tell you that even maxing out the caster stat FoD isn't really useful at that level due to widespread immunity (undead and golems) that leads into stuff just having very high Fort saves across the board (epic dungeons).  And that's assuming you max Wisdom, which most non-Zen Archery, non-AC built monks don't, which means the two types of monks who get the best use out of it are the two least likely to use it anyway because one fights at range and the other can't land it due to a bad attack bonus.

Maybe the concealment could be 5 rounds per class level? So then you don't have a massively long buff, but decently standing compared to a Displacement or Improved Invisibility spell. Maybe 3 per level, if that's too long. 50% concealment is a lot.

Bear in mind that a mage's 50% Concealment spell, Displacement, is one round per caster level, two if Extended.  5 rounds per class level, considering it has a minimum class level of 18 to even take it, would be massively long comparatively, clocking in at 540 seconds to a mage's 108 (216 if Extended) at the same level.  I'd rather keep it one round per level but give it more uses per day, say, five uses.  You generally don't need 50% Concealment all the time, only for the bosses or enormous hordes.

I agree that Wholeness of Body is pretty darn useless. It's a full round use, but pretty much a free cure critical potion. This could and probably should be increased. Perhaps not to the level of fully healing the monk, but perhaps since they have d8 as HP, you can change it to d6*(Class level).

Yup, Wholeness is terrible and I don't think anyone outside of the lowest-magic servers will argue.  A monk is better off using that round for two healing kits.  This change would, on average, increase the heal from 2 HP per class level to 3.5 HP per class level...  which unfortunately still puts it in the realm of 'heal kits are better' but at least makes it better than it was.  I'd propose making it work like a self-targeted Lay on Hands, healing HP equal to class level times Wisdom modifier.

[Remmy]

Jan 9, 2015 7:55:26 GMT -5 trylobyte said:

Bear in mind that a mage's 50% Concealment spell, Displacement, is one round per caster level, two if Extended.  5 rounds per class level, considering it has a minimum class level of 18 to even take it, would be massively long comparatively, clocking in at 540 seconds to a mage's 108 (216 if Extended) at the same level.  I'd rather keep it one round per level but give it more uses per day, say, five uses.  You generally don't need 50% Concealment all the time, only for the bosses or enormous hordes.

In pen and paper that duration on Displacement is true but on C/D the spell lasts far longer. It is about 1 turn/level now, so 60 seconds per caster level. That level 18 mage would have 1080 seconds (2160 if extended) while the Monk got just a fraction of that. A larger duration buff is in order on that one point.

[trylobyte]

If that's true, then I agree.  I don't actually know how long Displacement lasts since some spell durations no longer match what they say, and some aren't consistent (I've been told Mind Blank was never nerfed but it doesn't seem to last nearly as long as it should).

[Masque]

The stat requirement for Monks makes them very MAD (Multiple Attribute Dependant) and the other big blow is their equipment hinders them quite a bit.

I think it is important to note two things -


Due to the high level of magic items you can cover a lot of the Monk stats to make them respectable enough and Kama based Monks are preferable to unarmed Monk which I will discuss in a minute. 

The first thing to get out of the way though is the Wisdom - AC. Now a lot of people see this as a boon to the Monk when realistically it isn't one. The issue is that classes like Duellist adds Intelligence but again it loses armour. So they are the same right? Well no.


Lets look at the comparison -

Monks have no synergy for their high Wisdom while Duellists get a lot more synergy with their intelligence for example more skill points and this enables them to be a better skill monkey while at the same time gaining greater AC it also gets an additional AC boost at the later stages and receives importantly a damage boost in the form of precise strike. 

Now none of those things set the world on fire but we will also note it is a full BAB class and gets a whopping 1d10 hit points a level.  It also uses a weapon which is very important but I will get onto that later. 

So it lets just do a quick comparison - It can achieve roughly the same AC so we will call that a draw, the duellist will have lower saves, however will have more hit dice and have greater BAB and due to having good Int synergy will be better skill monkey and just as good at stealth (if built for it). 

Lets also expand on why weapons are good. This is due to the item slot economy and the concept of Opportunity Cost. The true cost of an item is the item you don't wear and its benefits. So to illustrate the point if I wear my Ogre Gauntlets of +5 Strength I cannot wear my Gloves of Super Attack +5 which added smashing action. 


The more slots the fewer choices you have to make and the stronger your character is the problem with unarmed Monks they need all the slots they can get because they need to expand - Strength, Dexterity, Wisdom and Con. You can also argue you need a small investment in Int if you are going to actually use the class skills you have been given.

But the unarmed Monk also has mostly two fewer slots than most classes the weapon and the shield. Ignoring the Shield slot for now because it isn't that important in the analysis the loss of the weapon slot is a big blow because the Monk needs strength/dex boosting items due to its inferior BAB. 

While the Duellist can have his rapier of +5 Awesomesauce and still wear the Ogre Gauntlets of +5 strength which is an additional +2 to hit and damage and the Duellist already has the advantage in that department.

The best work around for this is fairly labour intensive but it is to add +AB boosts to gauntlets and gloves in the module with other enchantments I.e Dexterity Gauntlets/ Strength Gauntlets. This allows the Monk to be able to go unarmed without being disadvantaged and it is of no use to anyone else that doesn't use fists as there primary means of attack. 

The other thing is when it comes to AC on CD - Heavy Armour has always been the superior option due to things like Adamantine Plate. It takes a lot of investment in Dexterity or Wisdom to match it and it is also an inferior investment. Stat points are precious and while your dexterity build is matching the AC eventually (epic levels) the Full Plate wearer simply throws it on and then proceeds to dump all his skill points into Strength which increases both AB and Damage or even Con to achieve a superior amount of hit points.  

As a result you have a class that cannot mix it up with the front liners on due to a combination of inferior BAB, inferior strength due to needing to invest it into other statistics i.e. Dex, Wis, Con etc and also inferior equipment as they have to sacrifice the glove slot for a weapon and lose the weapon slot. 

Which is fine. I mean you can argue the Monk isn't meant to be a front line fighter but the Bard for example is an amazing front line fighter and has 3/4 BAB because it can synergies Strength and Charisma with Dexterity not being so important due to the light armour advantage they have.

So then are they good Skill Monkeys? Well they're not bad. They have a decent selection of skills but to really take advantage of this you need higher intelligence because - Discipline is a mandatory skill tax to contemplate melee so that is one of our four gone. Then stealth is again a further skill tax because you have to invest it twice in MS & Hide to achieve stealth and then you have a single point left which needs to go to Tumble for the additional AC (which you need). If you're human then you get an additional point or if you have higher Int you can take more and the selection is really good  - Listen, Persuade and Heal all being strong candidates. 

You also have no way of opening locks or disarming traps so you're pigeon hold into stealth or potentially being good at listen or heal. All these skills are really aimed at making you good in combat so I am not sure skill monkey is the correct term. We have also established that Monks are not as good in combat as more suited front line fighters and these skills don't really boost that. If you choose to focus on skills you will take a further hit on being combat effective. 

A good comparison is the Ranger as it also gets access to pretty much the same skills as the Monk but gets further synergy for them. If the Ranger goes the stealth route it gains HiPS to assist it, spells that enhance it and Trackless Step which is a +4 boost. They are also less reliant on Dexterity so can boost Int if they want more skill points while taking less of a hit on their combat capability. 

We also as already discussed know that the Ranger is already a more powerful front line fighter and is also better at being stealthy.

The Monk doesn't really have much else going for them they are less capable in combat than - Bards, Paladins, Rangers, Fighters and on parwith Rogues and of course the full casters but lets not get into them. 

It is also a worse at stealth than - Rogue, Ranger and is about on par with Bard. 

They are decent enough with the saving throws and that is the classes shining point it will usually only be out classed by the Paladin and his Cha - Saves. That being said saving throws while very good to have they will always fail on a 1 and there a lot of cheap consumables that over-ride the need for good saves (not perfect I am aware) while high AC and decent AB are always useful if that makes sense? 

The class features are a little bit hit and miss Empty Body being the most powerful after Diamond Soul and Perfect Body other than those two nothing to really rave about and Still Mind actually becomes a redundant class feature when you get Perfect Body.



While ECL races such as the one I play do make the class much stronger this is simply because I have enough stat points to make sure I keep my vital stats at an average level. If I had chosen to simply go fighter or bard. I would have dumped it all in Strength/Cha and become an even stronger combat beast. 

ECL races simply have the greatest impact on the Monk because they to an extent cover up some of the weaknesses that a base race Monk would encounter. That is why they are often perceived as 'broken' when taking Monk because the difference in power between non ECL and ECL is much more pronounced. 

An ECL Wizard is still throwing the same 9th level spells around as a non ECL Wizard. 

As for changes the problem with giving Monks full BAB is that UBAB is already the best class feature of the Monk and this enhances it. 

I would suggest

• Making the change to Gloves so Unarmed Monks don't have to cry themselves to sleep every night. 
• Make Monks more proficient in a greater range of weapons - Quarterstaff being a good idea so Monks have access to a two handed weapon.
• Make their class features better - add things like Tongue of the Moon and Sun. Boost wholeness of body to a once/twice a day heal.
• Maybe have flurry also add damage instead of just an extra attack. 

Difficult really I mean you can make the Monk work as it is you just need to be clever with your multi-classing. 

 







 

[ThayanKnight]

I've always thought monks should use their Wisdom for attack rolls (ie Intuitive Attack)It would make the spread less daunting, but I'm assuming that, too, would be a time heavy option for implementing on NWN.