So Monk is the one class we didn’t get a prior UA for, which means all the changes are totally new. I’m still wrapping my head around it. Martial Arts die increase: good. Martial Arts die not affecting weapons: bad. Step of the Wind buff: good. Stunning Strike nerf: bad but reasonable?
I feel like they knew Monks needed help, but it doesn’t really seem like they made as much effort to fix that as I think they really needed to. Anything I might be missing that saves the Class here?
I’m lukewarm on it. By my measure, the critical flaw in the monk’s design is stunning strike. Any discussion on the monk that I’ve had has invariably been pulled to that singular ability.
It’s an incredibly swingy ability that only costs one point. As a result all monks need to weigh all their point-cost abilities against it, and in combat either the monk is a mediocre contributor or they undermine the whole encounter by disabling key actors. SS was nerfed, but I’d like to see a version where it was removed entirely and it’s power was distributed throughout the class.
A key compromise that I think would be healthy is to transplant stunning strike into a subclass. That way players who enjoy that playstyle can opt for it, and DMs who dislike running games for those builds can disallow them at their table.
As for all the other details, I’m uncertain. There are some improvements, but it’s hard not to see the system bending over backwards and straining to fit around stunning strike.
I can agree that Stunning Strike was bad design, for sure.
It’s interesting when you compare the Monk to casters, who typically also have incap abilities that cost a resource. While I don’t think casters are designed perfectly either, a caster isn’t useless if they can’t use their incap spell on an enemy (through immunity or high saves or whatever) whereas a Monk that can’t stun is doing really nothing but subpar damage. Casters usually spend more of their resources on an incap spell, and they sure aren’t spamming it three times per round. Hypnotic pattern can still cause ridiculous swinginess when it comes to balancing fights of course, so maybe it’s not the best benchmark anyway.
With that in mind, I think Stunning Strike should probably be less spammy (which is the main part of what they did) but obviously it needs to be made up for by making the rest of the Monk much better, which I don’t feel was really achieved here.
I like the monk as the class who applied status conditions to enemies. The guy who runs around the battlefield who supports his allies but debuffing the enemies. So stun works with that fantasy but if it’s in a subclass like open hand that allows the others to have a cool signature ability at like 5th level.
Since I doubt that will happen I enjoy the changes now. You can do stun once and then use your discipline points elsewhere.
I absolutely agree with you on the Stunning Strike matter. The nerf has helped - it’s gone from “Use almost all my Ki on Stunning Strike.” to “What can I afford to use Ki on while Stunning Strike is on cooldown?” But it’s still the wrong kind of question to be asking, and IMO it’s exactly the kind of debilitating ability that makes DnD unfun.