maybe find a way to discuss the game without insulting swaths of the community for absolutely no reason. It not only makes people a lot less likely to have any patience with or grace toward you when you're wrong or out of line, but it just adds needlessly to the unpleasantness of a discussion that has no reason to be that way, on a forum that generally isn't that way.
Your other comment upthread about playtest respondents is just needless invective that adds nothing to any conversation. People don't find the monk unsatisfying because they're powergamers, and the community literally has a history of rejecting stuff because they think it's too powerful (often when it isn't).
So here's the thing.
I've posited my own desires for the Monk elsewhere, ideas for new features that give them more flexibility in line with what the OneD&D playtests have given to other classes. And the responses I received were insults because my ideas weren't purely about "DPR".
I've received insults whenever I've commented on what those who complain about the Monk want it to be, whether of the two extremes it always falls into: they want the Monk to be overtuned in terms of DPR, want them to be able to use and combine numerous special actions per turn with little limitation, and want them to have an overabundance of resources even when other classes are limited in theirs—or they want to change the Monk in a way that blatantly
weakens the Monk in either the short-term or long-term, but makes the Monk's features more exploitable for multiclassers.
I've received insults whenever I floated the idea that feats like Polearm Master should be rebalanced to only giving a limited number of uses of the bonus action per short rest, instead of being hugely anomalous to other feats which have limited uses to the special actions they grant.
There is absolutely a segment of the community that relishes in the toxic idea of "optimization", where they and the kind of players they believe the game should cater to attempt to milk every point of hypothetical DPR out of every class. They don't truly want game balance, because they actually want imbalanced choices so they can feel superior to those who don't take the more-powerful choices. It's why there's the type of player who insists that every and any martial having GWM/PAM is basically a
given, that no player plays any differently from how they would play a class.
For the vast majority of players, the Monk falls in line with every other class, possessing a flexibility with its movement and support features that other martial classes don't possess. But for that small segment of the community, whom I will absolutely refer to as power-gamers because they are, they're rabidly vitriolic about the Monk because it doesn't have the same elite-tweak optimization options. I'm not even exaggerating: despite the Monk receiving largely all-around buffs in UA6, the singular fact that they couldn't spam Stunning Strike was treated by the Monk Bad crowd as some kind of
personal slight, that they were being
victimized by not being able to exploit one powerful ability.
But at the end of the day, it's that kind of gamer who is more likely to be responding to the playtest surveys. Many average players who play the game in a non-power-gamer way likely won't invest the time to assess and try out the playtests, while those who invest themselves heavily in "theorycrafting" and their pursuit of Being More Awesome Than Other Players At The Table are going to be much more critical of the playtests and anything that stands in the way of that goal. And as we've seen from several celebrated new features, what many playtest respondents seem to expect is for classes to get potent new features with no action economy and/or resource management cost, like Weapon Mastery and Cunning Strike. Which then falls perfectly in line with expectations like the title of this thread.
