D&D 5E Monks Suck

[Esker]

That doesn't sound right. Let me do some back of the envelope math...

Greatsword does base 7 damage per hit.
Strength +4
Great Weapon Master +10
Great Weapon Fighting is what, +1? They'd probably take Defense anyway but whatever.
Two attacks

So that's 44, right?

If you assume variant human Champion with GWM feat and defense style with a base 65% to hit (becoming 40% after the -5), they do about 19.8 DPR on average (roughly a 10% chance of a crit and thus a bonus action attack; ignoring additional chances of a bonus action attack due to getting a kill).

With no feat, the greatsword champion with defense style does about 17.1.

A monk with no ki making two staff attacks and an unarmed strike at 65% to hit does 11.4 damage on average.

 

[Mistwell]

A level 8 monk will stun 3-4 times per short rest of dumping ki into stunning.

I'd like to see some math supporting that claim. Take the average Con of foes who are likely to be the CRs the party would face around that level, and their ACs, and the number of encounters between short rests, and let's see how many hits from a wisdom-focused and a dex-focused monk are likely to hit, and then the same for how many stuns are likely to work. Which is always the issue of course - if you pumped wisdom you did it sacrificing Dex so your attacks fail to hit more often (which doesn't waste a stun but it does waste a hit, and you will only have so many hits per short rest which allow for a stun). If you pumped Dex, your stuns fail to work more often. I suspect you get a result closer to 2 rather than 4 stuns per short rest. And then of course we need to factor in using Ki for things other than stun, which I think is a not-insignificant issue. Flurry and sub-class abilities will come into play competing for those Ki points. Using Ki for Defense also may come into play if you get hit hard with that low AC and low hit points.

This is a difficult calculation with a lot of factors. If we're going to do the calculation, might as well throw in as many genuinely relevant factors as we can.

That’s 9-12 times per day. Hypnotic pattern directed at 4 enemies may incapacitate 3 or so. On average that’s about 6 rounds of incapacitation. (Assuming a 4 round fight).

That doesn't sound right either. In my experience, if you hit 3 foes successfully with Pattern, those guys are left to the end of the battle as you kill off the rest of the foes, and they are likely all three incapacitated for at least 3 rounds, and often more than that.

To come out even you’d need to target 8 to 12 enemies with hypnotic pattern per day. That’s probably around 2-4 casts of it. That’s doable by level 8...

You can cast it four times per day at level 6. Arcane recovery. And of course you have other spells that can incapacitate at lower levels, which are particularly effective if you have a subclass like a Diviner which gives you Portent. Few things piss off the ogre in the cave that has no ranged weapon more than levitating them (2nd level spell) and then slowly roasting them to death with ranged cantrips A well placed Tasha's Hideous Laughter or Grease or Web (depending on the foe) can all also effectively take a foe out of the battle for several rounds, and all of those are first or second level spells too.

but the monk will do more damage than any character that can do that at level 8.

No, they won't. But that's a different debate involving way more math than I think would be right for this thread which isn't about wizards.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

It has no paths to extreme optimization, but that isn't even relevant. The point is that it also has no paths to even reaching the level of an "average power" character of another class.



Miscommunication is a two-way street, so I'm not going to put misunderstanding what I was trying to say on you. But hopefully now we are on the same page as far as that piece goes.

good lord this is some next level "internet forum argument" crap.

The monk is, without any optimization at all, at the same level as a normal character of other classes.

Seriously, my dude, if your statement was correct, it is impossible to even vaguely take seriously the notion that the monk could be anywhere even in the middle of class popularity. People aren't stupid. They know if their character isn't contributing. In order for it to be true that the monk "has no paths to even reaching the level of an "average power" character of another class", it would also have to be true that monks aren't significantly contributing to most groups.

There just isn't any metric other than "CharOp Forum White Room" analysis that can reasonably take the position that monks "suck".

As for the second paragraph, I just...am blown away by the level of nonsense. You gotta be kidding me.

 

[Undrave]

3. Then there is the issue of how the player plays the character. DPR doesn't take into account players catering to a class's abilities. "Wait, the monk attacked and destroyed my weapon? What do I do now?" It doesn't measure the "fun" of playing different style. Some people find pure "DPR" and "Tanking" fun, others prefer a tradeoff to allow you to hit and run. It's not right or wrong, it's just different.

Destroying weapons is an optional rule, as is the basic disarm action. You can't have a class depend on 'DM may I', that's just bad design because players don't know what to expect when reading it.

And Tanking and DPR are usually trade off for one of the other. You sacrifice your tanking to hit harder, or you sacrifice your damage to be harder to hit. The Monk has the GREAT ability to do this on the fly, and that's a pretty cool concept... I just don't think it's calibrated properly.

 

[Chaosmancer]

Finally caught up, a few things with some hyper-basic math and all that jazz.

First. Can we please acknowledge that "I can buy a horse" is the worst counter-argument for the monk's mobility ever conceived? I feel like I'm alone in remembering the first UA for the Cavalier where pretty much everyone agree that building a subclass based on mounted combat was a terrible idea, because horses lose effectiveness in all the places Adventurers go.

I played a paladin with a mount, being mounted is awesome, but I also could rarely utilize it, because you don't ride your mount around the city, and you have to leave it behind when crossing a ravine, or going down a ladder, or any of the millions of other things that Adventurers do constantly.

To give just a basic example to highlight what I mean. Level 9 monk in a marketplace, along with his Cavalier horse buddy. I'm even going to assume that instead of stabling the horse, they are riding the horse through the market place.

Assassin fires a crossbow bolt from a rooftop and begins fleeing.

The monk gives chase moving approximately 150 ft, running up the walls of the buildings to get to the roof and begin leaping the rooftops to catch the assassin.

The mounted cavalier... can't get to the rooftops, so they will have to take a more circuitous route. They also are at half speed because of the crowds (not a problem for a single person to slip through, but a large horse, much harder), so are only moving 60 ft....So, no, the monk's mobility is not copied by buying a horse.


Also, I'd like to talk a bit about Deflect Missiles. Let us assume that a part of 4 is facing five archers. Immediately, I have to ask, are all 5 archers targeting a single player? No. Most DMs will spread that out, not focus all of that damage on a single player. Especially at low levels such as 5 and below, where five ranged attacks can drop a player pretty quickly,

Assuming Monk AC of 16, and archers have a +5 to hit, they hit about half the time. So, DM gives that extra shot to the monk. Two attacks, one misses, the other hits. The attack is a heavy crossbow let's say. That is 1d10+3. The Monk's deflect missiles is 1d10+6 minimum. Meaning they are very likely to take zero damage from that exchange. If this is 5th level? 1d10+8 is likely. Meaning that is the monk rolls a 1, the enemy still needs to roll a 7 or better to deal any damage at all.

Now, let's say that you are suffering from "DM hate's me-itis" and all five attacks are going at you. If we give the monk a turn to dodge, that takes their 16 AC to 21 (approximately) We'll say that drops the attackers chances of hitting to 30%. That means... Out of 5 attacks, it is likely only 2 hit, and of those two, one did zero damage.

This is very powerful.


But, now for the meat. DPR/AC/Ect.

One thing that is annoying me is not only the baseline (which is very high) but how a lot of this gets tilted around. So, I'm going to throw my own analysis down, and point out a few things that I think people are overlooking or ignoring.

I am assuming +4 to main stat (because I did that math already) and that everyone has about the same Con. I am using no daily resources, no feats, no subclasses. Just the base numbers. I will acknowledge here, Barbarian has best HP, followed by fighter, and rogue and Monk essentially tie.

Fighter Dual-Wielding AC 15 Damage at levels 1/5/11 double shortsword 15/22.5/30

Fighter Great Weapon Master AC 16 Damage at levels 1/5/11 Greatsword (assume style is +2 total) 13/24/35

Fighter Dueling Style AC 18 Damage at levels 1/5/11 Sword and Board 10.5/21/31.5

Fighter Defensive AC 19 Damage at levels 1/5/11 Sword and Board 8.5/17/25.5

Monk AC 17 Damage at levels 1/5/11 Staff and single martial arts 15/24.5/25.5

I had barbarian and rogue, but I started running out of time, so I cut it short. Note that in my analysis At level 1 the Monk is tied for best damage, level 5 they have the best damage, and they drop sharply at 11. And in terms of AC, they are comfortably in the middle.

But, I hear the hew and cry, my analysis is all wrong. Why aren't the fighter's wearing plate? Or using magical weapons.

And that is point 1 that I would like to address. While it is true that fighter's can spend gold to increase AC, that leaves a weird deficit in the party, because if we assume equal loot, the monk is getting a lot of gold, and nothing to use it on. They have to be buying something with all that gold, but we don't know what it is.

But, these is part of the problem with monks that isn't any problem of the monk design, but rather the rest of the game. If we assume the Fighter is getting +3 Plate, +3 weapon and +3 Shield, then the monk falls behind everywhere, because they don't have any good magic item support. Monks don't really have any way to increase their AC through magical gear that isn't also available to everyone else. Which means that they are going to fall behind by default. Not because they are poorly designed, but because the other classes have access to things that support them and their styles.



Now, that all being said, I did make a recommendation on a different site that I am going to leave here too, because I think it is painfully obvious that monks fall off the cliff at level 11. But, I just want to acknowledge that if we are assuming the other classes can use their gold to improve past their starting gear, but leave the monk with nothing to spend their gold on that helps in anyway, then of course they are going to look worse.

So, the solution might simply be, make Monk Gear.

Now, this is a massive drop off [talking about 11th level damage], I fully agree with that, but I also note, that everything is below his baseline yet again. I can see a fix of increasing the monks bonus action attacks here, letting them do 2 naturally and 4 with ki...

That would make the monk doing 4d8+16 = 34 baseline, and then spending their ki could bring it to 51... which is pretty decent actually. But, I think his baseline is still far too high

Edit: People reminding me that short rest recovery is a thing. Maybe do something a little more complex, but have the second set of attacks be a die size lower? Probably still too good if you really focused on making them shine, but they do need a big boost in damage to stay competitive with even basic builds at this level.

 

[FrogReaver]

Why is it 6 only 6 rounds in a 4 round fight? Is that because you're assuming there are two other enemies that come in and use actions to shake the three enemies out of it? It's quite possible IME that hypnotic pattern with three targets failing the save is 12 rounds of incapacitation. I think on average it's more than 6 even though it might sometimes be 6.

In a 4 round fight that means you are killing 1 enemy per round. The first enemy gets his attack and you kill him that round. That means there's no incapacitated enemies left. So you attack one of the incapacitated enemies. You go through the rounds and kill him but in that time he likely gets an attack in on the party. So ultimately the party takes 4 attacks. Without hypnotic pattern the party would take 10ish attacks assuming focus fire. The difference is 6. Not a perfect comparison. But a starting point.

But ok, let's say it's 6. Per short rest if the warlock is using both of their slots on Hypnotic Pattern, that's about 12 enemy-rounds of denied turns, vs the monk's 3-4.

It depends on the size of the enemy groups encountered. The smaller the group the less useful. hypnotic pattern is. The larger it is the more useful it is.

Then you credit the monk for the damage (direct and indirect) that they're doing (since HP doesn't provide advantage), and credit the warlock for the damage they're doing, and the monk closes that gap some, but they can't make up 8 enemy-turns worth of denied actions.

Depends on the damage difference. But sure, it's likely not enough to keep up with a wizard or sorcerer or warlock in terms of control potential. Of course that's more about showing caster supremacy than it is showing the monk is bad. In fact, that a monk has much better control abilities than DPR classes at all may be enough to vastly elevate him over those DPR classes. Just as you argued with the warlock being much better than the monk because of better control abilities.

 

[FrogReaver]

That doesn't sound right. Let me do some back of the envelope math...

Greatsword does base 7 damage per hit.
Strength +4
Great Weapon Master +10
Great Weapon Fighting is what, +1? They'd probably take Defense anyway but whatever.
Two attacks

So that's 44, right?

not really. if you start adding in GWM then the monk at that level has +2 dex in comparison. Remember we aren't considering variant humans here. If you bring in GWM then you have to factor in chance to hit. I don't as the chance to hit is identical in my example.

I just crunched the numbers and the -5/+10 from GWM is worse in that scenario (assuming the 60% to hit everything else has assumed).

 

[Esker]

I'd like to see some math supporting that claim. Take the average Con of foes who are likely to be the CRs the party would face around that level, and their ACs, and the number of encounters between short rests, and let's see how many hits from a wisdom-focused and a dex-focused monk are likely to hit, and then the same for how many stuns are likely to work.

Figuring out what CR distribution to use is really hard to standardize, since that part will vary greatly from table to table. But I just did a quick back-of-the-envelope scan, and if at level 8 you assume that

• 50% of enemies are CR4 (half the party's level)
• 25% are CR8 (equal to the party's level) and
• 25% are CR12 (1.5 times the party's level)
• within each CR band the monsters are sampled uniformly from "non-good-aligned" creatures in the MM and MToF
• you just look at CON save bonuses (ignoring legendary resistances and the like, which are presumably a significant factor for the higher CR enemies, for the sake of a quick back-of-the-envelope)

then for a monk that "splits the difference" and takes +2 DEX and +2 WIS (for a DC 15 save), on average monsters should fail their stun saves about half the time. If that's a reasonable description of the CR distribution you face, then 3-4 stuns per short rest is probably about right.

If your table tends to use fewer, higher CR monsters, the failed save rate will be less, but the value of the stun will be greater. I don't know how those balance out but my gut says that higher value stun is worth more than a higher fail rate.

So... at this level anyway, I'm fine with supposing that stuns work about half the time, unless someone wants to refine my arbitrary CR distribution based on something more concrete.

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

Destroying weapons is an optional rule, as is the basic disarm action. You can't have a class depend on 'DM may I', that's just bad design because players don't know what to expect when reading it.

Do you know what else are optional rules?

Multiclassing.
Feats.

So can we stop with the whiteroom theorycrafting already? All the stuff that "assumes" certain optional rules, and then (as you do here) says, "Woah, pardner, those optional rules are different than the optional rules I use!"

Anyway, my point was more simple (and didn't use the pejorative "DM may I" language) - players have different strategies, and some classes fit those better than others.

And Tanking and DPR are usually trade off for one of the other. You sacrifice your tanking to hit harder, or you sacrifice your damage to be harder to hit. The Monk has the GREAT ability to do this on the fly, and that's a pretty cool concept... I just don't think it's calibrated properly.

Well, then re-calibrate it ... for you.

It's fine for the rest of us.

 

[Esker]

not really. if you start adding in GWM then the monk at that level has +2 dex in comparison. Remember we aren't considering variant humans here. If you bring in GWM then you have to factor in chance to hit. I don't as the chance to hit is identical in my example.

I just crunched the numbers and the -5/+10 from GWM is worse in that scenario (assuming the 60% to hit everything else has assumed).

I was assuming variant human, but sure. Without feats, looking at "at will damage", the defense style greatsword champion has probably 21 AC, and 17.1 DPR. The monk has 17 AC and 11.4 DPR. About 33% less (or the fighter has 50% more, depending on which way you look at it). But I'm not sure that in itself says that much, since on the one hand, at-will damage isn't that useful a measure, and on the other, Champion is a terrible subclass.