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Message: <blockquote data-quote="TheOneGargoyle" data-source="post: 8642734" data-attributes="member: 6924207">I've been thinking too. Any melee really needs 3 things:1) Effective Health / Survivability - things like heavy armour & shields, increased HD, resistance to damage, ability to disengage etc2) Damage output - things like Sneak Attack, increased # of attacks, flat damage bonuses etc3) Engaging things to do - things that are interesting & effective, different for all classes, their "shtick" as others have put itThe thing is, monks have good answers to all 3 of these, eg :1) Patient Defence, Step of the Wind2) Flurry of Blows, MA dice (at last for tiers 1 & 2)3) Stunning StrikeSo the problem isn't that monks don't have good answers to those 3 things. The problem is that those things use the same resource pool & the costs for those things are high, leading to the monk having to choose to do relatively few of these things at the exclusion of the others. As it stands, monks can't be survivable enough, and do competitive damage, and do their shtick, they have to choose which of those things they want to do. This doesn't really happen with other classes.Fighters don't have to choose between having their heavy armour & shields work, or being able to use Extra Attack. Rogues don't have to choose between being able to do Sneak Attack or Cunning Action. They're generally always available, they don't compete for actions, or resource pools. The ones that are limited use generally last long enough to cover multiple encounters, like barbarian rages & moon druid wild shapes and again, usually give answers to all 3 of the above things at the same time.But for monks, everything costs Ki to use, plus nearly everything uses their bonus action as well. So they can only do one of those things every round, and not for very long, they can easily run out in just a few rounds.So, thought experiment: what if monks could use their existing abilities with less of this action & resource contention? What if they either used a bonus action, or a Ki point, but not both? Would this give them what they need?For example (might need tweaking, but something like this?) :<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Patient Defence - uses either a bonus action but no Ki, or uses 1 Ki and a reaction (to being attacked)</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Step of the Wind - uses either a bonus action but no Ki, or uses 1 Ki and is a free action</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Flurry of Blows - uses bonus action but no Ki, or uses 1 Ki and a free action (not sure about this one)</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Stunning Strike - uses 1 Ki per attempt, or free attempt on crit</li> </ul>This would mean a monk spending 1 Ki per round could flurry + SotW + Stun only on crit, for example. Or if they've completely run out of Ki, could still do a normal attack + patient defence.Would that be overpowered? How would you tweak that?</blockquote>

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