monks too powerful

[Azure Trance]

What does more damage on average, a fighter with 18 strength and a greatsword +2, or a monk with 18 strength (like he'll have that) and a d20 attack with his fists?

"Like a greatsword +8" my pasty white ass. Monks are NOT damage-dealing machines . . . not like fighters and barbarians.

The lack of damage dealing potential is what stops me from playing one; indeed the above character highest stat was his 19 WIS, and his weapon of choice was a Halberd (Fists of Fury only when they went within 5 feet). It's obvious that a monk unarmed is sort of lacking compared to a fighter who has lots of feats and a weapon with magical bonuses on it.

 

[Spatzimaus]

This discussion comes up pretty often. I'll try to break it down a bit; here goes.

1> Monks get abilities at every level. This is true, no one's arguing it. It's a plus. However, I'd say roughly half of these abilities are useless (or nearly so) at the level you get them. Timeless Body, any speed over 50', etc. all fall into this category.
Only a few high-level ones are worth the sacrifice. In fact, I'd go out of my way to AVOID getting Perfect Self, because outsiders get hedged by Protection spells and can't be raised... not worth dinky DR.

2> Flexibility is power. Monks have no flexibility. Oh sure, they'll get some good abilities, but they don't really vary as you go up in level. A level 15 Monk is the same as every other level 15 Monk, except for slight variations in stats and which Feats were selected with the general slots. You can't multiclass well, and you can't use armor or most weapons. In combat, it's pretty much "run up to bad guy and punch him", which is something most people can plan for.

3> For a melee fighter, they're really at a disadvantage in a protracted fight. d8 HD, 3/4 BAB, the fists can't get an attack bonus or exotic weapon enchantments (and those exotic monk weapons don't quite make up for this), and their WIS bonus and innate armor together ALMOST make up for the loss of wearing armor.

4> On the other hand, they get 4+INT skill points, a good class skill list, and great saves all around. IME, this makes them ideal mage-killers, but they get soundly trounced by tanks.

Bottom line, if you think Monks are overpowered, you should be playing one. In my experience, they're just WAY too limited. You just can't react well. When confronted with an enemy immune to some sort of attack, most other classes can switch to a different attack without losing much. If a Monk is trying to hit a monster he can't harm (maybe because of DR), his backup plan (if he has one) will be far less effective.

There have been plenty of threads proposing fixes for the Monk class, usually involving increasing their flexibility by letting them pick abilities as they go. Feel free to search around.

 

[Happiest_Sadist]

1) which other class gets special abilities going from level 1-20? monks= 19 levels of extra special feats? barbs 15, bards 2, cleric 1, druid 17, fighter 11 bonus feats, paladin 9, ranger 5, rogue 16, sorcerer 1, wizard 6

How useful are all of these in a fight, and how much do they change the balance. Slow fall? Not, like feather fall is that hard to get. And its about 6 of the abilities. Toungue of sun and moon? Not game-breaking in any concievable circumstances. Timeless body. Nice (but still not gamebreaking) if you run a campaign taking 20+ years of game time. I've never played one. Ki Strike? Ki strike is painfully bad, even with Ki Strike, monks can't keep up with DR like a fighter with full values of equipment.
Compare these to fighter feats like whirlwind attack. Or wild shape. Or even a familiar.

2) then we go to the point of damage unarmed strike at level 12 gives 1d12, thats like the best weapon in game 1d12 = greataxe 2d6 = greatsword but it gets better at level 16 they get 1d20 dmg!!!! no weapon is that good..... that is like a greatsword +8.... no such thing.... no weapon can do that much potential damage on any given strike! 20 points? give me a break

Consider average damage. Average damage for d20 is 10.5, average damage for a d12 is 6.5. In otherwards its equivalent to a +2 greataxe if you always power-attack for 2 and have worse crits. Monks don't get bounuses to hit. Then consider they can never get cool abilities like flaming, keen or vorporal.

3) at 5th level monk is immune to all natural diseases and at 11th immune to ALL poison magical or otherwise! not even a paladin can do that?

Ok. this is a nice ability, but is inaplicable in 90% of the situations. Espeically how common curing spells are by then.

4) then they get evasion at 1st and improved evasion at 9th so guess what that fireball, what fireball..... rogues dont even get improved evasion!!!!

Ok, finally a good useful ability. However nothing great.

5) then at 12th they can dimension door once per day.... heck which other non spell caster can do such? heck wizards cant even access that spell till 8th level and they have to memorize it! its not innate like it is to monks....

Same as #4, however not insane again.

6) the kicker.... at 13th they get SR equal to 10+ their level!!! heck it is a minimum of 23.... guess what the highest SR item you can buy from the DMG is Mantle of Spell Resistence and it costs 90,000 gp and it only gives you SR 21!!!! so your saying that a monk of 13th level is better than any spell resistance in the world!!!!!! and it keeps getting better since a 20th level monk would grant him/her SR 30!!!! that is a load of crap...

This is a good ability. However don't forget there are spells that give the same SR.

7) then at 15th you have quivering palm which enables the monk to make a hit, and any creature that can be critically wounded has a chance it may die from one strike from a monk so potentially an anchient red wyrm can die with one strike of a monk....

Once per week, if it fails a save. That's true of many spells, like slay living for instance. Or disintegrate.

8) at 17th level a monk can communicate with any living creature... a 20th level ranger cant even do that to animals let alone ANY living creature....

Ok, how is this so great? A wizard can do this with the right low level spell. It barely registers on the power scale.

9) at 20th they get innate damage reduction 20/+1.... hmmm and become an extraplanar being..... what do other classes get at 20th level.... you guessed it you become just a 20th level fighter, cleric, paladin, rogue, wizard, etc.!!!

Ok, when is this aplicable. When you are fighting a creature with no natural attacks (anything that uses equipment will likely have something magical by then,) has no damage reduction like for instance anything with a celestial template, or a dragon. What CR 16 or above creature has no damage reduction and uses no equipment. Not many.

 

[silvertable81]

Been working on a "Monk". Just thought I could show it off here. If you think they're too powerful now, NEVER even open the Oriental Adventures book. If you think they're not powerful enough, get the book, NOW.

http://3ep.rpgprofiler.net/3ep/view.php

 

[Forrester]

Re: hey newbie, i mean forrester

secondly as an evaluator you are supposed to test all odds... and a monk with these current abilities would be stupid not to either invest in a magical item to enhance their strength or just have good strength to begin with...

Um, yeah, except that fighters will do the exact same thing, and get x1.5 to their damage if they're wielding that +8 greatsword you're so worried about.

If you really think that monks deal out more damage in combat than fighters do to anything except maybe blind kobolds, you need to start splitting the little orange pills in half.

 

[CRGreathouse]

Re: why a monk is so unbalanced....

first of they get too many special feats...

They get two bonus feats by level 20, less than rangers (on level 1), wizards (on level 10), fighters (on level 4), and rogues (on level 16).

2) then we go to the point of damage unarmed strike at level 12 gives 1d12, thats like the best weapon in game 1d12 = greataxe 2d6 = greatsword but it gets better at level 16 they get 1d20 dmg!!!! no weapon is that good..... that is like a greatsword +8.... no such thing.... no weapon can do that much potential damage on any given strike! 20 points? give me a break

Garbage. On level 12, a fighter will have a +2 or +3 equivilent weapon, dealing (say) 2d6+1+1d6 (+1 flaming greatsword). The monk deals 6.5 + Str mod; the fighter deals 11.5 + 1.5 * Str mod.

3) at 5th level monk is immune to all natural diseases and at 11th immune to ALL poison magical or otherwise! not even a paladin can do that?

Yeah, it's nice, but both monks and paladins have good enough saves that this is a rare situation -- it wouldn't surprise me if it never came up. (Paladins almost always make the save, that is. Fort tends to be their best.)

4) then they get evasion at 1st and improved evasion at 9th so guess what that fireball, what fireball..... rogues dont even get improved evasion!!!!

Rogues can get inproved evasion by 10th level.

5) then at 12th they can dimension door once per day.... heck which other non spell caster can do such? heck wizards cant even access that spell till 8th level and they have to memorize it! its not innate like it is to monks....

Monks are semi-spellcasters: they manifest magic through ki, though not as well as 'normal' casters. A wizard could prepare three dimension doors, but a monk couldn't.

Oh, and it's "prepare" not "memorize".

6) the kicker.... at 13th they get SR equal to 10+ their level!!!

A spellcaster with the same level as the monk and Spell Penetration (very common for PCs in my group) bypasses this 2/3 of the time.

guess what the highest SR item you can buy from the DMG is Mantle of Spell Resistence and it costs 90,000 gp and it only gives you SR 21!!!! so your saying that a monk of 13th level is better than any spell resistance in the world!!!!!! and it keeps getting better since a 20th level monk would grant him/her SR 30!!!! that is a load of crap...

I agree that the cost for items of SR is too high.

7) then at 15th you have quivering palm which enables the monk to make a hit, and any creature that can be critically wounded has a chance it may die from one strike from a monk so potentially an anchient red wyrm can die with one strike of a monk....

An ancient white dragon without prep spells has Fort +23. Since the save DC is 10 + the monk's Wis mod + 1/2 the monk level, the DC is 15 + level / 2 if the monk's Wisdom is 21. Of course, this has a reasonable chance to succeed -- considering that the monk must be level 31 to use quivering palm on the dragon. Of course, the dragon shouldn't be a challenge by then...

8) at 17th level a monk can communicate with any living creature... a 20th level ranger cant even do that to animals let alone ANY living creature....

A high-level ranger should have no lack of speak with animals, and will generally have a good Animal Empathy score to boot. Sure, monks communicate better with intelligent creatures -- but who's surprised?

9) at 20th they get innate damage reduction 20/+1.... hmmm and become an extraplanar being..... what do other classes get at 20th level.... you guessed it you become just a 20th level fighter, cleric, paladin, rogue, wizard, etc.!!!

This is a token benefit, you know. I'm not sure if it helps more than it hurts.

So as you can see a monk is overly powerful... and in my humble opinion some adjustments are truely needed for this uber character class....

There may be reasons to think so, but I've not seen any here.

 

[CRGreathouse]

In fact, I'd go out of my way to AVOID getting Perfect Self, because outsiders get hedged by Protection spells and can't be raised... not worth dinky DR.

20th level monks can still be raised, actually.

 

[Numion]

In my games the high-level monk is the guy who just won't die!. That's it. Pretty hard to kill, but quite inefficient in itself.

Is that balance? Beats me. Never broke my game, at least.

 

[Numion]

Uh oh, just read Zaks list.. doesn't make sense.

Try to play a game from 1st to, say, 16th level, then come back and tell me monk is uber. Really.

It's so not uber. Clerics might be uber. Wizards might be uber. But not monks.

BTW, just to counter one point: immune to disease and poison? Whoop-ti-friggin-doo. At those levels PCs rarely to succumb to those dangers anyway... big deal.

 

[Zaknafein]

6) the kicker.... at 13th they get SR equal to 10+ their level!!! heck it is a minimum of 23.... guess what the highest SR item you can buy from the DMG is Mantle of Spell Resistence and it costs 90,000 gp and it only gives you SR 21!!!! so your saying that a monk of 13th level is better than any spell resistance in the world!!!!!! and it keeps getting better since a 20th level monk would grant him/her SR 30!!!! that is a load of crap...

This is a good ability. However don't forget there are spells that give the same SR.

[/B]

In response to spells giving same SR.... you are referring to Spell Resistance which is a 5th level Clerical spell from the Protection or Magic Domain.... not all clerics will have that to begin with and if they do it will grant 12+ caster level SR BUT only for 1 min/lev however monks will have their SR at all times.... kinda like a drow....

what I am tring to say is for instance a 13th lev Wizard casts Power Word, Stun(7th lev spell without a save but grants SR) with INT of 27(headband of Int +6) on a 13th lev Monk which innately gets 23 SR at this level... which gives the high level wizard 50% chance of hitting him with his 7th and highest level spell.... I am just saying which other class gives SR out like that? You can potentially go up to an archmage and snap his neck before he gets to hit you... and if you do get threw a monks SR then you are faced with the most balanced saving throws out of any class.... at 13th your looking at +8 WS +8 RS +8 FS....

-in honor zaknafein