Monk Class
Version 1
| Level | Proficiency Bonus | Features | Martial Arts | Unarmored Movement |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1st | +2 | Martial Arts, Unarmored Defense | 1d4 | ─ |
| 2nd | +2 | Unarmored Movement, Ki | 1d4 | +10 |
| 3rd | +2 | Deflect Missiles, Ki Fueled Strike, Monastic Tradition | 1d4 | +10 |
| 4th | +2 | Ability Score Increase, Slow Fall, Quickened Healing | 1d4 | +10 |
| 5th | +3 | Extra Attack, Impeding Strike, Focused Aim | 2d4 | +10 |
| 6th | +3 | Ki-Empowered Strikes, Monastic Tradition Feature | 2d4 | +15 |
| 7th | +3 | Evasion, Stillness of Mind | 2d4 | +15 |
| 8th | +3 | Ability Score Increase | 2d4 | +15 |
| 9th | +4 | Purity of Body, Unarmored Movement Improvement | 2d4 | +15 |
| 10th | +4 | Ability Score Increase | 3d4 | +20 |
| 11th | +4 | Whirlwind of Blows, Monastic Tradition Feature | 3d4 | +20 |
| 12th | +4 | Ability Score Increase | 3d4 | +20 |
| 13th | +5 | Tongue of the Sun and Moon, Spiritual Fortitude | 3d4 | +20 |
| 14th | +5 | Diamond Soul | 3d4 | +25 |
| 15th | +5 | Timeless Body, Reactive Defense | 3d4 | +25 |
| 16th | +5 | Ability Score Increase | 3d4 | +25 |
| 17th | +6 | Hurricane of Blows, Monastic Tradition Feature | 4d4 | +25 |
| 18th | +6 | Empty Body | 4d4 | +30 |
| 19th | +6 | Ability Score Increase | 4d4 | +30 |
| 20th | +6 | Mastery of Ki | 4d4 | +30 |
As a monk, you have the following class features.
Hit Points
- Hit Dice: 1d8 per monk level
- Hit Dice at 1st Level: 8 + your Constitution modifier
- Hit Dice at Higher Levels: 1d8 (or 5) + your Constitution modifier per your monk level after the 1st
Proficiences
- Armor: None
- Weapons: Simple weapons, shortswords, slings, blowguns
- Saving Throws: Strength, Dexterity
- Skills: Choose two from Acrobatics, Athletics, History, Insight, Religion, and Stealth
Equipment
You start with the following equipment, in addition to the equipment granted by your background
- (a) a shortsword or (b) any simple weapon
- (a) dungeoneer's pack or (b) explorer's pack
- 10 darts
Martial Arts
At 1st Level, your practice of Martial Arts gives you mastery of Combat styles that use unarmed strikes and monk Weapons.
You gain the following benefits while you are unarmed or wielding only monk Weapons and you aren't wearing armor or wielding a Shield.
• You can use Dexterity instead of Strength for the Attack and Damage Rolls of your unarmed strikes and monk Weapons.
• You can roll your Martial Arts dice in place of the normal damage of your Unarmed Strike or monk weapon. The dice used is shown in the Martial Arts column of the Monk table.
• When you use the Attack action with an Unarmed Strike or a monk weapon on Your Turn, you can make one Unarmed Strike as a Bonus Action.
A weapon is considered a monk weapon as long as you are proficient in the weapon and it comes from the following list:
- Simple melee weapons without the heavy, special or two-handed properties
- Martial melee weapons without the heavy, special or two-handed properties
- Versatile weapons wielded with two-hands without the heavy or special properties
- Thrown weapons
- Blowguns and Slings
Unarmored Defense
Beginning at 1st Level, while you are wearing no armor and not wielding a Shield, your AC equals 10 + your Dexterity modifier + your Wisdom modifier.
Unarmored Movement
Starting at 2nd Level, your speed increases by 10 feet while you are not wearing armor or wielding a Shield. This bonus increases when you reach certain monk levels, as shown in the Monk table.
At 9th level, you gain the ability to move along vertical surfaces and across liquids on Your Turn without Falling during the move.
Ki
Starting at 2nd Level, your Training allows you to harness The Mystic energy of ki. Your access to this energy is represented by a number of ki points. You have an amount of ki equal to your monk level plus your Wisdom modifier (minimum of 1).
You can spend these points to fuel various ki features. You start knowing three such features: Flurry of Blows, Patient Defense, and Step of the Wind. You learn more ki features as you gain levels in this class.
When you spend a ki point, it is unavailable until you finish a short or Long Rest, at the end of which you draw all of your expended ki back into yourself. You must spend at least 30 minutes of the rest meditating to regain your ki points.
Some of your ki features require your target to make a saving throw to resist the feature's Effects. The saving throw DC is calculated as follows:
Ki save DC = 8 + your Prof. Bonus + your Wisdom mod.
Flurry of Blows Immediately after you take the Attack action on Your Turn, you can spend 1 ki point to make two unarmed strikes as a Bonus Action.
Patient Defense You can spend 1 ki point to take the Dodge action as a Bonus Action on Your Turn.
Step of Wind As a bonus action you can take the Disengage or Dash action as a Bonus Action on Your Turn, and your jump distance is doubled for the turn. If you spend 1 ki, you gain both disengage and dash.
Deflect Missiles
Starting at 3rd Level, when are hit by a ranged weapon attack, you can spend 1 ki point and use your Reaction to deflect the missile. When you do so, the damage you take from the Attack is reduced by 1d 10 + your Dexterity modifier + your monk level. Additionally, you can deflect or catch additional missiles that hit you before the start of your next turn. You can only deflect up to your Wisdom modifier in total missiles.
If you reduce the damage to 0 for one of these attacks, you can catch the missile if it is small enough for you to hold in one hand and you have at least one hand free. If you catch a missile in this way, you can make a ranged Attack (range 20 feet/60 feet) with the weapon or piece of Ammunition you just caught, as part of the same Reaction. You make this Attack with proficiency, regardless of your weapon Proficiencies, and the missile counts as a monk weapon for the Attack.
Ki-Fueled Strike
If you spend 1 ki point or more as part of your action on your turn, you can make one attack with an unarmed strike or a monk weapon as a bonus action before the end of the turn.
Monastic Tradition
When you reach 3rd Level, you commit yourself to a monastic tradition, such as the Way of the Open Hand. Your tradition grants you features at 3rd Level and again at 6th, 11th, and 17th level.
Ability Score Improvement
When you reach 4th Level, and again at 8th, 10th, 12th, 16th, and 19th level, you can increase one ability score of your choice by 2, or you can increase two Ability Scores of your choice by 1. As normal, you can’t increase an ability score above 20 using this feature.
Slow Fall
Beginning at 4th Level, you can use your Reaction when you fall to reduce any Falling damage you take by an amount equal to five times your monk level.
Quickened Healing
Starting at 4th Level, as an action, you can spend 1 ki point and roll your Martial Arts dice. You regain a number of hit points equal to the number rolled plus your proficiency bonus.
Extra Attack
Beginning at 5th Level, you can Attack twice, instead of once, whenever you take the Attack action on Your Turn.
Impeding Strike
Beginning at 5th Level, you can interfere with the flow of ki in an opponent's body. Once per Turn, when you hit another creature with a melee weapon attack, you can spend 1 ki point to make it an impeding strike. The target's speed is halved, and it cannot take any reactions until the end of your next turn. Additionally, they must succeed on a Wisdom saving throw or be slowed until the end of your next turn. While slowed, the target takes a −2 penalty to AC and Dexterity saving throws. On its turn, it can use either an action or a bonus action, not both. Regardless of the creature’s abilities or magic items, it can’t make more than one melee or ranged attack during its turn.
Focused Aim
Starting at 5th Level, when you miss with an attack roll, you can spend 1 to 3 ki points to increase your attack roll by 2 for each of these ki points you spend, potentially turning the miss into a hit.
Ki-Empowered Strikes
Starting at 6th Level, your unarmed and weapon strikes count as magical for the Purpose of overcoming Resistance and immunity to nonmagical attacks and damage.
Evasion
At 7th level, your instinctive agility lets you dodge out of the way of certain area Effects, such as a blue dragon's lightning breath or a Fireball spell. When you are subjected to an Effect that allows you to make a Dexterity saving throw to take only half damage, you instead take no damage if you succeed on the saving throw, and only half damage if you fail.
Stillness of Mind
Starting at 7th level, you gain proficiency in Wisdom saving throws. Additionally, at the start of Your Turn, you can end one Effect on yourself that is causing you to be Charmed or Frightened. You cannot take an action the turn you use this ability.
Purity of Body
At 9th level, your mastery of the ki flowing through you makes you immune to disease and poison.
Whirlwind of Blows
At 11th level, immediately after you take the Attack action on Your Turn, you can spend 2 ki point to make three unarmed strikes as a Bonus Action.
Tongue of the Sun and Moon
Starting at 13th level, you learn to touch the ki of other minds so that you understand all spoken Languages. Moreover, any creature that can understand a language can understand what you say.
Spiritual Fortitude
At 13th level, whenever you make a saving throw and fail, you can spend 1 ki point to reroll it and take the second result.
Diamond Soul
Beginning at 14th level, your mastery of ki grants you proficiency in all Saving Throws.
Timeless Body
At 15th level, your ki sustains you so that you suffer none of the Frailty of old age, and you can't be aged magically. You can still die of old age, however. In addition, you no longer need food or water.
Reactive Defense
At 15th Level, when you are attacked by a creature and before the attack roll is made, you can spend 2 ki points to take the Dodge action as a Reaction. You retain the benefits of Dodge until the start of your next turn.
Hurricane of Blows
At 17th level, immediately after you take the Attack action on Your Turn, you can spend 3 ki point to make four unarmed strikes as a Bonus Action.
Empty Body
Beginning at 18th level, you can use your action to spend 4 ki points to become Invisible for 1 minute. During that time, you also have Resistance to all damage but force damage.
Additionally, you can spend 8 ki points to cast the Astral Projection spell, without needing material Components. When you do so, you can't take any other Creatures with you.
Mastery of Ki
At 20th Level, your mastery of your personal ki allows you to perform the Patient Defense, Flurry of Blows, and Deflect Missiles techniques without spending any ki.
Level by Level Change Explanation:
Version 1:
Level 1: Pseudo-incorporated Dedicated Weapon into Level 1 with some simplification. Generally, you should get your primary weapon at level 1; not level 2. Also monk weapon choice has been setup as a list of potential weapon types you can pick; so no added complexity of making other weapons monk weapons via attunement for the base class. Players pick a weapon or two as their main at L1, and then no worries about monk weapons unless they go Kensei at level 3.
The list of monk weapons is focused on melee weapons that aren't heavy or explicitly two-handed, or ranged or weird like lances or nets. Issues over the use versatile weapons as monk weapons has been clarified no matter if you two-hand or one-hand the weapon. Also, let's face it, monks are melee fighters, their damage potential is in bonus action attacks with their fists; long range is not really an option unless you have subclass feature that gives you bonus action ranged attack(s).
Level 2: The monk suffers from a lack of ki and way too many abilities that use it. Nowhere is this more significant than in Tier 1 and Tier 2 play. Doubling ki would be too excessive at high levels and require a rebalancing of certain ki features. Adding proficiency modifier would be fine for a mono-classed monk but is generally a bad idea for low-level class features due to multi-classing. Since Monks are already a MAD class and will generally have a +2 or more Wisdom modifier, Monks gain their level plus Wisdom modifier in ki per short or long rest. This helps significantly at low levels plus has diminishing returns at high levels. Also since Monks generally raise Wisdom later than Dexterity, they won't gain much additional ki from the Wisdom until Tier 3 or 4 where the bonus will be small.
Also, the bonus action is a such a significant cost for the additional defensive mobility gained from Step of the Wind that costing highly valuable ki is too painful especially with Rogues getting to use their bonus action to dash, disengage, hide, or aim at the same level without losing much damage potential (only melee rogues can use their bonus action to try to sneak attack if they missed on the first attack). I did decide to give step of wind a bonus if spending 1 ki to let the Monk gain both disengage and dash.
Level 3: Deflect missiles always seemed rather weak. It helps that it doesn't cost ki to deflect an arrow, but it only deflects one with maybe a bonus reaction attack at some extra ki cost. Since the feature is called Deflect Missiles, I changed it to allow deflecting up to Wisdom Mod missiles (again probably two missiles at Tier 1 and 2 play), but it does cost 1 ki to use the ability no matter the number of arrows.
You still gain the opportunity to get a free reaction ranged attack from the ability if you reduce one (and only one) of these arrows, bolts, darts, etc. to zero damage. Situational, but it looks cool and can come in handy when facing a mixed group of lower level enemies such as ranged goblins supporting hobgoblins or a bugbear.
Ki-Fueled Strikes helps the Monk from not losing out too badly on damage when using their subclass ki-features.
Monastic Traditions They could probably use some tweaking in certain cases, but they are generally fine and can be considered largely unchanged for this revised version. There is the exception that the pseudo-caster/blaster monks fall way behind.
For a revision of them, their abilities will simply cost less ki than before, at least for the damage spells. A L2 damage spell is fine when facing Tier 1 enemies and some Tier 2 enemies, but is way too little during Tier 3 play when the blaster monk is primarily using those types of spells, Thus a blaster style monk really needs to spam L2 spells like a Sorcerer who is wasting their sorcery/spell points on low level spell slots. Though to be honest, if you want to play a Bender style character, you really need a Monk-style Subclass for the Sorcerer and not a 1/3 or 1/2 short-rest caster subclass for the Monk.
Level 4: Slow Fall is fine, it doesn't cost ki and is highly situational. It doesn't even negate all falling damage, just reducing it some. And the 1d4 + prof healing for 2 Ki points is garbage when Ki is already so precious. So just a simple change to 1 ki for the same amount of healing. Plus it is self healing at the cost of combat functionality; primarily used immediately before a short rest with any remaining ki.
ASIs: For some reason, Monks don't get more ASIs than the standard, which is ridiculous given that Rogues and Fighters are more versatile than monks without factoring in their extra ASIs. Plus Monks are one of the most MAD classes in 5e given how important Wisdom is for the class. Not even Barbarians need Con or Dex as greatly as Monks need good Wisdom. And a Monk shouldn't ignore Con either. As a result, Monks do gain a 6th ASI. With all of the added class features in Tier 1 and 2, the only really open space was level 10 as we start getting into the more fluffy or highly situational class features. As a result, Monks can use it to buff Wisdom or gain a feat, which they ordinarily wouldn't be able to get without Variant Human.
Level 5: Extra Attack is good, no change here. I didn't see anything wrong with Focused Aim, as you do gain +2 bonus when you miss an attack at the cost of 1 ki; and you probably know when you are reasonably close to the enemy's AC. I think this ability will probably see less use outside of boss fights or against high AC enemies.
And then there is Stunning Strike, an ability which is too good and too bad at the same time. It is just unfun for the GM and makes the Monk too one-note in combat. There are so many problems with the ability that it is completely reworked here into a very different ability.
- Changed it to Once per Turn, still after a hit is scored. Can be used on reaction attacks.
- Since you almost need to spam the Stunning Strike to get a creature to be affected thanks to the Con save, the save is now Wisdom.
- There is a small effect gained even if the creature succeeds on the save: half speed and no reactions; which has the benefit of letting the Monk avoid an Opportunity attack, helping mobility without costing a bonus action.
- Most important change is Stun has been replaced with the far less potent Slow effect for a round.
The -2 to AC and Dex Saves makes the enemy easier to hit instead of nearly impossible to miss. The creature still has the ability to engage in actions, and non-movement based Legendary actions are unaffected; but their options are more limited and they lose multi-attack for a round. And thus, the monk goes from burning through legendary resistances to being the cheapest means of burning a legendary resistance per round.
Wisdom saves are generally not that high for non-caster legendary enemies, giving the monk a good chance of the target failing its save and needing to burn a resistance without the monk needing to burn lots of ki every turn. Between a few extra ki and the dramatic reduction in ki-burn rate, the monk can consider various options throughout combat rather than burning 3-5 ki per turn on a stun-spam.
Level 6/7: Slight change with ki-empowered strikes in that it ensures that if the monk is using their monk weapon, they can still bypass nonmagical attack resistance/immunity. This way they aren't required to get a magic weapon of the right type to deal with the nonmagical immunity issue.
Also, it seems like Monks should get better at Saving Throws gradually, so Stillness of Mind has been improved to include Wisdom saving throws here. In addition, there is a fix to ensure that RAI and RAW match for Stillness of Mind. If you want the monk to lose their action to break a frighten or charm effect, then you need to ensure they can break it and not be prevented from doing so thanks to the Charm/Frighten effect overriding their action.
Level 8, 9, 10: Both the Unarmored movement and Purity of Body are each weak abilities more for flavor than real mechanical gain, so both are placed at Level 9 to give some potency to this level. This leaves Levels 8 and 10 open for the ASIs.
Level 11/17: Damage boost is sorely needed in Tier 3 and 4 play, so at the cost of more ki, the monk can attack one or two more times this round rather than in later rounds. At these levels, monks have enough ki to last them two good combats. I didn't want to make Flurry too strong, however, and end up with Monks having more attacks than fighters while those attacks are nearly as powerful assuming no feats.
Level 13/14: The language ability is extremely weak outside of certain campaigns, so I spread out the saving throw benefits of Diamond Soul into level 13; by allowing for 1 ki for a re-roll of saving throw.
Level 15: Again Timeless Body is flavorful, but nearly useless mechanically. So I added Dodge as a reaction. Given the low cost of a reaction, I have it cost 2 ki here; though at this point, 3 ki could be easily justified.
Level 18: I didn't see anything wrong with Empty body. It isn't powerful nor is it greater invisibility, but resistance plus concentration-less invisibility for one minute isn't bad.
Level 20: The original capstone sucked, so I changed it to reducing ki costs. Here, however, I simply made base features free. Key feature to note is the name specificity. Bonus Action dodge is free, but reaction dodge still costs two ki. Additionally, I didn't want to give Monks 6 free attacks at the cost of an action and bonus action, so this feature only gives four attacks for free. While Fighters also get four attacks, their attacks usually have better riders from subclasses and their ability doesn't cost a bonus action and stacks with their two action surges.
As for damage, I decided to have it rise in number of dice rather than size of dice. In fact, you could reflavor this increase as each d4 being a separate punch or kick, but only one of those punches per attack gets the dexterity bonus. Monks are also going to tend towards very reliable but average damage values using weak damage dice. Assuming they hit with every attack, they would get about 15 damage per attack ranging from 45 damage for 0 ki, 60 for 1 ki, 75 for 2 ki, and 90 for 3 ki.
Admittedly, the damage output is competitive or stronger for 6 rounds versus a base GWF Fighter using their Action Surges to attack for two rounds. Still, the GWF can have better damage riders and a free bonus action and the GW Master gives their attack a massive damage boost over the monk's attacks on top of being a much tankier build by default. The monk is burning their bonus action and ki resources purely to deal damage leaving them with fewer options, no attack riders, and weaker defenses/mobility.