Playtest 8 Monk Overview and Damage Comparison

A lot of hype around the new monk, but how do they stack up damage wise. We'll evaluate two builds, one from PHB and one from Playtest 8 to see their damage output and survivability.
Timestamps
0:00 - Intro
0:25 - Levels 1-5
7:22 - Levels 6-9
9:04 - Levels 10-13
11:11 - Levels 14-17
16:57 - Damage takeaways
18:42 - Survivability and Overview
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#DnD #TabletopGaming #Roleplaying #DungeonsAndDragons #RPG #dnd5e

[@DndUnoptimized]

CORRECTION: custom lineage for PHB monk, not variant human. And crusher feat cannot boost Dex, so the PHB monk's numbers here are a little higher than they should be. I should have added levels 18-20 in the video, but here they are. *For PHB* Level 18: We get empty body to go invis as an action and give resistance to all dmg except force. (For offense we do less damage if we use it because it eats one whole turn of attacks and reduces the number of times we could use quivering palm too) Damage: 58.4 DPR (38.4%) Surivival if we use Empty body: we take 29.4 Damage each round, letting us last for 5.6 rounds. Level 19: Damage: 57.7 DPR (35.9%) Survival as above: we take 34.6 damage each round, lasting 5.0 rounds Level 20: Damage: 56.9 DPR (32%) Survival as above: we take 40.5 damage per round, lasting 4.5 rounds *For Playtest 8* Level 18: Superior defense is like Empty Body doesn't cost an action, so much better. Damage: 62.7 DPR (41%) Survival if we use Superior Defense and patient defense: We take 14.5 damage each round, lasting 15 rounds Level 19: we gain a feat boosting Dex to 22 Damage: 71.5 DPR (44%) Survival as above (now 21 AC): we take 16.5 damage each round, lasting 13.7 rounds Level 20: we boost Dex and Wis by 4 (Dex 26, Wis 24) Damage: 85.3 DPR (48%) Survival as above (now 25 AC): we take 8.8 damage each round, lasting 26.5 rounds So Playtest 8 monk continues to go up in damage and survivability after 17, while PHB goes down. Couple of things to point out. I didn't mention how much better ki management is, but that's a big one thanks to patient defense and step of the wind having options to use without ki. Also, in the new version, magical items for monks will be included, so that itself is a big boost. Damage numbers are calculated using a scaling AC based on the DMG chart on pg 274. If you have seen my Martial Caster divide video you'll know that the monk did pretty poorly without a subclass, but does better here. This is because we weaponize the push feature in way of open hand, and quivering palm added quite a bit of damage at 17. Looking at other monk subclasses they usually get some boost at 17 for damage, but none of them are close to this one.

[@kongoaurius]

Do you think old subclasses would be worse at dealing damage?

[@DndUnoptimized]

@kongoaurius worse than PHB open hand, or worse than play test 8 open hand? Open hand typically isn't a damage dealer, I believe way of mercy is the only one that directly adds damage starting at level 3, but almost all subclasses have an ability at 17 which boosts damage. I'd have to run some numbers to find out how they compare to the PHB quivering palm, but just my gut feeling is that they don't, and it's probably significantly less damage.

[@nyanbrox5418]

​@@kongoauriusyeah, so, open hand is a controller slirmisher hybrid, not a dps (though don'tunderestimate 120ft of forced movement dragging an enemy up a cliff or through a spike growth or heaven forbid, conjure celestial, shadow is more like an skirmisher, infiltrater hybrid, mercy is more like a hybrid healer and dps, and elements sort of acts more like, well I don't know, it's got more forced movement, akin to telekinetic, instead of double speed at level 10 it gets flight, which eliminates your weakness against flying creatures even more than the massive reach and ranged stuns to knock flyers out of the air with darts and daggers (shuriken and kunai) And idk, I think having a massive aoe fireball on a monk is alot better with bonus action punches and disengages to evacuate from the area yourself Not sure about elements, but it's definitely good

[@DndUnoptimized]

@@nyanbrox5418 yea, it for sure has a lot more usable options. PHB monk has a lot of promises for cool things, but they just never seemed to work for one reason or another. I'll have to play this new monk in a long term campaign to see how it really feels, but it seems so much more likely that you can actually use your cool stuff.

[@nyanbrox5418]

@@DndUnoptimized i never really played the old phb monk, but I played along side them, the DM even let them specifically play an Aarakocra, at our unoptimised table, basically they had the best possible chance of being effective And even with our party, they still ended up feeling very weak, running out of ki right before the boss fight, etc etc, this changed the moment their pc died and they rolled up an unoptimised straight cleric, and even without really any idea as to how to play a cleric (they didn't know what spirit guardians was), and of course they could no longer fly for free for 4 hours each day, they still felt alot more effective in combat

[@PackTactics]

combat space: Are you also accounting for resources and damage taken? This is a Skirmisher with resources and I think you're being waaay to nice to the 5e Monk looking in the description. I admit, I haven't watched the full video. I only watched 2 minutes before I had to go.

[@DndUnoptimized]

@PackTactics Whoa, Pack Tactics! I never thought I'd see the day you watched a video of mine. It's an honour. Regarding combat space. This is just a DPR calculation turned into a percent of HP for the encounter. The goal is to provide some context for DPR instead of just numbers. Most people don't know good from bad DPR by a number, but using a percentage of a combat shows how far that DPR takes you. But for my DPR calculations my examples are always 3 battles (so a 1/3 daily resources), and assuming 1/2 short rest resources. I don't consider damage taken into account when calculating our damage output. I've never seen that done before, do you calculate how likely you are to get knocked down and then subtract that from your damage output? Maybe I'm misunderstanding your question. Open hand monk in PHB damage output is really low at level 16, but quivering palm gives a big boost, so if you are looking at my pinned comment, the levels 18-20 are not representative of the PHB monk overall. I know there is a lot of controversy regarding quivering palm, and many optimizers dislike it, but when I ran the numbers myself seems to have a significant impact. I'd be very interested to hear your opinion.

[@PsyrenXY]

Love this analysis - have a sub! 2014 monk wasnt quite as bad as some people said, but man do I love the playtest monk

[@DndUnoptimized]

Thanks! Yea the monk has a very bad rep, but before level 5 it is quite good, and then stays decent for a while after that. I think the bad feelings often come from the Ki starvation, and lack of cool abilities. A lot of them seem great in your mind, like slow fall, but in practice pretty much never happens. PT 8 monk made the cool abilities work better and added a lot of quality of life! I hope this one stays

[@raqsasim]

@@DndUnoptimized I made it to Level 16 as a Monk in Scarred Lands, and it was amazing! I've played Monks for years and that last play was really flavorful. In fairness, I wasn't playing with a bunch of people who play for maxing out damage

[@DndUnoptimized]

@@raqsasim super happy to hear that! All I want is that people play the monk and feel awesome. Hopefully in optimized circles this is the case too, but I fear it isn't.

[@khultak]

I'm curious how much better a monk would be if they took 1 level of fighter, probably at level 2, and took the two-weapon fighting style, weapon mastery in dagger or light hammer and hand axes. The reason is that these are all monk weapons, and the dagger/light hammer have the nick mastery which moves the extra attack into the attack action meaning the monk still gets their full bonus action to use on flurry of blows. As monk weapons the damage the weapon does doesn't matter because it uses the martial arts table, but since they are monk weapons the monk can use dex for attack and damage including for throwing them. At second level the level 1 monk/level 1 fighter dual wielding a hand axe and a dagger would get two attacks with the attack action doing 1d6 + dex modifier on both (two weapon fighting style) and also either a bonus action unarmed attack or a flurry of blows for up to 4 attacks in a single round. At level 6 (monk 5/fighter 1) this increases to a potential 5 attacks per round using d8, and at level 11 (monk 10/fighter 1) a potential of 6 attacks per round. You could use a shortsword or handaxe in your main to get vex, and a dagger in the offhand to keep the nick mastery so your extra attack is part of the attack action, and it would give monks some use for magic items. It also gives you some limited ranged attacks, and since the thrown property tells us that we can draw the weapons as part of the attack, you could throw three daggers a round from 5th level all in the attack action (2 main hand throws, one offhand throw) and still pummel the crap out of someone with flurry of blows. If I'm reading the UA 7 fighter Action surge correctly, taking 1 more level of fighter would allow you to action surge for up to 8 attacks in a single round at level 12 (you can only make the light property extra attack 1/turn), 5 of which could be thrown weapon attacks... shuriken machine gun anyone?

[@DndUnoptimized]

Yea I was thinking along the same lines but didn't address multiclass in this video. Nick would be a great feature to have here and one level of fighter for it isn't a hard sell. Adding weapon masteries at level one makes martial classes even more front loaded, which I'm a little sad about, but I'm happy for them to have some versatility and control.

[@khultak]

looking forward to seeing more of your content

[@khultak]

@jamesdeer3129 I dont understand what this comment has to do with what I posted. I didn't compare the monk to fighter, I only mentioned multi-class possibilities that don't have anything to do with subclasses. It is simply looking at the synergy between the U8 monk playtest and the playtest weapon mastery.

[@Zr0din]

So glad to get some good news for the monk. Hey is the feedback link up yet for the survey?

[@DndUnoptimized]

Yes, the monk deserves it! And yea the feedback survey is now open until Jan 2.

[@Klaital1]

Just one note about the Grappler feat, the strike + grapple at same time you can only do specifically when you make an unarmed strike as part of your action. Can't do that with bonus action or reaction attacks.

[@DndUnoptimized]

True! Thanks for pointing that out

[@thorscape3879]

Every Monk should get an alternate benefit from Flurry of Blows like how Drunken Master gets disengage when they use it.

[@DndUnoptimized]

It could be a nice way to streamline them, and makes sense flavour wise.

[@Vandylizer]

Quick question, if you knock them back 15ft with Open Hand why would that pop them 20ft in the air? Are you adding the normal 5 ft shove on top of the 15ft?

[@DndUnoptimized]

Maybe I wasn't too clear about how it worked. We use crusher feat to knock them up 5ft then use open hand flurry of blows to move them up 15 more. It's quite the uppercut. Hope this makes sense

[@Vandylizer]

@@DndUnoptimized Ah OK, so this is taking advantage of the fact that any unarmed strike can become a grapple or shove, so now you can flurry of blows three times at level 10 and this adds an extra 15 ft on top of the crusher 5ft, yes? BTW in the Playtest 8 PDF it says the target needs to succeeed on STR or DEX saving throw vs a shove so technically that extra 15ft isn't a guaranteed launcher for that 20 ft fall damage, correct? Like the extra 2d6 fall damage seems nice, but if I shove them prone I'd get advantage on the 2nd and 3rd Flurry of Blows UA Strike, so maybe that's a bit less risky versus the high risk high reward triple uppercut combo? (Since Crusher can't shove them prone, it can only launch them 5 feet away upwards, to the left or to the right, correct?)

[@DndUnoptimized]

Good questions. The crusher feat is only on the PHB monk, doesn't exist in the play test monk yet. For the PHB, we use crusher to move 5 ft vertically with our action attack, then use flurry of blows with bonus action. Now we can activate 2 attempts to push. If we push on the first attack then they fly up and go prone, then we hit with the second flurry of blows. If the first one misses or they make the save, then we attempt to push with the second flurry of blows attack. If we do trip attacks with the flurry of blows then we have already attacked twice, and we would need to succeed on the first flurry of blows trip attacks in order to get 1 attack at advantage. It becomes a pretty minimal damage addition at that point. For the play test monk, we don't take crusher and don't launch them in the air. We take the grappler feat, and whenever we attack a grappled enemy we have advantage. So we flurry of blows first, get a free grapple attempt after the first strike AND attempt a trip attack. that's two options in one attack to attempt to gain advantage for the rest of the attacks. If we want to spend another ki we can do stunning strike too for a third attempt. We can also attempt a second or third trip attack with the other flurry of blows. That's how I've been running it. Does that seem logical to you?

[@Vandylizer]

@DndUnoptimized Oh Ok, so you're just making multiple attempts at a 15 ft launch using Open Hand Push tacked onto a Flurry of Blow strike (after landing the initial hit with a 5 ft launch using Attack action). For some reason I was picturing you hitting them each time with a Flurry of Blow that each shoved them 5 more ft (5 ft x 3 shoves = 15 ft) on top of the intial Crusher attack. I was missing the forest for the trees by focusing on the new changes to Unarmed Strikes and how they can become grapples and shoves now, so I thought that's what was on the table, lol. But now it makes more sense. I'm excited to see the monk become more of a slippery tanky playmaker. As Yun would say from Steeet Fighter: Time to show off a little! 😁

[@DndUnoptimized]

Yea, the slipperiness and kiting abilities of the monk are amazing now. Add the fantastic defense abilities and I imagine it'll be a really fun class to play! Also it's a lot more multiclass friendly which is a huge boost to playability. Monk 5 hits with spirit shroud would be pretty great.

[@TheMystic-Portal]

Interesting finds with this one, it’s almost as if wotc is doing what they should have been doing already, but instead they are getting to it either too late or only due to the ogl situation What do you think?

[@DndUnoptimized]

The OGL situation was definitely a mess, but I think it was their plan was to update the martial caster divide the whole time. From what I've seen they have been doing a pretty decent job of shrinking that gap with one DnD. We'll have to wait until the PHB releases to find out for sure!

[@TheMystic-Portal]

@@DndUnoptimized that is very true, it would be nice to see them fix things

[@DndUnoptimized]

@jamesdeer3129 you think the PHB monk is better than Playtest 8? That's surprising, almost everything it can do is better except for stunning strike and maybe quivering palm. Personally I don't think monks should just be stun bots because it isn't as much fun for the players or the DM, and they feel like it's their only play, like a one trick pony. Quivering palm being so strong isn't required anymore because the base class is much better. Having said that, a save or die technique is just amazing and I've always wanted to make it happen in a cool way. But like I said in the video, there are a lot of problems with just using the PHB quivering palm because of how it worked which made it unlikely to actually do as much as you hope.

[@DndUnoptimized]

@jamesdeer3129 ah, I see. I haven't played those monks, so I don't know. I do agree that stunning strike is better in PHB because of duration and no limit to attempts per turn. But limiting it to one per turn forces the monk to use their ki elsewhere, making them not just stun bots, which I like better. Since the rest of the class is much better, it doesn't feel like a big nerf.

[@JamCliche]

There is no doubt in my mind that monks were always supposed to be dodge tanks. Your goal should be to get in, deal some amount of damage, and get out either by stunning, dodging or disengaging

[@DndUnoptimized]

I think they were always meant to be skirmishers, but never tanks where they sit on the front and take all the hits

[@JamCliche]

@@DndUnoptimized I dunno, most of the abilities in this kit are not substantially different than the original, they're just more economical now. It strikes me as fixing quality of life, not changing the class role.

[@strifeairleon9291]

Kinda sad we didn't get level 20 and the crazy shenanigans that is 25 AC. Also worth noting that past lv 11 you are dashing every turn and if you want to spend the ki point you get disengage as well, really helps survival when you can always run out of range each turn

[@DndUnoptimized]

Yes, I knew id get this comment. I originally just did 1,5,9,13,17 but then eventually decided to fill in the gaps. As I posted it I thought, why didn't I just go to 20?! I think I'll have to finish it and post the results in written form. And yes, I should probably have mentioned that too because it'll definitely help with kiting!

[@DndUnoptimized]

Took a bit of time, but here are the results for level 18-20. I updated the pinned comment to reflect these too. I'll do level 1-20 in these types of videos from now on. *For PHB* Level 18: We get empty body to go invis as an action and give resistance to all dmg except force. (For offense we do less damage if we use it because it eats one whole turn of attacks and reduces the number of times we could use quivering palm too) Damage: 58.4 DPR (38.4%) Surivival if we use Empty body: we take 29.4 Damage each round, letting us last for 5.6 rounds. Level 19: Damage: 57.7 DPR (35.9%) Survival as above: we take 34.6 damage each round, lasting 5.0 rounds Level 20: Damage: 56.9 DPR (32%) Survival as above: we take 40.5 damage per round, lasting 4.5 rounds *For Playtest 8* Level 18: Superior defense is like Empty Body doesn't cost an action, so much better. Damage: 62.7 DPR (41%) Survival if we use Superior Defense and patient defense: We take 14.5 damage each round, lasting 15 rounds Level 19: we gain a feat boosting Dex to 22 Damage: 71.5 DPR (44%) Survival as above (now 21 AC): we take 16.5 damage each round, lasting 13.7 rounds Level 20: we boost Dex and Wis by 4 (Dex 26, Wis 24) Damage: 85.3 DPR (48%) Survival as above (now 25 AC): we take 8.8 damage each round, lasting 26.5 rounds So Playtest 8 monk continues to go up in damage and survivability after 17, while PHB goes down.

[@nyanbrox5418]

​@DndUnoptimized now of course, if one uses patient defense constantly, eventually one would run out of the ki to fuel it, it's more likely that I would start with full all out damage, knock an enemy or two out, then round 2 focus fully on defense, (as half of my HP was lost on round 1, but now my durability goes up 10x, I should still survive the rest of the combat no problem, meanwhile I'll grapple enemies to give them disadvantage to attack anyone but me with bonus action flurry of blows stuff, then action dodge, or vice versa to deal a bit less damage and be a bit more defensible, with the temp hp and disengage, as well as like 100-120ft of move speed with the free dash late game Honestly this monk just looks so fun

[@DndUnoptimized]

These numbers are assuming half ki points per encounter, and encounters are 4 rounds. So we start using patient defense every round starting at level 8. Yea, It is probably not going to be normal for the monk to do that unless they are doing pure tanking and grapple to control them. Your series of events is the likely thing to happen. Yea this monk looks a lot more fun!

[@NitzMonkey]

Now I want to build a monk tank

[@DndUnoptimized]

Yea me too! It would be pretty great

[@TheMystic-Portal]

Second attempt Hello, my I go by the eternal Gm, my company and I would love to discuss your work on the martial caster divide video. We would like to discuss with you doing or explaining what program you used and how you did it, so that we can guarantee balance in our system between martials and casters You used a lot of the language and concepts I’ve discussed with my team for class creation and how to balance it across the system, I believe what you did could be the way to perfect this. Please if interested respond with a way we can talk outside of comments and open view. Again great work, and im sitting down to watch this video now, may comment again to push that algorithm for you 💯😁

[@DndUnoptimized]

Glad you've enjoyed my work! Is this your second attempt to reach out? I must have missed your earlier comment, sorry. Sounds like you are designing a system and are looking to balance casters and martials. Honestly I don't know if I can help with that, it's taken me a long time to get a grasp of DnD 5e, but I'm happy to lend a hand or provide any insight I can. Let me set up an email for this KZbin account and I'll post it here. Thanks for pushing the algorithm! 😊

[@TheMystic-Portal]

@@DndUnoptimized always, I understand and respect the effort it takes, and I do believe you could help, when we can talk I’ll break it down

[@DndUnoptimized]

I just updated my about page to include my email. You should be able to reach me there

[@TheMystic-Portal]

@@DndUnoptimized alright, going to check that soon as I’m done here

[@TheMystic-Portal]

@@DndUnoptimized okay I checked and couldn’t find anything through your page on my phone, have an idea where I should look?

[@stabieman]

Great breakdown. I was surprised to see how tanky the new monk could become. Turns out fists > plate, who knew.

[@DndUnoptimized]

Yea I was very surprised at that. They are really tanky in late levels!

[@thecactusman17]

I really like it specifically because it requires active decision making on the player's part since they still have the relatively scrawny HP and Unarmed Defense of a standard 2014 Monk. You have to actively choose to use your abilities and Ki to dodge or deflect damage, which lowers your damage output. Simultaneously, maximizing their damage makes them vulnerable. It really feels like a balancing act especially since they're still effectively forced into melee with their Unarmed Strike being the focus of their offensive kit.

[@DndUnoptimized]

​@@thecactusman17 That's true, it feels like you can be a damage dealer or a tank this round, but make a choice. I bet that will be really fun to play.

[@JJV7243]

I do like the changes to the monk, but think that the class is a bit overpowered starting around level 10+ and the numbers (not design) need to be tuned down a bit.

[@DndUnoptimized]

It is definitely strong and I think might be the strongest martial class. We will have to wait for more spells to get released before we see if it is stronger than casters, but I'm happy with where it is now, I think it ends up similar to the paladins damage output now which is great.

[@CamachoElMacho]

Completely disagree with overpowered. I think it's been brought up to par which is different. It's definitely the 2nd most versatile martial next to the battlemaster fighter. But in terms of attacks, at level 11 fighters can do a minimum of 7 attacks without including subclass abilities that add more attacks and/or extra damage on each attack. And their damage die are higher and more consistent for a much longer part of the campaign. 1d12's and 2d6's since level 1 and benefit significantly from weapon masteries, while Monk just barely reaches 1d10s at level 11 and got their weapon mastery taken away. Now we just have sensible strategies we can use to play the Monk and not feel like the class is bad. I've playtesting this Monk since it came out and it feels really good to play in never overshadowed any of the other players or overpowered any of the enemies. Stunning Strike's extra damage now just feels good when the enemy inveitably saves against the CON ST so it doesn't feel so bad to use. There's a couple of things I'd like to have for the Monk: 1) Improved Unarmored Movement at lvl 4 with Slowfall would make a world of sense to me. 2) Enahnced Defense - a +1 to AC at level 9 to ameliorate the AC issues mid campaign and not have to really on magic items. 3) Give us the weapon mastery back. It makes no sense that Monks don't use weapons when all we've seen from any depiction of Monk (Western or Eastern) is Monks using weapons effictively. I think those would really go a long way in making sure that Monks aren't just up to par but geniunely great for the game. But if the Monk comes out just as this, I'd be ok with that.

[@notsochosenone5669]

Even if monk would actually be overpowered (i doubt it) it would 100% be a good thing - monk was bad for decades (in every edition but 4th), so monk deserve to be new wizard, if you ask me. At least for one edition.

[@moonlight2870]

Hum actually, crusher increades str or con, not dex.

[@DndUnoptimized]

Correct, I have a correction in the pinned comment about that. Wish I had remembered that earlier.