I'm playing through act 2 as a Four Elements Monk, and while I like that in BG3 it's possible to do Flurry of Blows (and sometimes the unarmed strike) after elemental disciplines, and the disciplines in general are a lot better than in 5th edition. However it still feels a bit lacklustre for a few reasons:
- Everything it does still costs Ki points, but Harmony of Fire and Water only lets you recover half once per long rest. There is still nothing in this sub-class that works passively, or bolsters something you're already spending Ki on (like Flurry of Blows).
- While gaining new, higher level, elemental disciplines is nice, it never has the same kind of level of flexibility as a proper third-caster (like Arcane Trickster/Eldritch Knight). This is made worse by the elemental disciplines not having any ability to upcast them like in 5th edition.
- By the time you hit act 2 you're already swimming in spell scrolls and magic items that let you cast spells, so being able to cast using Ki really needs to do more to justify itself compared to going Open Hand and just using scrolls for the stuff you need.
- By a similar token, magic items that bolster melee attacks (either weapon attacks or unarmed attacks, or both) are pretty abundant, this means that choosing to not just use your free regular attack(s) + unarmed strike needs to be really tempting.
I feel like I've got a decent mix of abilities on my build with fangs of the fire snack, fist of unbroken air, water whip, and gong of the mountain, but I find this all fairly situational; fangs of the fire snake is the only one I use semi regularly, and even then a lot of the time I feel like it's better to just save the Ki for one or two Flurry of Blows over the course of most fights. Water whip for example is very situational because your speed means you can usually reach things to begin with, so as with fist of unbroken air you're very much at the mercy of BG3's finicky angling for pushes/pulls into obstacles which makes them a lot harder to use often in practice.
Part of the problem is that with an Open Hand Monk you get boosted Flurry of Blows (which you'll be using somewhat regularly anyway), plus Manifestation of Mind, Body and Soul adds passive damage to unarmed strikes, so again further boosting something you're already doing at no extra cost. And for those situations where you do need a bit of extra utility, some area damage etc., you can just use a scroll or magic item spell. Plus Open Hand gets the significantly improved Wholeness of Body ability (healing, extra bonus action,
and Ki recovery!), and resonating punch gives you a really solid area damage option as it's fairly easy to stack it to cover groups, so on top of push/prone flurry of blows it's not like Open Hand is lacking for utility in combat.
My opinion is that Four Elements really needs either some additional sweeteners; some of the things I'd like to see are:
- Harmony of Fire and Water should be a bonus action so it can be used more easily during combat for longer sustained Ki use.
- Should gain an ability similar to Manifestation of Mind, Body and Soul but not as strong, e.g- a choice of cold, fire, lightning, or thunder as an extra 1d4 damage on unarmed strikes.
- The ability to upcast elemental disciplines that are simply renamed spells (with upcasting) at a cost of 1 Ki per additional level, limited by the character's Monk level.
- Some other way to get Ki points back, such as using all four elements (air, fire, water, thunder) during the combat.
