Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Thoughts on monk stats?

Well, I'll be honest, that was not useful at all. Guess I'll figure it out myself

Its about as useful as "my square-wheeled cart doesn't work, how can I fix it?"

I get your opinion on the STR monks, however it is a fact that you gave little to none useful answers to my particular questions. I am going to make it work! :P

Hes not wrong tho ...
What is your goal neprostoman?

I mean IF we get stat rolling ... then yeah you can make Gith monk work, but its true that no racial bonus will be usefull for you. Thats just a fact.

That's because there ARE no good answers. Your character will have an AC of 14 and 3+6 per level hp. Enemies in BG3 are particularly prone to targeting low AC characters. You will be shot full of goblin arrows and die. Maybe try Shadow monk, since that will make you slightly better at running away and hiding whilst your companions do all the fighting. But you would have to live until level 3 first.

I've always wanted to roleplay as a githyanki infiltrator, the creche path to the cure and the whole githyanki thing intrigues me the most in the story. I also want to choose a martial class that I've never yet tried, which is monk.
I tried gith fighter patch 4, gith bard patch 9 and gith cleric patch 8 and had no troubles, even though the last two classes are not particularly well-aligned with the race. Even if monk would be considerably harder to pull off, I am still willing to give it a go! I just like the idea!


I've been thinking about SM as well, I guess between shadow step and misty step and big jumps this monk can have great mobility. But you are right about the AC, rolling initiative poorly can lead to an unwanted death for sure. I guess I could play it ninja style, trying to avoid combat or initiate through surprise rounds. I wonder how they'll code mage armor and unarmored defense interaction, could be a potential AC solution depending on how they implement it.

Don't need to make it the same character though.

A gith melee wizard plays similarly to a monk, and has a better AC. Try illusionist or enchanter to be good at infiltration. Or Rogue - a martial class who isn't actively impeded by armour and can attack with STR so long as they use a finesse weapon. Assassin is good at infiltration, and so is an arcane trickster with the right spells.

But if you must play a gith monk YOU NEED DEX and as much CON as possible too.

Hm, armor proficiencies don't seem useless tbh, at least on paper.

What if I go with gith monk, but abandon Martial Arts and Unarmed Movement in favor of Heavy Armor and Shield. I know, heavy armor doesn't go very well with infiltration, but it kinda rings with 'githyanki way of infiltration', so I'd still go with the shadow monk.

What I am planning is:
- Set initial stats as 17 (STR), 8 (DEX), 15 (CON), 12 (INT), 12 (WIS), 10 (CHA) after the racial bonus applies
- Take Heavily Armored at level 4, boosting STR to 18 and solving the AC problem
- Take Heavy Armor Master at level 8, boosting STR to 19
- Take ASI at level 12, boosting STR to 20 and CON to 16

This way I am losing on two things: the possibility to use my BA for the unarmed strike and mobility from the Unarmed Movement. However, the lack of moment will be compensated by the huge jumps and those would at the same time occupy the BA. And all the other monk features are perfectly usable. What do you think?

This is a really terrible idea. You are wasting ability point / feat options turning a monk into a crappy fighter instead of focusing on what makes monks unique.

There is no advantage to putting points into STR as a monk.

STR increases to hit and damage
DEX increases to hit, damage, and AC

It’s a single player game, so if you want your protagonist to be the weakest character in your party, that’s up to you, but why?

Edit: I just double checked- you need to gain proficiency in medium armor before heavy and light before medium, so assuming that the final game build follows these rules, you can’t do this anyway.

This is true because Monks use Dex for Quarterstaff and Spear.

You of course want to dump charisma to emulate your Master.

I haven't played a Monk in 5e, but it will be interesting to see the Larian Monk buffs on the 7th.

Also, by the rules of DND, mage armor and unarmored defense do not stack. It’s one or the other.

You get medium armor proficiency as Githyanki though, as well as some weapon proficiencies. I knew someone will pull the crappy fighter card, but you are still a monk, with all the later features of your monastic tradition. Do fighters get that? No, they don't. Also, I agree that for your average human/half-elf/elf and so on monk there is no advantage of putting points in STR over DEX. But there is advantage of putting points into STR as a Githyanki monk, which is a +2 racial modifier. Githyanki excel at STR and it can determine not only their hit chance and damage, but also jump length, chance to shove and carry weight. You are also true that dexterity rules the AC while STR doesn't, but heavily armored solves AC completely, so there is virtually no advantage of DEX over STR in terms of AC in this setup.

+You would be losing out on bonus action attacks from Martial Arts
+Your Flurry of Blows would be do so little damage that it would no longer be useful mid to high levels
+With such low WIS your Stunning Strikes would be worthless against the opponents it would be more useful against
+Ki empowered strikes is worthless
+Evasion is nerfed because the low DEX

If this sounds good, okay. But you should probably just focus on being a tank and max CON over STR since you will be doing low damage anyway. At least that synergizes with all of the focus you are putting on staying alive and might be useful if everybody else in the party can focus down the enemy while you just stand ground.

I could live with it in a single player run, where I don't imperil my party

BTW, wouldn't high STR partially substitute for the unarmed strikes used in the flurry of blows? If I remember correctly, your base unarmed damage is 1+STR and it works same in BG3 I think. That means the damage will be flat 6 by level 12 which is fine when compared to d10 dice the usual monks get.

Nah. At level 12 with max DEX your unarmed strikes are supposed to do 1d8+5, so yours would always be doing minimum damage (with no crit bonus damage) as a STR monk. But that’s only if you are actually using Flurry of Blows. With such little damage output you’d be better off using your bonus actions on Patient Defense. You are putting all of your focus around being a tank, so if that is the case you’re better off leaning into it rather than being good at nothing.

I think what you may not be seeing is that you'll be missing out on a lot of flavour too. Having seen a monk in action I feel like the highlights of the class are:

• Having enough movement speed and wall-running to move anywhere you want as you please
• A million lightning-fast punches and jabs per turn
• Face off against a dragon in your undergarments because weapons and armor are for dummies
• Sprint to the enemy mage hiding in the backline, punch them three times, stun them for a round and sprint back to your party like it's nothing
• Edit: Almost forgot - leaping down a 100-foot chasm without feather fall or running up a 50-foot tall wall and then jumping down on the other side because you can

By building around Strength, heavy armour and shields, you will be missing out on ALL of the above. Maybe that's fine if you're okay with that, but you won't have the true 'monk experience' imo.

This is true! In the tabletop I wouldn't go for it, but I think BG3 will put limitations on unarmed movement and there won't be any wall-running or water-running shenanigans in the game. Slow Fall should work with armor, shouldn't it? Also, I had a small brain fart tbh, shield proficiency would not be available to gith monk, so my best bet is going for the greatsword aka silver sword for flavor. As I've written above, I wanted to combine two desired tropes in a single run, because my time would be short after the game releases. Thats why all the bother. Thanks everyone for advice, BTW!

I absolutely expect Larian to give us a replacement for wall-running that helps with vertical traversal. Think permanent effects of the Jump spell, jumping distance derived from Dex or something like that.
Actually, you're right. I had to double check that. It makes little sense, but hey, it's RAW.
Hmm... have you considered taking your 1st level in fighter and then switching to monk? You'd have delayed extra attack and miss out on level 12 ASI but no actual monk features. As a benefit you'd have heavy armor, shield and all martial weapon proficiencies upfront, which would free you up to round up your Strength to 18 with Heavy Armor Master at 4th level. Also you'd get dialogue options for two classes.

Base unarmed strike damage for monks is 1d4+DEX bonus, increasing to 1d6 at level 5 and 1d8 at level 11. Of course, this is disabled by wearing armour, as are most monk abilities.

That was my first thought, but then I realised that heavy armor works kinda bad with multiclassing into fighter/monk, because you need 13 DEX and 13 WIS in order to make this transition. And DEX is much less useful to the heavily armored character. I am leaning towards Warlocke's suggestions about focusing on the defense and compensating for the damage by wielding a two-handed greatsword which is much better than monk weapons, 2d6 against 1d8. Then I'll probably branch into a shadow monk to get darkvision which githyanki don't have and to get shadow step for consistent mobility (I won't use my BA for flurry of blows anyway). Having the disadvantage on stealth rolls bothers me a bit as a shadow monk though Larian could introduce some sort of a mithral armor. We already have the adamantine splint mail that is heavy and has no stealth penalty!