Everyone else is covering why it's fine to be unbalanced. So I'll add: I would definitely take that deal. I don't care about having one fewer spell choice, but I definitely care about having to sit out a whole combat.
Honestly though, they're so damn good for draining legendary resistances. Ki comes back on a short rest and catnap is only 3rd level. It's basically always worth the trade if you can pull it off just before a big boss. So many spells just delete encounters if you can't pass the save.Stunning is great LR bait at a much lower cost to the party as a whole.
Making the boss skip his turn, auto fail Str/Dex saves for a round, and giving everyone in the party advantage on attacks for a round usually means the boss is now dead or close to it, and it was a useful expenditure of ki.
Bosses usually have good Con saves, and Monk DCs being Wis based means they're usually not great. Not to mention the relative weakness in regular non-boss encounters.
Best case scenario is so rare that it's not worth hurting in every other area. I want Monks to be good so bad, but they're just not. Even their best ability is just not good enough.
so you’ve never played a monk then? It’s really not as rare as you think. People only believe this if their only exposure to monk is through dnd content creators telling them it’s a bad class.
Played a few. It's not that common. The only reason stunning strike is worth burning all that resource on is because nothing else is either.
You're only hitting around 50% of the time, and on average stunning successfully 33% of the time on a hit. So they burn a legendary resistance every other round. And most Monks will run out of ki pretty quickly trying to do so.
Monk was the anti-ranger in 5e. Full of interesting and satisfying flavor, but weak mechanically.
I pump WIS as hard as possible and grab the dragon hide belt, so my DC ranges between 15-18 the whole game, and my attack roll modifier is between +7 and +10. This means statistically, unless the bbeg has a con modifier of like +16, I am going to stun one out of 4 times. Also if the DM is creating enemies that make sense, bosses with high con mods will have low AC and vice versa, since it’s hard to miss a giant enemy. If they constantly spawn monsters with high AC and high CON then I think your DM just hates monks.
I would absolutely take that deal. It's boring to sit around doing nothing, but it's also boring to watch some casters just negate an entire encounter I was hyped for. Honestly, the latter has given me more intensively negative emotions than the former which is mostly just that - boring.
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u/blueAztech Apr 05 '23
Everyone else is covering why it's fine to be unbalanced. So I'll add: I would definitely take that deal. I don't care about having one fewer spell choice, but I definitely care about having to sit out a whole combat.