What's the under over on Strength based Monks in 5.5e?
I’ll start by saying I appreciate this will never be meta, and there will be better things to do, but I don’t want to be completely neutered by aiming for that.
Also, I would like to take a decent number of levels in monk, but if the reality is I have to just dip monk and level barbarian or fighter, I’m down.
I am fully dedicated to going unarmed, which does push me toward monk levels to scale the dice.
This is a level 3–14 campaign, so that’s the range I’m trying to make this work in, though I’m open to a bit of a rocky patch early on.
I fully appreciate that dumping Dex is never going to be viable, so I think the only option is to dump Wisdom, which affects a few things:
- Unarmoured defence – I think I can work around this by using barbarian unarmoured defence
- Saving throws – don’t really have a good answer for this lol
- Some subclass features – if I go Open Hand, I think this only really affects the bonus action heal, which sucks, but I’ve got plenty of other uses for my bonus action anyway
I’m aiming for a 1–2 level dip in barbarian, but open to more.
This gets me rage (resistance is nice), but the big thing is +2 damage on all my flurry of blows and normal attacks, as well as unarmoured defence based on Con, which is just a good stat to stack anyway.
Not really sure when to take the barb levels. Feels like the first one is needed early, but at the same time extra attack from monk is also very nice.
Basically, I think this comes online properly at level 6 and then just gets better as martial arts dice scale.
At level 6 I’d be looking at:
- Strength: 18 (15 point buy, +2 background, +1 half feat — not sure which feat yet)
- Dexterity: 14
- Constitution: 16
- Wisdom: 10
- Intelligence: 8
- Charisma: 8
AC would be 15 from barbarian unarmoured defence.
I’d be doing 4 attacks a turn at 1d8 + 4 + 2 each (so 4d8 + 24 total), with 40 feet of movement.
Thoughts? What feat should I take? Is there an entirely different build I should be looking at?