by glennfrogknight » Sun Aug 23, 2015 5:18 pm
No spells and medium BAB can be good, the biggest issue with the Monk is that it's a poorly-designed toolbox. It's full of tools, but there's no strong cohesion, no benefit to trying to utilize all of your class abilities in a fight.
Another big issue is that the monk needs too many stats all at once. You're a melee combatant, so you need STR for damage/to-hit (or feat-tax yourself into not needing it for to-hit), DEX for AC, CON for HP, WIS for class features/extra AC bonus. That's real bad.
Finally, the biggest issue is that even when you're at your best (Flurrying in melee), you're not that good.
I don't really know how to propose a fix for this. Making the monk just "be better" at fighting isn't a great solution, because there's already plenty of classes that do this. Honestly, the class doesn't fit very well. It's a muddied mix of pseudo-East Asian mysticism abilities. There's much better non-OGL version unarmed fighting classes/options, and as for the rest of the fluff... you can add fluff your character however you want, why does it need to be forced into a class? Few of the other classes have this much fluff. The druid is one, but that's because the druid comes from older editions, where it was just a variant of a Cleric, not a full-blown unique class.