Prior to the UA fixes I would have been okay if Fighters got 3 ASIs, Monk/Barb/Rogue got 2 and Paladin/Ranger got 1. Since the chassis improvement for the martials though I'm okay with Fighter and Rogue being the only classes to get them.
Ranger still needs work though, which I'm hopeful they're currently getting as the design team works out of the public eye.
Until we see the actual updated rules in the new PHB, we don't actually know WHAT they are keeping or modifying from the last Monk UA. Why are you bringing in stuff from OneD&D when it's not even official? Always read the fine print.
Also, I checked the 2014 PHB again. Both the Open Hand and Five Elements Monk have several features that key off WIS. So in 2 of 3 cases in the core materials, a WIS score not adjusted up becomes a long term liability.
Four Elements was a poorly executed design, and if you're really going in on the save spells as your bread and butter, you just do what I said WIS focused Monks should do and flip your stat priority and make DEX secondary. You can hit 16 in both stats at creation with point buy, so your to-hit will start out optimal and by the time it starts to seriously lag you'll have plenty of ki to spend on the elemental moves. As for Open Hand, Sanctuary is going to discourage aggro just by being in effect and is of very limited use to the player in any case, Open Hand Technique is in the same boat as Stunning Strike in that the effects are bonuses on an Action, except that these don't even cost the additional Ki that SS does and so you're literally just fishing for bonus effects on something you will typically choose to do anyways, and Quivering Palm does 10d10 damage for 3 ki on a passed save with instant death on a failed one. Given that FoB is worth 1d10+5 at that point, it is a ridiculously good effect either way.
The myth power gamers push is that anything less than the highest possible DC for a level is bad on any character. That is absolutely not true. If you're not a full caster who is sinking their entire action into a save and relying on the save or suck part of the effect to go through, you can afford to fish. A large portion of the DC effects on Monks, Paladins, and Rangers are riders to a successful attack, meaning you're getting your bread and butter in already just by landing the attack. Paladins of course can always default to a basic Divine Smite to avoid the risk, and with Rangers most of their offensive spells are AoE, so they're already getting more damage than they would from an unmodified hit just by using the spell. The 10% theoretical difference in the saving throws is not going to have nearly as much influence as the swing of the dice themselves.
Okay, i see you completely ignored the part about using OneD&D potential rule changes to justify current state of the Monk.
Please. You're the one who earlier in this very thread was talking about how Monks shouldn't get more ASI because "so many more control abilities than Fighter" and now you're talking out the other side of your mouth to say that an Open Hand Monk or a Four Elements Monk shouldn't even be reliant on some of those same control effects you used earlier to justify denying expanding ASIs. The implication of what you're saying is that Open Hand Monks should be grateful that their Open Hand Techniques work at all or that spells cast using Disciple of the Elements should take full effect. That's saying that Monks should be satisfied taking out crap Mooks and just be grateful that the stuff they took subclasses for does an occasional bit of good. If you really believe your argument that "Monks have soo much more control in combat than Fighters", then you should want Monks to boost their WIS stats. If you don't, then you are being hypocritical and going against your own argument about Monks being good at control.
Until we see the actual updated rules in the new PHB, we don't actually know WHAT they are keeping or modifying from the last Monk UA. Why are you bringing in stuff from OneD&D when it's not even official? Always read the fine print.
Also, I checked the 2014 PHB again. Both the Open Hand and Five Elements Monk have several features that key off WIS. So in 2 of 3 cases in the core materials, a WIS score not adjusted up becomes a long term liability.
Four Elements was a poorly executed design, and if you're really going in on the save spells as your bread and butter, you just do what I said WIS focused Monks should do and flip your stat priority and make DEX secondary. You can hit 16 in both stats at creation with point buy, so your to-hit will start out optimal and by the time it starts to seriously lag you'll have plenty of ki to spend on the elemental moves. As for Open Hand, Sanctuary is going to discourage aggro just by being in effect and is of very limited use to the player in any case, Open Hand Technique is in the same boat as Stunning Strike in that the effects are bonuses on an Action, except that these don't even cost the additional Ki that SS does and so you're literally just fishing for bonus effects on something you will typically choose to do anyways, and Quivering Palm does 10d10 damage for 3 ki on a passed save with instant death on a failed one. Given that FoB is worth 1d10+5 at that point, it is a ridiculously good effect either way.
The myth power gamers push is that anything less than the highest possible DC for a level is bad on any character. That is absolutely not true. If you're not a full caster who is sinking their entire action into a save and relying on the save or suck part of the effect to go through, you can afford to fish. A large portion of the DC effects on Monks, Paladins, and Rangers are riders to a successful attack, meaning you're getting your bread and butter in already just by landing the attack. Paladins of course can always default to a basic Divine Smite to avoid the risk, and with Rangers most of their offensive spells are AoE, so they're already getting more damage than they would from an unmodified hit just by using the spell. The 10% theoretical difference in the saving throws is not going to have nearly as much influence as the swing of the dice themselves.
Okay, i see you completely ignored the part about using OneD&D potential rule changes to justify current state of the Monk.
Please. You're the one who earlier in this very thread was talking about how Monks shouldn't get more ASI because "so many more control abilities than Fighter" and now you're talking out the other side of your mouth to say that an Open Hand Monk or a Four Elements Monk shouldn't even be reliant on some of those same control effects you used earlier to justify denying expanding ASIs. The implication of what you're saying is that Open Hand Monks should be grateful that their Open Hand Techniques work at all or that spells cast using Disciple of the Elements should take full effect. That's saying that Monks should be satisfied taking out crap Mooks and just be grateful that the stuff they took subclasses for does an occasional bit of good. If you really believe your argument that "Monks have soo much more control in combat than Fighters", then you should want Monks to boost their WIS stats. If you don't, then you are being hypocritical and going against your own argument about Monks being good at control.
You're the one who said you weren't going to consider UA changes relevant, so I stopped referencing them. As for the rest... my you have a very vivid imagination to get all of that from what I said. I very clearly said that a Four Elements Monk should prioritize WIS over DEX, which will give them approximately the same save performance as a full caster. As for Open Hand, they get two fishing attempts per Ki point on top of regular attack damage from FoB with Technique, with not extra cost. Ergo, they are losing pretty much nothing if any given instance of the save doesn't work, and weight of numbers strongly favors them over instances where forcing a single save constitutes the entirety of one's action.
And, most critically, despite the power gamers always screaming about the 10% difference, you are not actually causing enough saves in a short enough window for that 10% to affect the outcome more strongly than the variance inherent to a d20. At level 4 using nothing but the baseline stats from point buy creation and the +2 and +1 wildcards for race, you can hit a DC of 14 with WIS at +4. If you leave WIS at +3, it will instead be 13. Assuming no modifiers to the save that means that 14-20 will save regardless of which DC you use; that's 7 of the 20 sides of a d20. If you left your WIS at +3, then a 13 also saves, creating a single side that fails because of that decision. That means you're seven times as likely to have the effect fail purely by where the dice falls as you are to have it fail by the choice. At level 8 our possible DCs are 14, 15, and 16, meaning there's 5 sides that will always pass the save. Thus you're still more than twice as likely to have the die land beyond the scope of your ability score to change than you are to have it land in the margin affected by your choice of ASI. And if the target has a positive mod to the save (far more common than negatives to the saves Monks target), all that does is increase the segment where your ability mod is irrelevant. Obviously you don't want to just dump WIS on a Monk, but as I've just illustrated, the returns you get on 18 and 20 for DC are less impressive than you'd expect.
Okay, i see you completely ignored the part about using OneD&D potential rule changes to justify current state of the Monk.
Please. You're the one who earlier in this very thread was talking about how Monks shouldn't get more ASI because "so many more control abilities than Fighter" and now you're talking out the other side of your mouth to say that an Open Hand Monk or a Four Elements Monk shouldn't even be reliant on some of those same control effects you used earlier to justify denying expanding ASIs. The implication of what you're saying is that Open Hand Monks should be grateful that their Open Hand Techniques work at all or that spells cast using Disciple of the Elements should take full effect. That's saying that Monks should be satisfied taking out crap Mooks and just be grateful that the stuff they took subclasses for does an occasional bit of good. If you really believe your argument that "Monks have soo much more control in combat than Fighters", then you should want Monks to boost their WIS stats. If you don't, then you are being hypocritical and going against your own argument about Monks being good at control.
You're the one who said you weren't going to consider UA changes relevant, so I stopped referencing them. As for the rest... my you have a very vivid imagination to get all of that from what I said. I very clearly said that a Four Elements Monk should prioritize WIS over DEX, which will give them approximately the same save performance as a full caster. As for Open Hand, they get two fishing attempts per Ki point on top of regular attack damage from FoB with Technique, with not extra cost. Ergo, they are losing pretty much nothing if any given instance of the save doesn't work, and weight of numbers strongly favors them over instances where forcing a single save constitutes the entirety of one's action.
And, most critically, despite the power gamers always screaming about the 10% difference, you are not actually causing enough saves in a short enough window for that 10% to affect the outcome more strongly than the variance inherent to a d20. At level 4 using nothing but the baseline stats from point buy creation and the +2 and +1 wildcards for race, you can hit a DC of 14 with WIS at +4. If you leave WIS at +3, it will instead be 13. Assuming no modifiers to the save that means that 14-20 will save regardless of which DC you use; that's 7 of the 20 sides of a d20. If you left your WIS at +3, then a 13 also saves, creating a single side that fails because of that decision. That means you're seven times as likely to have the effect fail purely by where the dice falls as you are to have it fail by the choice. At level 8 our possible DCs are 14, 15, and 16, meaning there's 5 sides that will always pass the save. Thus you're still more than twice as likely to have the die land beyond the scope of your ability score to change than you are to have it land in the margin affected by your choice of ASI. And if the target has a positive mod to the save (far more common than negatives to the saves Monks target), all that does is increase the segment where your ability mod is irrelevant. Obviously you don't want to just dump WIS on a Monk, but as I've just illustrated, the returns you get on 18 and 20 for DC are less impressive than you'd expect.
Yes, at Tier 1, a DEX of 16 is fine. If you prioritize WIS over DEX, and then not bother to raise DEX beyond 16, however, that will definitely hurt your Monk performance for most of the subclasses (including 4 Elements) even before Tier 3 since you still need to make your Evasion and Deflect Missiles saves as much as possible, what with the crappy d8 HD for a (usually) melee range PC. Not to mention that your basic standard attack rolls are also made based on DEX. Having more attacks doesn't help that much if you whiff most of them.
Mercy, Ascendant Dragon, Sun Soul, and Long Death Monks also have useful features that depend on having a high WIS. (Leaving out Astral Self since their 10' range and WIS instead of DEX for their spectral arms actually make this a good candidate for not elevating DEX beyond 16. For this subclass, you are correct.) So you have 5 or 6 subclasses out of 9 that depend on boosting both WIS and DEX.
Meanwhile, the Fighter who took Unarmed Fighting Style is doing more damage per hit more consistently until ****** level 11 because they can focus on pumping STR, don't have a fiddly small one-round-use resource to manage outside of Action Surge, get to benefit from all types of armor, have d10 HD, and get 2 more ASIs, which they can use for the Crusher feat, amongst others, that gives them better access to control than a lot of Monks because, again, they are not as MAD.
And if the target has a positive mod to the save (far more common than negatives to the saves Monks target), all that does is increase the segment where your ability mod is irrelevant.
Okay, the rest of this post is just a somewhat aggressive framing of the math, but this part is outright misleading. The target bonus does not just "increase the segment where your ability mod is irrelevant", it significantly increases the difference between similar save DCs.
A target with a +X Con mod can be represented as treating a Con save target as X lower than it is; thus we can represent the efficacy difference between two Con saves with different targets as (Higher DC - Target Con)/(Lower DC -Target Con) -1. This represents the percentage of saves that fail against the higher DC but pass the lower one. I'm belaboring this because I want anyone following along to be able to check my work.
For DC 14 vs DC 13 against a target with Con + 2, the formula becomes (14 - 2)/(13 - 2) - 1. This returns .09, or 9%. If we increase the Con mod to +5, we see that the difference increases to .125, or 12.5%.
Sure, these effects are attenuated at very high DCs: the difference between DC 20 and DC 19 to that Con + 5 target is about 7%. But it's also not a linear improvement. Against a +5 target, DC 20 is 15% more efficacious than DC 18, but DC 16 is 22% better than DC 14.
The inescapable conclusion here is that if Monks want their saves to be effective against high-bonus targets (which, as you said, are far more common for them than targets with penalties) they need to get their WIS up, particularly at low to medium level where they can't count on their Proficiency Bonus to pick up the slack. I'm not here to tell anyone they can't or even shouldn't play a low-WIS Monk; that could be a very funny character. But if we're talking strictly about combat effectiveness you absolutely will see a difference between low and high WIS monks over the course of a campaign.
And here you are once again simply repeating “it has a DC, therefore it only works if you have the highest ability mod possible for that DC and level”, completely ignoring that I addressed that point in terms of the objective statistics. When you actually feel like reading my post and responding to it instead of just repeating the same talking point ad nauseum, please do and I’ll be happy to continue this discussion. Otherwise, good day.
Edit: This was directed at Song of Blues; hadn’t refreshed the page for a bit.
And if the target has a positive mod to the save (far more common than negatives to the saves Monks target), all that does is increase the segment where your ability mod is irrelevant.
Okay, the rest of this post is just a somewhat aggressive framing of the math, but this part is outright misleading. The target bonus does not just "increase the segment where your ability mod is irrelevant", it significantly increases the difference between similar save DCs.
A target with a +X Con mod can be represented as treating a Con save target as X lower than it is; thus we can represent the efficacy difference between two Con saves with different targets as (Higher DC - Target Con)/(Lower DC -Target Con) -1. This represents the percentage of saves that fail against the higher DC but pass the lower one. I'm belaboring this because I want anyone following along to be able to check my work.
For DC 14 vs DC 13 against a target with Con + 2, the formula becomes (14 - 2)/(13 - 2) - 1. This returns .09, or 9%. If we increase the Con mod to +5, we see that the difference increases to .125, or 12.5%.
Sure, these effects are attenuated at very high DCs: the difference between DC 20 and DC 19 to that Con + 5 target is about 7%. But it's also not a linear improvement. Against a +5 target, DC 20 is 15% more efficacious than DC 18, but DC 16 is 22% better than DC 14.
The inescapable conclusion here is that if Monks want their saves to be effective against high-bonus targets (which, as you said, are far more common for them than targets with penalties) they need to get their WIS up, particularly at low to medium level where they can't count on their Proficiency Bonus to pick up the slack. I'm not here to tell anyone they can't or even shouldn't play a low-WIS Monk; that could be a very funny character. But if we're talking strictly about combat effectiveness you absolutely will see a difference between low and high WIS monks over the course of a campaign.
No, the save bonus on the target does not affect the ability mod’s influence on the outcome. Assuming optimized DEX and WIS at character creation- which can be achieved without hardship using point buy- at level 4 you choice of ASI means that a single d20 result is the only one where the outcome of a save is altered by whether you increased WIS or DEX. At level 8 there’s two results whose outcome could vary depending on your ASI choices, and from then on the maximum swing results more or less remains constant, barring the rare creature whose bonus is exactly two points lower than the DC. Otherwise what the actual numbers are is irrelevant, your ability mod is only capable of altering the outcome on up to two results out of 20. Yes, Monks need to invest in WIS at creation: I have never said otherwise. And they are entirely able to do this without compromising their DEX and getting a positive CON mod as well, all without dumping anything else below 8. The mistake people make is assuming that the final two points of WIS mod have crucial sway over the outcome; they do not. 19 times out of 20 from levels 4 to 8, that 1 possible point is irrelevant to the outcome of a save, and at level 8 this shifts only slightly to 18 out of 20 irrelevant results based on the two possible points. I have never said that it would not be beneficial to have those 2 points as well as commensurate DEX, but the odds are significantly against them affecting the outcome of any given roll, and given that the only Monk class that routinely ties up its entire action on a DC is Four Elements- which is a fundamentally flawed design, if only from excessive Ki dependence- the performance of the class simply will not be impacted by the slight variance of 1 to 2 points difference in DC enough to impair its overall efficacy, particularly not in comparison to something like a half caster. I would further like to point out that there are a couple of Fighter subclasses that use DCs based on something besides DEX or STR (Psi-Warrior and Rune Knight), and they’re generally lauded as some of the stronger options, further highlighting that there seems to be a bias in these evaluations based on what class is being scrutinized.
No, the save bonus on the target does not affect the ability mod’s influence on the outcome.
It objectively does, I literally just showed you that. The higher a target creature's save bonus, the greater the percentage of variation in save outcome that is attributable to save DC. Let's go over it again.
Take a creature with a +0 Con mod making a DC 14 Con save; it will fail that save on 13/20 rolls. Compare this to a DC 16 Con save, which it fails on 15/20 rolls. You've correctly ascertained that 15/20 - 13/20 = 2/20, which is 10%. So you say the creature is 10% more likely to fail at DC 16 than at DC 14, which is true, and then you stop thinking, which you shouldn't. You should ask the next question: what percentage of failure rolls are attributable to the increase in DC?
To figure this out, we need to compare the increase in failure rate to the previous DC. The increase in failure rate is the new failure rate, X, minus the previous rate, Y. To get this increase as a percentage of the previous rate, we divide the difference, X - Y, by Y, resulting in (X - Y)/Y, or, via the distributive property, (X/Y) - 1.*
When we apply this to our previous example, we get (15/13) - 1 = 0.154. What does this tell us? It tells us that going from a DC 14 save to a DC 16 represents an increase in failure rate of ~15%. To put it another way, ~15% of the time when a creature with a +0 modifier fails a DC 16 save, it would've passed a DC 14.
This framing shows us the value of relative increases in save DC, and we can see that the value increase is not linear. Compare a + 0 creature facing a DC of 19 or 20 (19/18 - 1 = 0.056) to the same creature facing a DC of 10 or 11 (10/9 - 1 = 0.111). Same 1 point difference in DC, but nearly twice the percentage of variation is attributable to it for the easy save compared to the hard save. Thus we can draw the following conclusion: the more likely a creature is to pass a save, the more variation in its results can be attributed to differences in DC.
As we know, positive save modifiers directly decrease failure rates; a creature with a save modifier of + 5 fails any given save on 5 fewer results than a creature with a + 0 modifier. Returning to our original equation, (X - Y)/Y, we can represent the effect of a modifier by subtracting the modifier, M, from X and Y at all parts of the equation. Thus we get [(X - M) - (Y - M)]/(Y - M). This can be simplified to (X - Y)/(Y - M).**
What does this tell us about save modifiers? For constant values of X and Y, an increase in M increases the product of the overall equation. Thus, higher target save modifiers result in greater percentages of variation which is attributable to increased save DC. Ergo, a 1 point increase in DC means more against a creature with a + 5 modifier than it does against one with a + 0. Run the numbers yourself. You may not find the difference significant, but it obviously exists. Don't bring math into the discussion if you're not ready to do math.
*We could put an additional term here for total possible outcomes, but it immediately distributes out so I've skipped that step.
**Or [(X - M)/(Y - M)] - 1 if that's easier for you.
i still think they could get 1 extra feat and it wouldnt be busted and help them alot in the later levels to keep up with the wizard casting wish and just casually warping time and space to their will
Even 2-3 feats is not going to close that gap. As long as martials are constrained by physics and "realism" while magic is not, casters will always be flashier and possess way more utility while also being able to do everything the martials can with the right spell selection (except beat on enemies indefinitely).
Martials are not constrained by physics and realism.
Spellcasters have the inherent ability to access magic via spells while Martials require items that provide magical properties. The game should make some rule adjustments in how spellcasting is conducted and there are also some rules that can be tweaked or existing ones better enforced to bound the use of magic.
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Prior to the UA fixes I would have been okay if Fighters got 3 ASIs, Monk/Barb/Rogue got 2 and Paladin/Ranger got 1. Since the chassis improvement for the martials though I'm okay with Fighter and Rogue being the only classes to get them.
Ranger still needs work though, which I'm hopeful they're currently getting as the design team works out of the public eye.
Okay, i see you completely ignored the part about using OneD&D potential rule changes to justify current state of the Monk.
Please. You're the one who earlier in this very thread was talking about how Monks shouldn't get more ASI because "so many more control abilities than Fighter" and now you're talking out the other side of your mouth to say that an Open Hand Monk or a Four Elements Monk shouldn't even be reliant on some of those same control effects you used earlier to justify denying expanding ASIs. The implication of what you're saying is that Open Hand Monks should be grateful that their Open Hand Techniques work at all or that spells cast using Disciple of the Elements should take full effect. That's saying that Monks should be satisfied taking out crap Mooks and just be grateful that the stuff they took subclasses for does an occasional bit of good. If you really believe your argument that "Monks have soo much more control in combat than Fighters", then you should want Monks to boost their WIS stats. If you don't, then you are being hypocritical and going against your own argument about Monks being good at control.
You're the one who said you weren't going to consider UA changes relevant, so I stopped referencing them. As for the rest... my you have a very vivid imagination to get all of that from what I said. I very clearly said that a Four Elements Monk should prioritize WIS over DEX, which will give them approximately the same save performance as a full caster. As for Open Hand, they get two fishing attempts per Ki point on top of regular attack damage from FoB with Technique, with not extra cost. Ergo, they are losing pretty much nothing if any given instance of the save doesn't work, and weight of numbers strongly favors them over instances where forcing a single save constitutes the entirety of one's action.
And, most critically, despite the power gamers always screaming about the 10% difference, you are not actually causing enough saves in a short enough window for that 10% to affect the outcome more strongly than the variance inherent to a d20. At level 4 using nothing but the baseline stats from point buy creation and the +2 and +1 wildcards for race, you can hit a DC of 14 with WIS at +4. If you leave WIS at +3, it will instead be 13. Assuming no modifiers to the save that means that 14-20 will save regardless of which DC you use; that's 7 of the 20 sides of a d20. If you left your WIS at +3, then a 13 also saves, creating a single side that fails because of that decision. That means you're seven times as likely to have the effect fail purely by where the dice falls as you are to have it fail by the choice. At level 8 our possible DCs are 14, 15, and 16, meaning there's 5 sides that will always pass the save. Thus you're still more than twice as likely to have the die land beyond the scope of your ability score to change than you are to have it land in the margin affected by your choice of ASI. And if the target has a positive mod to the save (far more common than negatives to the saves Monks target), all that does is increase the segment where your ability mod is irrelevant. Obviously you don't want to just dump WIS on a Monk, but as I've just illustrated, the returns you get on 18 and 20 for DC are less impressive than you'd expect.
Yes, at Tier 1, a DEX of 16 is fine. If you prioritize WIS over DEX, and then not bother to raise DEX beyond 16, however, that will definitely hurt your Monk performance for most of the subclasses (including 4 Elements) even before Tier 3 since you still need to make your Evasion and Deflect Missiles saves as much as possible, what with the crappy d8 HD for a (usually) melee range PC. Not to mention that your basic standard attack rolls are also made based on DEX. Having more attacks doesn't help that much if you whiff most of them.
Mercy, Ascendant Dragon, Sun Soul, and Long Death Monks also have useful features that depend on having a high WIS. (Leaving out Astral Self since their 10' range and WIS instead of DEX for their spectral arms actually make this a good candidate for not elevating DEX beyond 16. For this subclass, you are correct.) So you have 5 or 6 subclasses out of 9 that depend on boosting both WIS and DEX.
Meanwhile, the Fighter who took Unarmed Fighting Style is doing more damage per hit more consistently until ****** level 11 because they can focus on pumping STR, don't have a fiddly small one-round-use resource to manage outside of Action Surge, get to benefit from all types of armor, have d10 HD, and get 2 more ASIs, which they can use for the Crusher feat, amongst others, that gives them better access to control than a lot of Monks because, again, they are not as MAD.
Okay, the rest of this post is just a somewhat aggressive framing of the math, but this part is outright misleading. The target bonus does not just "increase the segment where your ability mod is irrelevant", it significantly increases the difference between similar save DCs.
A target with a +X Con mod can be represented as treating a Con save target as X lower than it is; thus we can represent the efficacy difference between two Con saves with different targets as (Higher DC - Target Con)/(Lower DC -Target Con) -1. This represents the percentage of saves that fail against the higher DC but pass the lower one. I'm belaboring this because I want anyone following along to be able to check my work.
For DC 14 vs DC 13 against a target with Con + 2, the formula becomes (14 - 2)/(13 - 2) - 1. This returns .09, or 9%. If we increase the Con mod to +5, we see that the difference increases to .125, or 12.5%.
Sure, these effects are attenuated at very high DCs: the difference between DC 20 and DC 19 to that Con + 5 target is about 7%. But it's also not a linear improvement. Against a +5 target, DC 20 is 15% more efficacious than DC 18, but DC 16 is 22% better than DC 14.
The inescapable conclusion here is that if Monks want their saves to be effective against high-bonus targets (which, as you said, are far more common for them than targets with penalties) they need to get their WIS up, particularly at low to medium level where they can't count on their Proficiency Bonus to pick up the slack. I'm not here to tell anyone they can't or even shouldn't play a low-WIS Monk; that could be a very funny character. But if we're talking strictly about combat effectiveness you absolutely will see a difference between low and high WIS monks over the course of a campaign.
And here you are once again simply repeating “it has a DC, therefore it only works if you have the highest ability mod possible for that DC and level”, completely ignoring that I addressed that point in terms of the objective statistics. When you actually feel like reading my post and responding to it instead of just repeating the same talking point ad nauseum, please do and I’ll be happy to continue this discussion. Otherwise, good day.
Edit: This was directed at Song of Blues; hadn’t refreshed the page for a bit.
No, the save bonus on the target does not affect the ability mod’s influence on the outcome. Assuming optimized DEX and WIS at character creation- which can be achieved without hardship using point buy- at level 4 you choice of ASI means that a single d20 result is the only one where the outcome of a save is altered by whether you increased WIS or DEX. At level 8 there’s two results whose outcome could vary depending on your ASI choices, and from then on the maximum swing results more or less remains constant, barring the rare creature whose bonus is exactly two points lower than the DC. Otherwise what the actual numbers are is irrelevant, your ability mod is only capable of altering the outcome on up to two results out of 20. Yes, Monks need to invest in WIS at creation: I have never said otherwise. And they are entirely able to do this without compromising their DEX and getting a positive CON mod as well, all without dumping anything else below 8. The mistake people make is assuming that the final two points of WIS mod have crucial sway over the outcome; they do not. 19 times out of 20 from levels 4 to 8, that 1 possible point is irrelevant to the outcome of a save, and at level 8 this shifts only slightly to 18 out of 20 irrelevant results based on the two possible points. I have never said that it would not be beneficial to have those 2 points as well as commensurate DEX, but the odds are significantly against them affecting the outcome of any given roll, and given that the only Monk class that routinely ties up its entire action on a DC is Four Elements- which is a fundamentally flawed design, if only from excessive Ki dependence- the performance of the class simply will not be impacted by the slight variance of 1 to 2 points difference in DC enough to impair its overall efficacy, particularly not in comparison to something like a half caster. I would further like to point out that there are a couple of Fighter subclasses that use DCs based on something besides DEX or STR (Psi-Warrior and Rune Knight), and they’re generally lauded as some of the stronger options, further highlighting that there seems to be a bias in these evaluations based on what class is being scrutinized.
It objectively does, I literally just showed you that. The higher a target creature's save bonus, the greater the percentage of variation in save outcome that is attributable to save DC. Let's go over it again.
Take a creature with a +0 Con mod making a DC 14 Con save; it will fail that save on 13/20 rolls. Compare this to a DC 16 Con save, which it fails on 15/20 rolls. You've correctly ascertained that 15/20 - 13/20 = 2/20, which is 10%. So you say the creature is 10% more likely to fail at DC 16 than at DC 14, which is true, and then you stop thinking, which you shouldn't. You should ask the next question: what percentage of failure rolls are attributable to the increase in DC?
To figure this out, we need to compare the increase in failure rate to the previous DC. The increase in failure rate is the new failure rate, X, minus the previous rate, Y. To get this increase as a percentage of the previous rate, we divide the difference, X - Y, by Y, resulting in (X - Y)/Y, or, via the distributive property, (X/Y) - 1.*
When we apply this to our previous example, we get (15/13) - 1 = 0.154. What does this tell us? It tells us that going from a DC 14 save to a DC 16 represents an increase in failure rate of ~15%. To put it another way, ~15% of the time when a creature with a +0 modifier fails a DC 16 save, it would've passed a DC 14.
This framing shows us the value of relative increases in save DC, and we can see that the value increase is not linear. Compare a + 0 creature facing a DC of 19 or 20 (19/18 - 1 = 0.056) to the same creature facing a DC of 10 or 11 (10/9 - 1 = 0.111). Same 1 point difference in DC, but nearly twice the percentage of variation is attributable to it for the easy save compared to the hard save. Thus we can draw the following conclusion: the more likely a creature is to pass a save, the more variation in its results can be attributed to differences in DC.
As we know, positive save modifiers directly decrease failure rates; a creature with a save modifier of + 5 fails any given save on 5 fewer results than a creature with a + 0 modifier. Returning to our original equation, (X - Y)/Y, we can represent the effect of a modifier by subtracting the modifier, M, from X and Y at all parts of the equation. Thus we get [(X - M) - (Y - M)]/(Y - M). This can be simplified to (X - Y)/(Y - M).**
What does this tell us about save modifiers? For constant values of X and Y, an increase in M increases the product of the overall equation. Thus, higher target save modifiers result in greater percentages of variation which is attributable to increased save DC. Ergo, a 1 point increase in DC means more against a creature with a + 5 modifier than it does against one with a + 0. Run the numbers yourself. You may not find the difference significant, but it obviously exists. Don't bring math into the discussion if you're not ready to do math.
*We could put an additional term here for total possible outcomes, but it immediately distributes out so I've skipped that step.
**Or [(X - M)/(Y - M)] - 1 if that's easier for you.
Martials are not constrained by physics and realism.
Spellcasters have the inherent ability to access magic via spells while Martials require items that provide magical properties. The game should make some rule adjustments in how spellcasting is conducted and there are also some rules that can be tweaked or existing ones better enforced to bound the use of magic.