Alright I’m new to monk, my character will be level 13. Both of these sound really cool to me, but I wanted to hear from you veteran monks, which of these is better pro vs con?
Sun soul's main strength is AoE, which is nice if your party is lacking, but lackluster if your party already has a bit. Astral self lets you focus on wis as the clearly superior stat until cap which is nice if that's what you want.
The question really is, what about them sounds cool? What do you see your role in your party being? What sort of character do you want to play?
Honestly the party structure is a fighter champion/barbarian, a Lycan Bloodhunter, artificer armorer, moon Druid/abjuration Wizard. I am super torn, the sun soul monk, I want to channel Vegeta, and be a blaster, darting around the field with mobile and magic Initiate warlock-Hex up, dealing aoe as well.
With astral monk I wanted to channel Itachi, with Susanoo, basically dealing damage and darting around the battle field, running in to 10 foot range laying down damage and retreating.
Astral Monk is probably a bit better for what you want. Going Hexblade with a Monk means a 13 + Charisma, which is almost always a Monk dumpstat b/c of how important DEX, WIS, and CON are to the character's ability to survive in combat.
I’ve always thought a sun soul monk was thematically bad. Whilst astral monk is of a solid mechanical design. Both have issues of which I’ll dive in to, and hopefully it can help you decide which way to go.
Sun souls biggest selling point would be you can replace your attacks with magical ranged attacks. But outside of changing damage type, and giving yourself some reach, there is no reason to do one or the other. You get the same number of attacks, they deal the same amount of damage. It basically feels very copy and pasted. I personally prefer abilities that give alternative approaches, which the later level abilities do a much better job of.
As an example I’ve been tinkering with a homebrew subclass to replicate characters like Vegeta, and it basically separates energy attacks and physical attacks. Physical attacks have high damage bonus by being boosted with Ki, whilst energy attacks are ranged and always cost Ki, they are mostly dice damage and therefore respond better to critically hitting.
This gives you two approaches to your fights. If your up against something hard to hit, you go in close for the more reliable damage, but if you can get advantage or your enemy is easy to hit, you can get some pretty satisfying blast attacks. Additionally I scaled both damages using proficiency and martial arts die, so you shouldn’t see huge leaps in power as you level, and you don’t cap out too early on as far as DPR goes. This is something Astral monks seems to be attempting to address.
Astral Monk’s insanely gets 6 attacks at high levels. Solving a problem of monks having lagging damage late game. However I have two issues with this subclass. I simply can’t justify in my mind how my character would look fighting with 10ft reach arms. And while you get a lot of attacks, they are very underwhelming and you’ll find yourself repeating the same roll several times each turn, and I didn’t find that very fun.
ZA WARUDO! TOKI WO TOMARE! I love the design of the Astral Self monk, but i wish they can add almost every damage type for determining your Astral Arm's damage type to be like the Stands from JoJo. I also hope that Tasha's Cauldron of Everything has an improved Astral Self Monk
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Alright I’m new to monk, my character will be level 13. Both of these sound really cool to me, but I wanted to hear from you veteran monks, which of these is better pro vs con?
Sun soul's main strength is AoE, which is nice if your party is lacking, but lackluster if your party already has a bit. Astral self lets you focus on wis as the clearly superior stat until cap which is nice if that's what you want.
The question really is, what about them sounds cool? What do you see your role in your party being? What sort of character do you want to play?
Honestly the party structure is a fighter champion/barbarian, a Lycan Bloodhunter, artificer armorer, moon Druid/abjuration Wizard.
I am super torn, the sun soul monk, I want to channel Vegeta, and be a blaster, darting around the field with mobile and magic Initiate warlock-Hex up, dealing aoe as well.
With astral monk I wanted to channel Itachi, with Susanoo, basically dealing damage and darting around the battle field, running in to 10 foot range laying down damage and retreating.
Astral Monk is probably a bit better for what you want. Going Hexblade with a Monk means a 13 + Charisma, which is almost always a Monk dumpstat b/c of how important DEX, WIS, and CON are to the character's ability to survive in combat.
I’ve always thought a sun soul monk was thematically bad. Whilst astral monk is of a solid mechanical design. Both have issues of which I’ll dive in to, and hopefully it can help you decide which way to go.
Sun souls biggest selling point would be you can replace your attacks with magical ranged attacks. But outside of changing damage type, and giving yourself some reach, there is no reason to do one or the other. You get the same number of attacks, they deal the same amount of damage. It basically feels very copy and pasted. I personally prefer abilities that give alternative approaches, which the later level abilities do a much better job of.
As an example I’ve been tinkering with a homebrew subclass to replicate characters like Vegeta, and it basically separates energy attacks and physical attacks. Physical attacks have high damage bonus by being boosted with Ki, whilst energy attacks are ranged and always cost Ki, they are mostly dice damage and therefore respond better to critically hitting.
This gives you two approaches to your fights. If your up against something hard to hit, you go in close for the more reliable damage, but if you can get advantage or your enemy is easy to hit, you can get some pretty satisfying blast attacks. Additionally I scaled both damages using proficiency and martial arts die, so you shouldn’t see huge leaps in power as you level, and you don’t cap out too early on as far as DPR goes. This is something Astral monks seems to be attempting to address.
Astral Monk’s insanely gets 6 attacks at high levels. Solving a problem of monks having lagging damage late game. However I have two issues with this subclass. I simply can’t justify in my mind how my character would look fighting with 10ft reach arms. And while you get a lot of attacks, they are very underwhelming and you’ll find yourself repeating the same roll several times each turn, and I didn’t find that very fun.
ZA WARUDO! TOKI WO TOMARE! I love the design of the Astral Self monk, but i wish they can add almost every damage type for determining your Astral Arm's damage type to be like the Stands from JoJo. I also hope that Tasha's Cauldron of Everything has an improved Astral Self Monk