IS FOUR ELEMENTS Monk Worth Playing in Baldur's Gate 3?

monk was the last class added into balers Gate 3 right before launch and with it we get three fun sub classes but the big question is how is the elemental monk is it any good is it better than the fifth edition tabletop well in this video today we're going to talk about the elemental monk some of the problems that it faces and how to kind of shore those problems up to make this a very fun and effective class this is your first time in my video first time on one my videos the way I do things is by UPF fronting the knowledge in my vide so you can just decide to stick around if you so wish so with that being said I will say that the elemental monk is completely viable if you want to just kind of play through and not have a 100% optimized character or experience or all that kind of jazz if you want to play with one have at it you will'll have just as fun of a time as if you had completely minmaxed it maybe you just won't kill things as quickly but to be completely candid it is not the best subclass for monk the Open Hand monk is just so effective and what makes the elemental monk kind of s ER is the fact that it is so Reliant upon its key points to really allow it to use its special abilities once it runs out of those points it needs to rest to short rest to get them back online but in the middle of a fight you can't do that so an open hand monk can really kind of benefit from the entire time so going 12 levels into an elemental monk not the best but you can combat that by going maybe nine Elemental monk three thief and really kind of have a lot of fun with going with the tavern brawler build where you focus on strength rather than dexterity we go with 10 Monk and Fighter 2 for just kind of a normal field where you do still go with dexterity and wisdom you could even go something spicy like 10 monin to SPID whatever it is but there's a lot of things that you can do with this to make it work so in this video we're going to show that off if that's all you wanted to know though please feel free to shut the video down before you do please don't forget to like comment and or subscribe each one of those things does help me out in an absolute huge way and like I've said before I have something like 89% unsub subscrib viewer base on the channel and that is a metric I am trying to change here before the year's end you can jump ahead to any part of this video that in you the most using the chapters with the timeline and the description and if you help with any other balers Gate 3 subject I have an entire playlist Linked In the description the pin comment at the end of this video all over the place that you can jump to to get a PL a ton more help let's get started here on is the elemental monk any good in balers Gate 3 loading into the game let's talk about the four elements Monk and what the problem really is because the class is really really cool on the kind of surface right you're a monk that takes advantage of all these Elemental attacks to do a lot of really cool stuff you have a fun amount of Elemental utility and you are still a monk so you have a lot of um almost said utility again but you have a lot of really cool ways to get on the battlefield a lot of Mobility a lot of really fun damage capabilities just a lot of cool stuff that you can do I think monk has slept on unfortunately far too much um and again this is a way better rendition of the four elements monk than the one that exists in fifth edition you can have a lot of fun with this character and yeah it's not going to be 1,000% optimized but it's still going to at least be good fun and passable but what's the big problem here I it comes down to these key points so your key points are restored on a short rest which is great the elemental monk gets this harmony of fire and water while not in combat regain half your key points rounded down so again the ours is 12 so this would give us six back this is great another thing too is using certain items that will help restore some key points so those are are your big kind of issues because yes you can restore them but you are solely Reliant upon them in the same way as spell slots but different because spell slots have different slots per level right no you have one cumulative amount and you are going to pull from it so if you use this one fangs the fire stin which is actually a very very very good ability it cost a single key Point reminds me the game Jade Empire so good but you see we cast that we're now down to 10 and we're good to go right we can just kind of keep casting out every turn if we want but as we get into higher levels we get into some better spells like we get shatter which is now three key points or we get scorching Ray which is now three key points now it does upcast right now this is four flaming rates rather than three um but at level 11 you get access to your final round of spells with the four elements monk you get a fireball you get a Mist form you get a fly and I think it's like one other thing but the big damage one here flames of the Phoenix costs four key points to cast this thing and that's the problem here if at max level you can only cast a spell three times or one of these spells four times and that's kind of where it starts to have an issue right uh your fist of four Thunders or your chromatic orb to key points to cast these and once you've exhausted your key points and casting spells you cannot use your key points to use stunning strike which is one of the biggest things of being a monk or Flurry of Blows or using your other ability that allows you to do a melee attack after uh you hit someone with your with your fist that's the problem and the open-hand monk does not suffer this because the Open Hand monk even when they run out of key points just their base attack is still going to get damage added in because it allows for that you're not relying upon items as much as you are as a Four Element monk it's still a fun class and my monk character is for element so please don't be discouraged by this video I just want to kind of show what the issues are because now let's talk about how we can fix some of those issues without getting into any of the classes and combinations let's talk strictly about gear so what we're wearing right now is a lot of probably the more optimal I am missing uh two items and I'll talk about them in their respective situations but the chest piece here vest of Soul Rejuvenation is quite nice whenever the succeeder the wearer the wearer succeeds on a saving throw against a spell they gain some hit points always lovely and the wearer can use a reaction to make an unarmed strike against any attacker that misses so this allows you to kind of weaponize um anytime someone attacks you and misses it gives you an ability to not use key points to do some damage which is always quite lovely also too you've got this hat which is just a really basic sick crap ass hat but whenever you deal fire damage you gain Arcane Acuity for two turns Arcane Acuity is nice because he has a plus one bonus to its spell attack rules and spell difficulty class per turn remaining so it gets you a little bit of layering into your um damage capabilities we have the nice cloak of protection just some Armor class and saving throws the boots of uninhibited Kush are absolutely crucial get them in act two to act three kind of Bridge Point I believe it is um there's like a little mini thing that happens in between the two and I it's very spoiler heavy but you can't avoid it and you'll get them during that the weer deals additional damage equal to their wisdom modifier with unarmed strikes so just putting these on I do an additional plus4 and that's absolutely huge um also this Amulet the sentient amulet this starts as a quest in act act one and finishes in act three and it is crucial because it gives you that key restoration just like there's that one amulet that helps out with spell slots which you think you can 1 act two this one is crucial for you as an elemental monk even if you just go with an Open Hands monk it's pretty crucial just cuz it gives you passive key restoration which is quite lovely yes you do have to do a long rest in between each one but it gives you just more key between each rest this makes it so that if you have just your standard short rests plus this amulet plus this ability plus a Bard your key stops becoming such a barrier to you because you have so many ways to just get rest going and not have to worry about them it's a very very nice thing to have um you can use these uninhibited cigo gloves they're not as amazing the uninhibited kigo chest piece that you get in act one is a great hold over until you jump into either this one or this one here in act three the nice thing about these two is it allows you to kind of turn patient defense or step of the wind into something right so step for the wind and patient defense are right here this is going to allow it so that I get Blade W if I cast Pati defense or step of the wind next attack roll has advantage and Deals an additional 1 to eight Force damage so these are key points right and key points are at a premium so at least we get more out of using them so keep that in mind is right like you want to kind of focus on using those key points for any kind of offensive spells that's the kind of focus of this class but if you can at least pull more value out of using one key point to get you okay well blade Ward here when now I've got resistance to bludgeoning piercing and slashing or now I do 1 to eight Force damage cuz I was just going to go punch something in the back of the head anyway so gets you a nice little extra pump in there the fist breaker helmet that you get in act two in the moonrise Tower is always great gain plus one bonus to spell save DC and you G plus one bonus to initiative roles pretty much all the Barbarian armor is is pretty good in general um this is also nice too killer sweetheart for giving you some good crit hits with any kind of attacks with uh your fists now the gloves I'm wearing and the two new well one of the items I'm going to talk about relies on using melee weapons remember monk weapons are any weapon that you are proficient in as a monk is a monk weapon so let's just say a Quarter Staff because you are proficient in quarter staffs but if you maybe start as a gith yan gith yan then um you are proficient in long sword short sword and and great swword so those are all monk weapons for all intents and purposes well maybe not the great sword it can't be heavy or two-handed I believe um a Quarter Staff is versatile but this when a weapon attack roll inflicts a condition the wielder gains arcan Acuity and these are not even though they look like armor they are not armor which is really cool another really really really crucial one um and this is not based off of uh actual weapons but this is one of the best ones that you can get for the class is the gloves of Cinder and Sizzle in act one in the mountain pass your unarmed attacks deal an additional one to four fire damage and you get a bound scorching Ray which does not use a key point and it will upscale as you level so it'll eventually do four rounds of scorching Ray let's take a look here now at this ability fangs of the fire snake this is why fangs of the fire snake is so good your next melee attack deals an additional 1 to four fire damage which will stack with the gloves of Cinder and Sizzle innate fire damage which will then help trigger Arcane Acuity from hat of fire Acuity so you really need to kind of take a look at maybe focusing on a specific weapon or specific element I'm sorry a specific element not weapon uh to really pull a lot of value out of what this class does innately and that's a real big thing that I think is not as apparent when you first jump into it the last thing here that I want to talk about that is based off of a uh weapon is the diem of Arcane Synergy when you inflict a condition gain Arcane Synergy for two rounds now Arcane Synergy in of itself is weapon attacks deal additional damage equal to affected entity spell casting ability modifier so basically this just means that if you're using a monk weapon it's really going to work really well for you if you're not it's not going to work so well for you since it is based off of a weapon attack and and monk weapons again are going to be bound your proficient in mon weapons so those will work now outside of that outside of all of your equipment you can do another little thing to kind of add a little bit more power into this build um how am I going to find this where do I find this um it's Elemental Adept fire spells you cast ignore resistance to fire damage in addition when you deal fire damage with a spell you cannot roll a one so what I've done here is basically focusing to double down on any of my fire capabilities that's why I've pulled almost all of my fire capabilities from my actual spell list so now I'm using and focusing on those fire abilities you could do this so with lightning right you've got those great gloves that I showed off earlier that have the lightning charges right there that beginning in act one you can you there's a lot of stuff that actually gives you tons of lightning charges and you can play a lot with that going Elemental adapt lightning and you get tons of lightning abilities as a um what the hell is this guy called this both thunder right these are both Thunder but there are lightning abilities as an elemental monk so rather than just playing this class kind of free form like you would a wizard you have to kind of think more about almost like you're playing a storm sorcerer or a specific ele element based character that's how you play this class you focus on that one because it's just how you get more value out of what you're doing you don't need to do it you'll be just fine if you don't but this is how you really pull an extra punch out of it so now that we've gone over items we've gone over some Feats let's talk more about how we can actually divide up the multiclass to make this work our multiclass options are going to come down to basically two big ones I'm going to focus on here today monk fighter and monk Rogue pulling more bonus actions into this character is going to be a huge benefit because we get so many things in our bonus actions category for a monk that this just really allows us to take off the alternative here is to go with fighter and just get surge right get more action out of our fighter out of our character so we can use our primary action it would be a 10 to monk fighter or a 93 monk Rogue let's talk though about something else and this is our ability points and stats so right now you can see my character this is how my ability points are before we jumped into us talking about everything um 16 dexterity 14 con and 16 wisdom this allows us to maximize our dexterity gain and this allows us to get the most out of our wisdom tacks but you don't necessarily need wisdom with this you can actually have this a little bit lower if you want and what we're really going to talk about is the tavern brawler so we've swapped things around here right our strength is now 15 our dexterity is 14 and our wisdom is still 16 and I know what you're saying why is my strength at 15 you don't get any benefits from having it at 15 and there's a specific reason why Tavern brawler is a half feet meaning it will give us one ability score and either strength or Constitution this allows us to maintain really good benefits of both dexterity and our wisdom so take a look at this our wisdom still going to be be at 16 giving us plus three to all of our saving throws but it helps out with our spell DC because that's where we'll be casting all of our spells from and it'll also allow us to get benefits or anything that's going to say hey your wisdom modifier gets added into this and so on so forth also remember we are monk so our dexterity and wisdom comes into our Armor class so that's a plus five and our our strength will go from a plus two right here it'll be a plus three once we get the tavern brawler the first one we're going to show off here is the m Rogue that uses Tavern brawler so with the feat selection of Tavern brawler you can see when you make an unarmed attack use an improvised weapon or throw something your strength modifier is added twice to the damage and attack roles both that's pretty huge right our strength at 15 now goes to 16 and we have plus three which is actually double to now plus six that is substantial and then on our next set of um what's this thing called Feats we can use imp improved ability score and put two more points into strength here so this is now a plus4 which is truly a plus eight whatever you want to do with this to really try to spice into this really strong combination here so after we got four levels into monk you can just kind of keep pressing on here um getting that fifth level here is probably the right idea just to get your extra attack unlocked and I would accept that and now before going further into monk what I would probably do here um even though this gives you keep empowered strikes your unarmed attacks count as magical for the purpose of overcoming resistance as immunity to non-magical damage you have plenty of ways to do that so I wouldn't worry about it um and to keep in mind too at level six and level 11 is when you start to get like the next set of abilities so all these ones cost one key point or not that guy and this one now starts to cost three and two and stuff like that so you start to jump into some of the the higher key Point ones that are a little bit different but level six we can spice over here into Rogue I'm just going to I'm going to choose all of its defaults here and remember because we have very high dexterity that slide of hand that you saw will get an innate bonus against it um so we get our bonus actions here that are all great but we still kind of have our own bonus actions as a monk we want level three so we can get thief and Thief is going to grant us fast hands gain an additional bonus action we'll take that and then we're going to go back into monk here and start choosing more stuff of course my character is still not level 12 I don't know if we'll ever make a level 12 character make all these damn videos but never make a level 12 character so at this point we're 83 we are level 11 this is the last level I can show off in the video uh the max level here would be level nine where we be able to jump into not much more but you have a choice you can go ability Improvement and make your melee attacks go even better you can definitely take that route if you so wish there is a spider 3 Ines from me and it's terrifying me in the middle of this recording but another really cool route to take here is Elemental adapt if you're really focusing on kind of doing what I was saying where you take the strength of really honing in on one thing and going crazy with it and for this video I'm just going to do it because I kind of like it I think it's kind of fun but Elemental adap here spells you cast ignore resistance to Fire and in addition you can deal fire damage with a spell you can roll a one so you can have fun with that um no what no screw it we're just going to go hard in the pain on the strength so we've got that 18th strength it's going to be really beneficial here and have a ton of fun with that and it allows us to kind of have a character that has way more in their kit now right so we have all of our bonus actions that we can take advantage of we have all these little kind of Juicy ones over here now we're missing some key points and stuff that we would have gotten at level 9 um but if I look take a look at this sweeping Cinder oops nope nope Noe nope nope sorry this fangs the fire snake right the one you've seen you've seen me use before your next melee attack deals additional 1 to four fire damage and if I take a look at this I mean that's not really going to do a whole ton it's really about trying to kind of Wombo Combo these things together using just your simple one key ability with Fang to the fire snake and adding in those Cinder gloves to really just get a ton of usefulness out of this combination and that Tavern brawler remember we're now going to get that plus eight to our attack rolls and our damage so we'll be able to pump out quite a bit with this combination let's show off a little bit of this damage here I'm going to go ahead and use bang of the fire snake she's going to get mad that's okay but let's go back to this take a look at all that damage right uh yeah sure improve that thing and don't react there so bang the fire snake martial arts unarmed strike you can make an armed strike with as a bonus action this turn now we can do another unarmed strike since we're still on that same turn um f to the fire snake affected entities now gives us one to four extra fire damage and we gained Arcane Acuity from it because I a clever girl um so let's just go ahead and push through okay back over to my character here easy days so because of that whole like Shenanigans of dealing with the the start of the situation we lost our F of fire snake but I'm just going to go ahead here we have our our bonus actions um and it counts as a extra attack here right so we can kind of really layer this in and now we've got our unarmed strike we can have a lot of fun with that right we have our extra bonus actions and we can pull even more into this um we can go ahead and use PS the fire again and I have my unarmed strike so I can run over here and like Judo chop this person right in the face cuz I have unarmed movement I can move like a million feet a minute Swift as my feet can carry me but let's use this and this thing is the same exact thing on Armor strike right and just kind of punch someone right in the face so you just get a lot of fun things that you can do with this we still have all these bonus actions so we can use another on arm strike here and we're just kicking the crap out of everyone so you you really get to layer a lot and we didn't see a ton of crazy damage because I haven't really optimized this character out but it's just a way to kind of show you you know hey we using fangs of the firefist using martial arts and we're trying to get all these things to work in conjunction to give us a lot of really good damage from that Tavern brawler and from all of the the bonus actions that we can do to try to really layer things together and since we can also replenish stuff with Harmony of Fire and Water our amulet just short resting it allows us to keep going because we are using the single cast of the key Point rather than jumping really hard in the paint here on a really big one like the two key Point uh cast here or I think this is two key Point as well or even some of the three or four ones from the later spells and we would only go to One More Level anyway in this but just to show off what the Rogue looks like comparison to the fighter so let's switch over to that one now with the monk fighter you can still go with Tavern brawler and everything like that but just to kind of showcase a a non- Tavern brawler here let's go ahead and just do the just the dexterity version uh 16 that's a 16 get this to 14 and I'm assume you're the main character so we get that to 12 that this would probably be your standard just I'm a monk I'm going to um use dexterity and and wisdom to my best of my ability if you could even bring this up to 10 if if you don't want to deal with any reduction to any kind of uh shove rolls or anything like that but this is what i' would probably stick with on just a generic monk fighter build and I would actually jump into fighter immediately just to get it out of the way because if you do that uh we get second wind and we get a fighting style and a nice thing here is just I would go with uh defense unless I intended to take some sort of Monk weapon or anything like that but just having defense online it's a good just plus one to my AC we'll get another one and we'll just get our action surge online and we'll be done and then we're going to spend the rest of the time just putting all of our levels here into monk messing that up there we go and just jumping all the way down this list it it's it's super straightforward I'm going to focus again on the fire abilities because of of the items that are beneficial to monk I only only have the fire focused ones and we're going to go ahead and go with you know what I think we'll go with I I'll just do elements I'll add up this time around just to kind of have fun with that and really it's straightforward all we do is just press accept all the way focusing on more of those fire abilities um maybe we can go Savage attacker is nice but it is a melee weapon attack so if you went with any of the melee weapons then it would be a really good call right if you with a monk weapon but outside of that it is not um I'll just go ability score we'll put it into because there's so many ways to improve our attacks based off our wisdom score exle this um we'll just go with a push cuz why not and we should be done there we go so with this ability we have kind of swapped our um our extra emphasis right rather than having that additional bonus attack now we have an additional action in that we can use action surge to pull more out of it so I'm not going to show any combat for this because it's really just the same as if You' saw with the monk uh we could simply use tons of things of the a fire snake but the nice thing here is that now we can do fangs to the fire snake and sweeping Cinder strike or Embrace of The Inferno then move up to someone and do something else you can just now layer in all of your actions to get more action out of every single round you could simply just use unarmed strike a whole bunch if you wanted followed by okay unarmed strike unarmed strike then bonus action to unarmed strike so you can play a lot with that you can do something like fangs the fire snake into the unarmed strike that it gives you into the unarmed strike here so it's really just a big it just comes down to how you want to approach your your engagements right because now you have more actions to cast more spells and do be more of a casting for elements Monk and with unarmed strike here you can see the difference between this and Tavern brawler 9 to 16 plus eight here because we have all of our benefits that we're pulling into our character so I think this is a a little bit better than just a pure elements monk because I get to cast more I can play more with my key points I can do more stuff in a given round sure I might exhaust out of them quicker but at the same time I'm more powerful in a given round than I would be otherwise keep in mind too you know of course action SE is once per turn and you you have to short rest so at least short resting too gets this back online as well as my ke but hopefully this helps you out on taking a look at the four elements Monk and how to really get the most out of it if you want to go the tavern brawler route definitely go with the Rogue or you can go with the fighter as a Tavern brawler if you so wish whichever one makes the most sense but pulling in that extra bit of utility to give you some more action economy either as a primary action or a bonus action is really the way to make this class work for you if you have any other suggestions or any other ways that you've played your form elements monks to Great Lengths go ahead and let me know in the comment section below maybe say hey you know what you talked about a lot of good items but you didn't talk about this one this is the one that works the best or uh hey I played it with with this type of character and this is the way that I have multiclass to really make it work I mean you could jump into different VAR Variations by going into Wizard or stuff like that or spicing into Druid or clerics since it's already a wisdom based class there's plenty of ways to kind of spice up this for elements Monk and really I I impressed upon you if you're playing the elements monk have a lot of fun with it it's a really cool class and it's the one I'm really enjoying as I play through my monk play through that is also a dark urge playthrough in bers Gate 3 but as always guys thank you so much for watching here today have a good one and take care

Channel: ItalianSpartacus

Views: 17,234

Keywords: IS FOUR ELEMENTS Monk Worth Playing in Baldur's Gate 3?, baldurs gate 3, baldur's gate 3, baldurs gate 3 monk guide, baldurs gate 3 monk, baldurs gate 3 class guide, baldurs gate 3 monk build, baldurs gate 3 monk class, baldurs gate 3 monk subclasses, bg3 monk subclasses, bg3 monk build, bg3 way of four elements build, baldurs gate 3 best monk subclass, bg3 monk guide, bg3 four elements monk multiclass, bg3 four elements monk build, bg3 four elements monk gear, feats

Id: 8Z2azS-h7mk

Length: 28min 26sec (1706 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 01 2023