The CLASSIC MONK - BG3 Dex Monk / Astarion Honour Build Guide

hello my friends and welcome back to another balers Gate 3 character building guide hope you're all doing well today we're covering what is probably the most underd discussed and underappreciated character archetype in Boulders Gate 3 the classic dexterity based monk you'll almost never see a guide to this character on the internet because it's so overshadowed in build guides by its Big Brother The Tavern brawler monk in Boulders Gate 3 the feat Tavern brawler is basically custom made for monks it increases your attack your hit chance and your damage with unarm strikes so monks obviously gain a lot of value out of that and it's based on your strength it's so powerful in fact that it increases your hit chance to well over what the game is designed to support and you're damage to higher values than the game is balanced to allow and so that feet by itself means that almost every monk build on the internet you're going to see is based off of strength however that's not a requirement for Monks at all and in fact the monk character gets to use dexterity the best attribute in the game for its unarmed strikes and its weapon attacks and so you can make a monk build based off of dexterity that doesn't have to twist itself to take strengths that it has no use for other than Tavern brawler simply by not using the feet Tavern brawler now I'm not going to lie to you and say that this character is going to be as powerful as a Tavern brawler monk because it won't Tavern brawler is broken it breaks the game wide open and is one of the most powerful things that you can be doing but the dexterity based monk is still an extremely powerful character and does have some real mechanical advantages over the tavern brawler monk you get to be much more flexible much more single attribute dependent and much less item dependent than the tavern brawler monk meaning that your play style and play through your actual the way that you approach the game are much less constrained when you're playing a dexterity based monk than they are when you're playing a Tavern brawler monk now you're going to be doing a little bit less damage but you do get some more strategic options which I'll talk about as we build the character and you get the warm fuzzy feeling of knowing that you're playing a character that's uh in line with the game balance and not one that is totally broken of course if you do just want to play a Tavern brawler monk I have many guides I think every other guide to monk that I have done uses Tavern brawler and so definitely go check those out for some of the most powerful characters available in the game but if you're looking for a really fun playthrough and a character that gives you a lot of strategic flexibility and challenge then I definitely recommend a dexterity based monk because it is powerful flexible and can be built in a lot of different ways and is a character that I think is deserves a lot more coverage than it gets in the balers gate community so that's what we're going to be building today let's get to it I'm using asaran as the example character here because he makes the best monk in the game thanks to his unique story abilities giving him a ton of additional damage especially in the late game this means that for every attack he's doing he's going to Power It Up significantly and thanks to the sheer number of attacks this character is making not only is this one of the best ways to use his abilities he's one of the characters that most optimizes this class combination and so it is incredibly powerful to play a monk with aaran if you're building this as a custom character though then I would recommend dgar or wood elf or half wood elf as your racial options because dgar is out of combat invisibility and enlarge synergize extremely well with Monk and the bonus movement speed from the wood elf variants gives you a ton of additional movement speed stacking extremely well with the monk additional movement speed and the bonus action movement that we're going to get from Rogue levels down the line to make your character light speed this becomes one of the fastest possible characters in the game even without that bonus and with it it gets even faster and that means you will always be able to position at any point on the battlefield that you want to which of course is incredibly powerful this is a melee Striker character that wants to be up next to high priority targets so the more movement speed and Mobility we have the better for the that reason also gith Yankee is pretty reasonable because the once per day Misty step can be very valuable as well for our uh first level though we actually are not going to take monk since this build is going to want Rogue levels later down the line I think it's much better to start with Rogue as your first level rather than grab monk levels initially this gives us two things that are really useful for this character one of course is the incredible skill access that Rogue gives you this lets this character be your Lockpick picking character and um provide a ton of utility to your party by opening locks and having access to a bunch of useful skills but also it gives you the weapon and armor proficiencies from Rogue while in the late game we're going to be unarmored there will be points especially in the early game where it will be better to be in light armor than to be in no armor before we get the the items that the unarmored clothing that really Powers up Monk's natural abilities and so there will be various points where we'd rather just be wearing armor and we also get access to hand crossbow and Rapier proficiency which massively increases the Strategic flexibility of this character this is one of the major advantages that um monk that Dex based monk has over Tavern roller based monk because it gives you a a significant boost to your ability to be strategically flexible since you have very high dexterity you can use ranged attacks very easily and since you are making weapon attacks rather than all armed attacks we get to use some of the powerful weapons that are available in the late game to really enhance our character's uh options and apply the magical effects of weapons that are extremely valuable especially when we're making a large number of attacks every turn for our attribute selection um we are going to be taking an extremely greedy attribute split which I've already set up here CU I had to take this part of the video over again um and we are going to be going with dexterity Constitution and wisdom in a 1765 split this is the highest that you can get three attributes and uh to start with and is again one of the advantages that Dex based monk has over strength-based Monk Is we get to use this very greedy attribute split we'll be evening this out at level four giving us the highest possible attributes that we can get at that point in the game and making our character have really excellent AC initiative in damage um right from the beginning but indeed all the way through the game this character gets to be one of the it gets to base all of its strength on the best attribute in the game because dexterity is just such a powerful feature for our skill selection of course I think that you as with all Rogue level characters you are as with all Rogue characters you are going to want to have expertise in slight of hand and probably expertise in stealth although perception expertise on aaran is also pretty useful if you don't believe that you're going to be using this character for stealth for our remaining two skills it doesn't matter as much although this character could uh take a less greedy attribute split and act as your party face by taking 12 Charisma if you wanted to go for a 16 16 14 12 uh attribute split and then with expertise in Persuasion you could then take dialogue skills as well and be a pretty reasonable party face so that's an alternate option that's available to you however for maximum damage this is what we're going with and that is is our level one build let's move on to level two at level two we get to take our first monk level monk obviously gives us a ton of things at level one but most importantly what it gives us is a lot of extra attacks with Flurry of Blows on turns where you have key points available you are going to be making three attacks which is three times as many as most other characters at this level but even on normal turns where you're just making the additional martial arts uh bonus unarmed strike you're making double the attacks of every other character at this level that combined with your Rogue levels means you have excellent skills and excellent damage at this point in the game um significantly more than you would just with a second level of Rogue at this point and so this gives us quite a bit of additional power for our party even at this very early stage of the game obviously the Rogue levels will still be very good later on but it's worth noting how much additional damage this character is doing compared to other characters at this very early stage and it can really carry you through the early game because of the very strong attribute spread giving you really excellent stats and the very high damage of the character you also get unarmored defense but at this stage in the game armor is probably still going to be better you don't yet have anything that cares about uh not being armored so you don't other than unarmored defense obviously you don't yet have any fast movement features or anything like that and so staying in light armor is probably going to be better since we currently only have 15 wisdom you'll obviously just want to make the comparison based on what sets of clothing you have and what sets of armor you have although those will be quite Limited at level two at level three there's no significant decisions to make but we are going to level up in Monk and this gives us step of the wind Dash disengage and patient defense all of which are pretty useful abilities while these abilities will later be overtaken by the equivalent Rogue abilities which don't cost key points for the early and mid game the step of the wind abilities are going to be incredibly powerful for you as well and even in the late game jump not requiring a bonus action is still very powerful so keeping step of the wind Dash in mind even once you get Rogues bonus action Dash is going to allow you to Traverse the battlefield with significantly more ease at this stage of the game though you're usually going to be using your key points for Flurry of Blows but sometimes you really do just need to get to that enemy and step of the wind lets you do that defense can be very useful as well if you find yourself in a scenario where you're going to tank a number of attacks and cannot kill all the enemies that are going to be attacking you spending a turn on uh bonus action on patient defense will allow you to tank for your party pretty well and thanks to the very high Armor class that you're going to have relative to most other characters at this stage in the game um you'll probably have somewhere around 16 AC which is better than a lot of Marshall characters will be able to have at level three thanks to the available armors you will be able to actually be quite defensive with um patient defense causing enemy attacks to miss you very reliably not something that I would recommend spending your turns on all the time of course but it does give you quite a a bit of additional flexibility when you need to use those abilities at monk level three we get to take our subass and it's no surprise that we're going to go with the strongest of the three sub classes the way of the Open Hand this allows us to use Flurry of Blows to topple stagger and push enemies all of which are very powerful abilities toppling enemies can be used to essentially lock them down and you can find a lot of situations where reducing enemy movement speed by half or forcing them to spend their turn getting up in a bad situation is effectively the same as a stun especially when combined with your bonus monk movement speed um and your add dashes and so on knocking an enemy down further away from your allies can prevent them from attacking uh can fully prevent them from attacking which is just as good as stunning strike will be at later levels and finding ways to use this ability to prevent enemies from acting is one of the most satisfying and fun ways uh to interact with the game with Monk and of course incredibly powerful stagger and push are also extremely useful you can use this to deal extra damage by pushing enemies off cliff or one shot enemies by pushing them into the abyss as well as um stagger just being a very powerful crowd control effect at level four we get access to slowfall which doesn't do that much but is fun when you uh when it does come up um gaining resistance to Falling damage for your reaction can be useful in some circumstances if you need to jump down onto enemies in order to uh hit them from the right hit the correct enemy and they're much lower than you and since you won't have a ton of use for your reactions at this point slowfall actually does sometimes save you a little bit of damage not a powerful ability but one to keep in mind and then for your feet you are going to take an ability Improvement and even out your stats getting us to the highest possible stat spread at this level with 18 16 and 16 meaning that our Armor class is now going to be up to uh 15 or 16 17 excuse me our Armor class is going to be up to 17 just from our stats I don't know why I said the wrong number twice I definitely know the number um as well as having our high Constitution which mitigates some of the issues that monks sometimes have with just having relatively low AC for their for being a marshall class and relatively low hit points the fact that we're able to maintain 16 Constitution while still maxing out our combat stats as well as our wisdom means that we are going to have pretty decent AC a lot of characters will not be able to reach higher than 17 at level five thanks to the available item sets and so this character actually gets to stay competitive on Armor class we'll fall behind a little bit in the late game once the really powerful armor sets come out but um at this point we are just as well armored as any fighter will be at monk level five we get extra attack allowing us to make four attacks per round with whatever weapon we've found plus our unarmed attack um which is obviously extremely powerful and we get the most powerful feature of monks stunning strike stunning strike is just an incredibly broken ability it uses the higher of your strength or dexterity for the save DC so it works just fine off of dexterity and is going to stop enemies from moving it only takes an attack stop enemies from acting or doing anything it only takes an attack action so at this stage of the game we could uh theoretically stun twice and then flurry of BL as well um and if you fail the stunning strike you can just try again which is one of the great things about it enemies who fail the who pass the save you will often just have to make the save again so you're very reliably able to lock down whatever enemy you need stunned and so the strongest enemy in every fight just won't be able to fight you uh starting at this level which is of course an incredibly powerful effect no real decisions to make though we're just continuing to gain in power level so let's level up to level seven at level seven we have our first real decision that we have to make um at this point of the game because at this point of the build because we need to decide whether we care more about the additional unarmed strike damage or more about getting earlier access to the additional Thief bonus action by taking Rogue levels I think in general monk 6 is just so powerful even though we will likely be using a weapon so we won't be getting full value you out of the manifestation damage um but monk 6 is just so powerful because it gives you wholeness of body so it's a once per day an additional bonus action already so just a lot of extra damage from that as well as the healing and key Point restoration the fast movement is extremely useful as well um powering up your fast movement massively and the overcoming damage immunities is very helpful as well for a lot of the damage that we're doing in addition to the extra damage so while I think you could very reasonably argue that you would want to get the additional bonus action from Rogue sooner I think it's just better to go to level six monk cuz level six monk is just such a powerful collection of abilities for open hand monk that it's very much worth getting earlier that said there's no build decisions that we have to make there once we've decided we're going monk so let's go to level seven or level eight and at monk level eight we are going back for our Rogue levels this gives us bonus action dashes hides and disengages without spending key points points which is very very useful and plays extremely well into Monk's strategy of being a hitandrun character where you're going to be uh jumping in stunning or assassinating the highest damage or most dangerous enemy On Any Given turn and then running away to safety with the bonus action dashes you can do that even more easily it does cost you of course a Flurry of Blows or a bonus action attack every time you use them but Mobility is so powerful that it's often worth giving up some damage and this character is less focused on pure burst damage than the strength based monks so what you're going to be doing for this character is using it to lock down enemies much more than you are going to be just blowing them up uh so the ability to reposition here is much more relevant than for the tavern roller monk the Rogue levels therefore synergize extremely well with monk already but that's not really what we're here for it's just a really nice bonus what we are here for is to get Thief Rogue at level uh Thief Rogue at level three which just gives us additional bonus action that's an extra Dash so we can now move up to three times our movement speed in a turn if we want plus our jump distance or an extra Flurry of Blows so we can now attack up to six times in a turn which is an insane number of attacks and is going to be doing a massive amount of damage and we can do that basically every turn as long as we have key points even if we don't have key points we still get many attacks per turn uh in addition to the hides dashes and disengages the bonus action from fast hands also gives us another option which I will talk about when we uh get to our feet but because we have the additional bonus action we can now make additional offhand attacks if we have a second weapon equipped and one of the great things that we can do with that is use two hand crossbows to be a very competent Archer we can lean even more into that play style depending on what feet we select and at this next level we are just going to go ahead and take level four Rogue to get access to that feet as soon as possible this is a point where the build could diverge pretty significantly if you take for rogue then you aren't hitting level 9 monk so you won't be able to get the AOE damage from Open Hands monk level 9 I think that it's better to get the third feet on these builds because it lets you be much more flexible with how you're going to build your character but the additional AOE damage from monk level 9 is also very powerful so I do want to mention that you could absolutely just continue to go to level monk all the way to the end in order to get that as is though I think it is better to get the fourth level of Rogue because the feat options that you can get at this point are just so powerful we have a lot of great options that we could take and I like uh and I want to highlight a number of them so let's take our fourth level of Rogue and talk about what Feats we can take obviously we could always just take an ability Improvement and go to 20 dexterity that is dexterity is just really really good so that's always an excellent option alert is extremely powerful on honor mode it's less necessary for dexterity based characters but still excellent meaning that you'll always go first so that's always an option as well then because we're a dexterity monk there's a couple Feats that we can get access to that the strength-based monks can't really use that actually give us a lot of additional strategic options one of these is Sharpshooter I talked a little bit about this already but one very viable play style for this character because we started with a level of Rogue is to switch between a is to play a hybrid character switching between ranged and melee as appropriate with two hand crossbows we have the additional off-hand attack from Thief Rogue and with the Sharpshooter feet that would allow us to be as competent a hand crossbow Archer as just about any other character it gives us our additional sneak attack damage which we are also getting to uh utilize with our melee attacks thanks to the fact that can equip a weapon um and we therefore would be able to be a threat at ranged and in melee with Sharpshooter another option that gives us a lot of strategic flexibility is Sentinel because Sentinel only uses weapon attacks but this character gets to equip a weapon Sentinel is really good for rogue uh for for monks because monks are a character that wants to be next to high value enemies locking them down and preventing them from getting away often you'll be able to kill them in a single round or stun them but sometimes you don't want to spend the key Point resources on bursting enemies down and it's good enough to be next to Mages with Sentinel a lot of the time just preventing them from escaping um or NE next to characters that need to get to your allies with uh Sentinel a lot of the time preventing them from escaping that way you can force enemies to engage your monk which is obviously not what they want to do if you have Sentinel and so if you're on a squishy enemy that uh you would rather have focusing on your monk than on another character or trying to run away from your monk Sentinel can be very powerful with the weapon attacks available to this character and so that's another strategic option that this character gets I think of these the one that I am going to say is probably the strongest is to take Sharpshooter because it gives you just a whole other layer to your character but um all of those are excellent options and ones that I wanted to highlight depending on what you think your party needs at this next level we're going to level up in monk again which gets us evasion which is very powerful and Stillness of mind which does mean that you are going to want to look for Charmed or frightened immunity because Stillness of Mind requires an action and is going to eat your turn if you get Charmed or frightened um it's nice to break out of those abilities cuz otherwise you wouldn't be doing anything on your turn anyways but immunities are still just better because they are going to prevent this uh ability from eating your action I do wish the interface was a little better for this cuz it just automatically casts and prevents you from using your turn um but with charm at this point in the game it should be fairly easy to have immunities to Charmed or frightened evasion of course is very good especially because we are going to have very high dexterity for a monk character since we're based based on dexterity meaning that we're going to take very little damage from offensive spells finally at monk level eight we get uh to maximize our key point and we get an additional feat which lets us max out our dexterity you could also if you wanted to stay at 18 dexterity and take one of the other Feats that I mentioned but one of the great things about this character is it gets to hit 20 decks and still get a feat as well as having 16 con and 16 wisdom so I definitely recommend maxing out your dexterity for the highest possible damage hit chance initiative and armor class all of which are the excellent features that dexterity gives you this char is quite simple to build as you can see this is going to be one of my shorter build guides overall but I think it's just incredibly powerful for all of that and the Simplicity is honestly a feature you don't need to do anything in particular to make this character work it just works really well out of the box um and is going to lock down your enemies do excellent damage in melee and at range thanks to Sharpshooter or have a bunch of strategic flexibility with Sentinel um especially combined with certain items that we can use later on and I think this character is very underappreciated in Boulders Gate 3 but still provides a lot for a party while being an extremely fun play style with the hit-and run and martial arts features of Monk on full display all right let's talk about items and combat strategy for combat strategy for this character there's really one stat that is more important to keep in mind than any other and that is our movement speed notice that we have 45 ft of movement speed um really 46 ft of movement speed for some reason I'm not 100% sure why it does that but uh that will allow us to reach enemies from outside of their effective range very easily you can stay 45 ft away from an enemy and they will be able to move only 30 ft towards you and so you will always be able to get the first attack against melee enemies you can move in to attack an enemy and then move out of their melee range again if you want to spend an action on cunning action disengage and so you'll always be able to play a hit and run style even if you don't have the key points to consistently stun or trip enemies on your turn the other thing that's really great about this is that if you use cunning action Dash it will double that movement speed and you will have 90 ft of movement speed 90 ft of movement speed is enough to stay out of the range of most ranged attack in the game and still enter melee range on the following turn so keep an eye on where your enemies are able to position and you will always be able to stay away from their attacks and still strike on your following turn that's the great thing about monks and it's what sets them apart from other classes is the incredible movement speed in increased even further with abilities like long Strider or items that give you additional movement speed and there are very few enemies in the game that can catch you if you want to get away not only does this let you just safely Escape honor mode runs it lets you kite enemies despite being a Melee character and also if you're using hand crossbows you effectively add 30 feet of range and don't have to spend um bonus actions on disengaging it's also worth noting that sometimes it's worth it just to tank the attack of opportunity you'll have okay AC and reasonable hit points and you won't get hit a lot so sometimes it's better just to Dash or just to move away from enemies if that's something that you need to do of course you also just have incredible damage so you should be able to just kill most enemies before that comes up but pulling bosses around the arena while the rest of your party sits back and blasts them from out of their effective range is very satisfying and it's something that monks are excellent at and darting in and out of combat and playing a hit and run play style lets you consistently Target the correct enemies while making sure that your monk is incredibly safe remember also that you can bonus action hide anytime time that you are in obscurement so keep an eye on where Shadows are and play uh with the stealth mechanics of the game as well for your actual attacks against enemies you're either going to be using opening with stunning strike or opening with topple depending on what you are attempting to um whether you're attempting to stun or whether you're attempting to topple an enemy and then you're going to Flurry of Blows them into Oblivion just like every other monk build will do uh significant amount of damage depending on what weapon you have equipped you can get a lot of additional damage stats from that weapon and one and one of the other great things about this character is it's almost completely item independent so you can use just about any weapon that you find in the game that you happen to think is cool and it will work very effectively with this character there's a bunch of great options but the only item that you really want on this character there's really only one that is particularly important for this character and that's the boots of uninhibited kigo which just let you add your wisdom to your unarmed strikes which effectively um increases the damage of your unarmed strikes by three you're going to be making a lot of unarmed strikes so that's just a lot of extra damage other than that there's almost no specific items that this character needs having a pair of hand crossbows equipped gives you a great ranged option so I definitely recommend a pair of hand crossbows or just a bow um depending on which you have better damage in and whether you took Sharpshooter or not if you took Sharpshooter you should definitely take two hand crossbows cuz it's going to let you apply the additional damage more often with the bonus action attacks that's four ranged attacks so that's plus 40 damage from Sharpshooter and that's great items that increase your damage on both your unarmed strikes and your melee attacks like the flawed husk gloves are really good for this character because you will probably be doing a combination of the two to make use of the powerful weapon effects that you can get um the bracers of Defense can increase your armor class to a pretty respectable value this is without any Buffs or anything and we just have 20 AC and no no bonus AC from our clothing or anything so you can pretty easily reach 22 or 23 AC which is very respectable for a character and excellent for a monk and then you get get to use just whatever the most powerful one-handed weapon or the the most powerful non- two-handed weapon that you find is um and that will let you apply some really great magical effects one that I think is particularly fun on this character is the dualist prerogative because the additional reaction especially if you took the Sentinel um if you took the Sentinel option if you took Sentinel as your feet this can let you lock down multiple enemies in a turn and make a whole bunch of additional uh reaction attacks and so the dualist prerogative is fun and since you won't be using a shield or have an off-hand weapon you'll always be able to trigger the bonus effects of dualist prerogative so this is a great character to use it and we have proficiency since we're a rogue other than that you're really just looking for the standard things increased initiative anything that increases your armor class without being armor um and anything that increases the damage of your weapon attacks or unarmed attacks are all very powerful options for you as well uh but this character is so item independent that you'll be able to use whatever the rest of your party doesn't need it won't conflict with the rest of your party in any way which is one of the great things about it all right my friends I hope that you've enjoyed this look at the Dex based Monk and think this character is really fun really satisfying to play and a take on monk that you don't really see in Boulders Gate 3 build guides so I wanted to bring it to you if you've enjoyed the video then feel free to leave a comment and like the video and uh both of those things help me out a ton with the algorithm and of course you can subscribe to my channel for more of this and other strategy game content and if you've really enjoyed the video and want to help support me in my channel further you can feel free to do so with the buttons below the video the joining as a channel member or leaving a super thanks and of course I really do appreciate people who take the time and uh gener are generous enough to support me in that way all right my friends cheers I'll catch you next time

Channel: Cephalopocalypse

Views: 8,659

Keywords: Etarran, Cephalopocalypse, Baldur's Gate 3, Larian, D&D, Dungeons and Dragons, Build, Guide, Strategy, Tactics, Tutorial

Id: Ni8rrKcrMqs

Length: 31min 11sec (1871 seconds)

Published: Wed May 01 2024