The RAREST CHARACTER - BG3 Four Elements Monk Build Guide

hello my friends and welcome back to another balers Gate 3 build guide hope you're all doing well today I have a fun one for you because we're going to talk about what I believe is the single least discussed and maybe the least played subass in the game the reason for this is that it's on a monk which is not one of the main companion classes and is not one of the most popular main characters and it's by far the least popular of the three mug sub classes I'm of course talking about the way of the four elements monk the reason that it's unpopular I think is that it brings slightly less raw power to the table than the other two monk sub classes but it does have some cool tricks and it's thematically so cool that I really wanted to do a build for it and show people how they can use the way of the four elements monk to let your fists on fire and punch the crap out of things you end up with one of the coolest visuals in the game as well as just having all of the power level of a monk which is one of the best classes in the game so you can manage very well even with the slightly weak or subass you also get the satisfaction of knowing that you're using a class that nobody else is using so you know you're just not like the other kids all right let's uh before I jump in I do have to quickly say thank you so much to tamas pongratz which I hope I pronounced close to correctly elrich Reed Haney and Brandon Meyer for becoming channel members thank you so much we now have enough channel members that if you go to my channel profile you'll see a little panel saying thank you there which is kind of cool great milestone as well well as to the Donk for the 5 and Cosmo Ron for the extremely generous $50 donation thank you so much my friends it really means a lot I really do appreciate it all right let's jump in and talk about our way of the four elements monk so I'm using lasel as the example character because I think it's thematic but of course if you are playing this for a main character I think the best race to pick is going to be dgar for the enlarge and invisibility um that is probably the best for monks by far although wood elf is also very synergistic with monks because it combos well with monks bonus movement speed the more movement speed you stack on top of additional movement speed the better it gets because each additional point of movement speed lets you play even further back and further away from enemies and still reach them in one turn monks really want to play that hit and run uh float like a butterfly sting like a be play style where they start their turn and end their turn very far away from enemies preventing them from retaliating but still get all their strikes in for our ability selection we are going to have to make a pretty tough decision here as with all monks the way of the four elements monk benefits extremely strongly from strength elixers or the gloves of dexterity because monks are so multi-attribute dependent meaning they require High stats in uh four of the six attributes and they typically want two of these to be very high at minimum monks are one of the classes with the highest stat requirement in the game I think only paladins require more stats than monks do wanting five of the six attributes for that reason um and because way of the four elements monk really really wants High wisdom I'm going to be assuming that we're using strength Elixir for this build but it's not mandatory and I will show you a stat spread for both with Elixir and with without Elixir so if you want to not use Elixir then you can definitely use the non- Elixir stat spread if you're not familiar with the strength elixir in the game I'll show them to you in a moment and talk about how we get them but basically you can raise your strength for free using an item for The Elixir stat spread we are of course going to drop our strength to eight take 16 dexterity 15 Constitution and 16 wisdom as well as our remaining two floating points will probably go in intelligence because I believe there's like one intelligence saving throw in the game that you have to make and Zero Charisma saving throws you could also put them in Charisma if this is a main character and you want to have a very slightly better chance of passing dialogue checks but these these last two points don't matter at all you could also put them into dexterity if you intend to get Ethel's hair on this character as well um because that will allow you to get 18 dexterity for our skill selection we are going to go with uh again it doesn't matter that much what in particular you pick but Athletics is very important to have even though it shows us plus one right now when we drink a strength Elixir you're going to see very high Athletics skills and Athletics is extremely important for all melee characters allowing you to reposition enemies something that this character in particular excels at and I think that the way of the four elements monk combos best with characters that make field effects like wall of fire from a sorcerer or a wizard Ally for example that you can move move enemies into and out of um and one of the fun things about this character is that the way the game handles enemies being moved into and out of field effects multiple times in a turn can be a little bit weird and buggy um and we can kind of take advantage of that bug if we want to by pushing them in and pulling them out of walls of fire the game shouldn't have that do multiple instances of damage but sometimes it does or sometimes it makes them make multiple saving throws if they stick on Ice multiple times things like that and because this character gets access to both pushes and PS we can repeatedly push enemies into and out of hazardous environments causing them to trigger multiple times in a turn if you don't want to use strength Elixir then for your stat spread you are of course going to need to raise strength so we get a slightly more Awkward stat spread but get to drop out a bunch of points from other things and take 17 strength 14 decks 14 Constitution 12 wisdom and then our remaining two points unfortunately can't be used to uh increase anything usefully again with Ethel's hair you could put these into an odd number in dexterity or Constitution or you could put them into intelligence for the saving throws as you can see this is a much weaker stat spread and given that this is we're already intentionally reducing our power level with this subclass um I recommend just going with the strength Elixir for this build but I do of course want to include a version of the build that doesn't use them because many people don't like to use them finally I should also mention just while we're on the topic of stat spreads that you could do a non- Tavern brawler version of this build just with decks and wisdom um but Tavern brawler is just so good to for monks I wouldn't recommend giving that up at all so we're going to use the strength Elixir build and get right on into leveling up this this [Music] character in the early game you are going to play as a dexterity based monk of course because you won't yet have access to the strength Elixir but one of the things that monk gets to do as opposed to something like a barbarian that's doing in Elixir build is that you can just use your dexterity in the early levels and you will be just as effective as if you had 16 strength with 16 dexterity this also gives you 16 starting AC which is one of the highest ACS for any character to start with in fact it's better than almost every other character gets access to at level one meaning that you are going to have a very smooth ride through the the first couple levels because your character is so powerful as we level up we get access to a bunch of the cool other stuff that monks get such as bonus action uh patient defense and bonus action Dash and disengage bonus action disengage although it does cost you a key point is very useful to this build and to all monk builds because like I said you want to play as as a sort of hit andun character you're a melee glass Cannon so being able to enter and leave combat easily without provoking attacks of opportunity is very powerful that being said you will usually uh be targeting non- melee enemies or you'll be stunning your enemies so you'll be able to leave combat without using step of the wind but don't forget that you have it it's very important to remember that you have both of these options you also get additional movement speed which helps with that feature as well and you get extra key points at every monk level which is very important as we level up to level three of course we get to pick our subass and we're going to select the way of the four elements let me talk a little bit about what this subass actually gives you and how it works so first off you get Harmony of Fire and Water a once per day usable action uh when out of combat that restores half of your key key points this gives you quite a bit more longevity than other monk characters have it's not a massive boost but it is nice and what this basically means is more stunning strikes per day as well as uses of your class abilities which cost key points that being said something that I should point out about way of the four elements Monk Is that like other monks you're mostly going to be spending key points on stunning strike and Flurry of Blows because that's what your character is most powerful for doing knocking single enemy out of the fight and just doing tons and tons of of damage um Harmony of fire and water makes you better at that because you can do it more often than other characters and longer during a day you're less Long rest dependent than other monks which are already not very long rest dependent so this is one of the characters that can keep going for longest during an adventuring day I think that's kind of cool secondly you get all of these moves many of these uh that you can select three of at this level and we'll get access to a few more later on many of these are exact duplicates of spells but cost key points to cast for example blade of rhyme is exactly the same as ice knife it just costs you two key points instead of a spell slot A lot of these are level one spells um and the save DC for these spells is based off your wisdom it's important to keep that in mind and also can be increased with items um so that's another thing that is worth keeping in mind when you're playing way the four elements buk so you can boost the save DCS of these spells up significantly that being said if they were just copies of level one spells from other classes we wouldn't be that interested but there's a couple unique effects that this class gets that nobody else has access to one of these is fangs of the fire snake which lets you make a melee attack at range and then additional attacks for a full turn deal an extra D4 of fire damage that's pretty big for monks who are often making many many attacks in a turn when using multiple flurries of blows and so on adding an extra default for a fire damage to all your attacks is very power for a round is very powerful and the ability to make ranged attacks um melee attacks at range is also very powerful for a wide variety of reasons and these do count as melee attacks for basically everything that cares about whether they're melee or ranged attacks um so anything in the game that boosts melee attacks works with fangs of the fire snake which is I think pretty cool and very synergistic it also allows you to boost up your later flurries of blows and this these actions they all say action the ones that are attacks just take your attack action so fangs of the fire snake just takes your attack action meaning that if you have extra attack as we will get at monk level five you can do two fangs of the fire snake or a fangs plus a normal attack plus a Flurry of Blows with your bonus action in one round getting lots of uses out of this extra damage for that reason we're going to select this one this is the best of these unique monk spells and and the one you're going to be using most often the other ones that are unique to the four elements monk are fist of unbroken air which knocks pushes a Target back and knocks it prone it does 3d10 damage this isn't an attack but does um just do pretty good damage for this level and knock an enemy prone and water whip which does uh 3d10 damage and either pours PS the target 20 ft towards you or knock it prone you get to choose uh in in place um another one that is is unique to you is uh shaping of the ice which creates an ice cube um this has 25 hit points and is just a cube that sits in the way and that actually has a ton of utility for blocking doorways getting up onto High areas and so on it only costs one key point and being able to control the battlefield by blocking enemies movement with a with an ice cube is actually pretty powerful and something that this class does get that no other class gets access to easily of of course you could do it with a crate or a barrel but then you have to Lug that around and it's also less you know feels a little cheesier when you're carrying 20 crates than when it's something your character your class actually does that being said at low levels I recommend taking water Whip and fist of unbroken air these will both be very useful the pole push combo being able to do these uh together is also very powerful and extremely useful at monk level four we get to take our first feat and our first feat is of course as it should be for every monk Tavern brawler Tavern brawler is broken because it breaks what is called bounded accuracy which I've talked about before essentially bounded accuracy is the rule in DND class design that hit bonuses shouldn't get too high strength Al uh Tavern brawler adds your strength twice meaning that you hit extremely reliably and so in the late game your monk will pretty much always hit 95 or 98% of the time if you have advantage that is obvious VI viously incredibly powerful as well as doubling the damage that your attacks do which when combined with Fist of the fire snake on a Flurry of Blows means that your average damage output in a turn goes up to the stratosphere you end up doing hundreds of damage per turn when you are making multiple flurries of blows with Tavern brawler you put the extra point in constitution of course which is why we took an odd amount of constitution at the beginning at monk level five you get an extra attack which which is of course EXT extraordinarily powerful um and can be used with most of your way of the four elements abilities to cast multiple of them in the same turn provided you're willing to spend the key points on it and like I mentioned previously your primary use for key points is going to be stunning strike which you now get access to just stuns a Target taking it completely out of combat for a turn the single best crowd control effect in the game and the reason that monks are so incredi powerful in boss fights this combined with the fact that they hit extremely accurately um means that most enemies are simply not going to take turns against monks and in the late game even through legendary resistances you can stun all of the bosses in the game pretty much except the ones that are immune of which there are not that many and prevent them from ever taking a turn while you just beat the crap out of them at uh our next level we can take monk level six to get key empowered strike improved on our movement and an additional spell cast from disciple of the elements but I think because we've now hit extra attack we're better off moving into the other levels that we were going to take and of course like most monk builds you're going to want to take a few levels in Rogue for this month Rogue uh gets you a couple skill expertises but as the first two levels of Rogue are not terribly important for what they specifically give you you won't make any um major decisions they do mean that you now have cunning action hide Dash and disengage without spending key points which means that you can use these very very reliably um to enter and exit combat which is of course extremely important but more importantly at Rogue level three or character level 8 we can take the thief Rogue subass getting a second bonus action the second bonus action can be used for a second Flurry of Blows so when a monk uh makes their two mainhand attacks plus four attacks from Flurry of Blows all of which are getting the bonus damage from fangs of the fire snake uh some of which are made it range because of fangs of the fire snake you are doing six attacks in a round all of which add 10 to their damage because of your strength modifier and strength Tavern brawler combined with strength Elixir meaning that you are doing a minimum of 60 damage in a round uh plus all of the dice that you're doing you're going to average something like 120 damage in a round uh starting at level eight once you get access to your second bonus action if you spend two key points on Flurry of Blows which is not a significant expenditure you can do this pretty regularly throughout the game especially because as a Four Element monk you have more key points than other monks do the damage output at this point just becomes rid ridiculous I will recommend going to Rogue level four to get access to another feat um although there is an alternative that we could do so while I would uh so I will mention this but you can also hit monk level 9 which does improve some of your spells the one spell that it doesn't improve is the one that you're going to use most often fangs of the fire snake um so I recommend just not bothering with way of the four elements monk level 9 but if you feel like you have enough Feats then you can definitely um just skip this fourth level of Rogue that being said your save DCs are built are based on wisdom so we do want to be increasing our wisdom we can grab an ability Improvement for additional wisdom um which will allow us to have higher ACS as well as knock enemies prone pull and push them much more reliably with our Spells at this point we go back into monk which gets additional movement speed as well as IMM uh enemies being piercing enemy resistances to non-magical damage if you're finding this to be a problem you could pick up this level earlier but for the most part I recommend um just getting your Rogue levels as soon as possible and this is one thing that this build also has over other Monk subclasses Is those monk subclasses want to be monk level six pretty quickly but the way of the four elements monk because level six isn't that important to you is actually better off getting Rogue earlier meaning that your damage combo comes online even faster since you don't need the bonus damage from the open Palm level six feature you don't need the uh extra stuff from the shadow monk level six you can instead pick up your Rogue bonus action since you already have your bonus damage combo with fangs with the fire snake that means that you get you this build comes on line a little bit earlier here we're going to take shaping of the ice at this point there's actually a lot of narrow passages in the late game especially uh that you can block completely with one of these blocks of ice um and finding creative ways to use this spell is really fun in my opinion and something that you should really be looking out for do not forget you have it you can block off whole groups of enemies and the AI often goes crazy when it's behind the block of ice sometimes it won't even try to destroy it um and you can just pepper them with ranged attacks as well one other thing that this monk build does get because you have reasonable dexterity and no other use for your um your other weapon set your your ranged weapon set is you can Equip to hand crossbows and do a reasonable cosplay of a ranged character since you have the bonus action from Rogue with two hand crossbows you can make four attacks around and do a decent a level of range damage in cases where you can't get into melee so that's something else that you can do and of course you have the ranged melee attacks from your four elements Powers which you can use as well um on the other side of this ice block it to enemies that are trapped there or stuck inside of field effects and you can push those enemies into field effects and then run away using your pushing abilities at monk level seven uh you get access to evasion and Stillness of mind um both of these are very powerful when combined with your very high wisdom Stillness of Mind means that you will pretty much ignore most wisdom targeting effects in the game you get Charmed or frightened you immediately remove it and that's extremely powerful and you have wisdom save uh you have very good wisdom saves because you are raising your wisdom which is one of the advantages that this version of the character gets if you were not using strength Elixir and were instead boosting your strength then you would not be able to have as good a wisdom save but you still get to evade a lot of the most dangerous wisdom targeting effects with Stillness of Mind evasion also makes you much more resilient to range damage in general to to spell damage in general and finally at monk level eight we get access to another additional key point and another feat and we're going to be maxing out our wisdom to make sure that our save DCs are keeping up if you are investing heavily into items that increase your safety CES or just find that you aren't caring that much about your safety sees which to be fair are not that important to this character you could uh just pick up alert alert is going to be excellent for every single character um and you could even have gotten this at character level 9 when you hit fourth level in Rogue at this point of of course if you only took three levels in Rogue you'd be hitting monk level 9 at which point you would get to add an additional spell um but for the most part you are just going to be going with your increasing your wisdom to increase your spell safety sees something else that I should mention is that you do get access to new spells at um monk level five at where the four elements monk level six and these are clinch of the north wind Embrace of The Inferno and gong of the summit these are none of these are worth taking they're all level two spells from other classes um so I wouldn't recommend going with this the most interesting is clench of the north wind because you if you can give an enemy hold person put them in hold person you then get automatic Critical Hits against them so being able to do that and then Flurry of Blows them for four automatic Critical Hits is pretty powerful and it's definitely worth considering replacing one of these spells with that if you aren't using one of the problem water whip is the one you'll use the least often I think fist of The Unbroken air is more likely to see use but if you aren't using one of these two then you could replace it with hold person um or I should say with uh clinch of the north wind um because although this does take your action and three key points to cast guaranteeing four Critical Hits against an enemy is incredibly powerful if they fail to save so especially if you combine this with a divination Wizard or something to force them to fail to save you can guarantee Critical Hits and increase your damage significantly I wouldn't recommend doing that though I think overall you're going to be better off simply not replacing your spells and using the push and pulls uh throughout the game for itemization here uh there's two things that are really worth mentioning a couple items that are particularly key of course we need these elixir of Hill giant strength um if you're not familiar with how to get these then there is a vendor in the Druid Grove who restocks them every long rest you're going to want to buy a bunch of them in act one and they'll restock three of them every time you long rest or spend 100 gold to Respec any character um and then you can just stockpile a bunch of these to that enough to last you throughout the game and then you drink one every long rest to set your strength to 21 this makes your Tavern baller damage plus 10 and your to hit bonus plus 10 and is incredibly powerful you can also of course go instead with with the gloves of dexterity if you aren't using the strength Elixir then you could drop your dexterity down and put those extra points into wisdom and take the gloves of dexterity if you are using strength Elixir the best gloves are just any that have additional damage on them um like any like these gloves of Cinder and Sizzle give your unarmed attacks additional damage and one thing that's kind of interesting about this character is because we are building lots of wisdom spells that you cast from items and Scrolls will actually have good safety se's that's usually not true for Marshall characters but for the four elements monk who's building for high safety se's and high wisdom you will have excellent safety se's off of Scrolls so this is one of the characters that's best at using Scrolls in the game uh so if you have extra Scrolls put them on your four elements monk they can use the scroll and then they can still make four attacks because all their their the main power of their attacks comes from Bonus actions um you also benefit from items that increase your spell saf DCS like the robe of the weave so that will make your pushes and PS hold persons Etc more likely to hit uh if you pick up items that increase your saf DCS also notice that we have 19 AC which is not at all bad for this level um just in normal clothes actually where's that extra AC coming from we've got one one extra point from somewhere not sure where that's from we should have at AC but at AC isn't horrible for a character that's not wearing armor and you can increase that with bracers of defense or any item that increases your uh your Sav DC or your your AC um finally the best-in slot boots are worth mentioning for every monk the boots of uninhibited cuso again we are increasing our wisdom and dealing bonus Wis wisdom modifier uh bonus wisdom modifier to your damage means that every attack you deal does plus 15 damage off of double your strength plus the boots even more so when you start using Cloud giant Elixir and other ways to increase your strength and wisdom in the late game um you're going to be doing plus 20 damage on every attack roughly with six attacks per round minimum more if you get haste or blood lust from an ally then you are going to be dealing in excessive 200 damage on your Nova turns which is incredibly powerful with the boots of uninhibited kuso finally let me just take a quick look at a combat turn here so we are going to just for fun uh because people have requested that I hit a real enemy we are going to be beating up this oathbreaker night so let's just do that this will aggro the whole Camp so we're going to have to hope that lasel can take on the entire group but um just to show you an endgame setup I'm also going to drink this elixir of cloud giant strength which is what you'll want to be switching to in the late game with 27 strength that means that you are adding plus seven to or excuse me plus eight to all of your attacks and damage but doubled for Tavern brawler meaning you're adding plus 16 from strength alone and then an additional plus five from wisdom I'm also just going to take a speed potion here just for um to show off the character too its best advantage and then we'll fight the oathbreaker Knight so we'll enter turn-based mode and then beat the crap out of the oathbreaker most combats you're going to want against important enemies you're just going to want to start with stunning strike um especially because if you start in outside of combat if you uh aren't already in combat and use fangs of the fire snake and then roll into initiative the Fang's buff will end at the beginning of your turn so you won't get to keep it for your first turn of combat if you use this to start outside of combat but stunning strike will still work for the enemy's first turn of combat notice that we have a 95% chance to hit one of the toughest enemies in the game and we a couple chances to stun him so we got him stunned here see if we can um just pass through everyone's turns real quick notice the oathbreaker Knight is stunned so we lost initiative with him but that's okay didn't really make a difference here or we lost initiative to him but because we stunned him before the um fight started oh uh shatter heart casting Sanctuary on scratch good use of a spell shatter heart that makes perfect sense to me and then we will counter [Music] that the trials of doing a fight in o a second Sanctuary on will Trials of doing a fight in the camp so the oathbreaker Knight has become un stunned we probably want to try stunning him again well let's just maximize our damage first so we're going to go with fangs of the fire snake which should increase our damage we get hellish rebuked and then we are going to hit him for a stunning strike dealing some additional damage and then we have our Flurry of Blows attacks notice we only got one extra um action because I've got this set on the honor mode rule set so we only got our one extra attack um but we're doing our Flurry of Blows bonus action attacks for 48 to 70 damage with a 90 9 and a bit chance to hit this is a one in 400 chance of missing and he takes a bunch of damage and we get to do it one more time and we actually rolled pretty badly on the damage there I think um yeah we did but that's all right even with a pretty poor damage roll we still got this guy for over 250 damage in a round stunned for the next round un so unable to act and uh fully just completely out of the fight in a single round thanks to the power of the four elements monk all right my friends I hope that you've enjoyed this video and as always of course if you have please feel free to leave a comment uh like the video and you can subscribe to my channel for more of this and other strategy game videos cheers folks I'll catch you next time

Channel: Cephalopocalypse

Views: 21,180

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

Id: 97wfqVzBhcU

Length: 31min 25sec (1885 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 16 2024