2024 DnD 5e Monk Subclasses Guide

Introduction

Your choice of Monk subclass will offer a combination of powerful abilities which complement the core Monk features, adding new and exciting capabilities which make it easy to distinguish yourself from other Monks. Many subclasses also add new role options, making Monks very diverse despite their homogeneity in their other build choices.

For legacy subclasses, see our 2014 DnD 5e Monk Subclasses Guide.

Table of Contents

Disclaimer

RPGBOT uses the color coding scheme which has become common among Pathfinder build handbooks, which is simple to understand and easy to read at a glance.

  • Red: Bad, useless options, or options which are extremely situational. Nearly never useful.
  • Orange: OK options, or useful options that only apply in rare circumstances. Useful sometimes.
  • Green: Good options. Useful often.
  • Blue: Fantastic options, often essential to the function of your character. Useful very frequently.

We will not include 3rd-party content, including content from DMs Guild, in handbooks for official content because we can’t assume that your game will allow 3rd-party content or homebrew. We also won’t cover Unearthed Arcana content because it’s not finalized, and we can’t guarantee that it will be available to you in your games.

The advice offered below is based on the current State of the Character Optimization Meta as of when the article was last updated. Keep in mind that the state of the meta periodically changes as new source materials are released, and the article will be updated accordingly as time allows.

Monk Subclasses

Warrior of Mercy (PHB)

Way of Mercy adds the ability to heal creatures (yourself or others) by spending Focus Points. While you lack the full range of healing capabilities available to spellcasters, the rate at which you can convert Focus Points into hit points is impressive, and Way of Mercy eventually gains the ability to remove status conditions and even raise the dead at very high levels. This allows the Monk to add Healer to their staple roles as a Scout and Striker, though you can’t compete with classes like the Cleric.

  1. Hand of Harm: One Focus Point point to automatically deal roughly as much damage as an Unarmed Strike is more efficient than spending a Focus Point to perform a Flurry of Blows which has a chance to miss. This is also necrotic damage, which is much less-commonly resisted than bludgeoning damage (or whatever type your weapon deals).

    Since the damage is “extra damage” added to the attack, the extra damage die is multiplied on critical hits, much like Divine Smite or Sneak Attack, so the most effective time to use Hand of Harm is when you score a critical hit.

    However, this only works after you hit with an Unarmed Strike. If you’re using a weapon, there’s an incentive to fight unarmed even if your Martial Arts die would deal less damage than a weapon. Of course, Flurry of Blows and Martial Arts’ Bonus Action attack only allow Unarmed Strikes, so there’s always going to be some portion of your attacks where you can apply this.

    Physician’s Touch later improves Hand of Harm to add the Poisoned condition, making it an amazing way to briefly debuff enemies without a save.

  2. Hand of Healing: Your Martial Arts die plus your Wisdom modifier is roughly equivalent to a 1st-level Healing Word. That’s not a ton of healing all at once, but you get a ton of Focus Points per Short Rest as you gain levels, and the action economy around this is fantastic. This is also a great way to expend your remaining Focus Points whenever you reach a Short Rest.

    While you can use Hand of Healing as an Action, there’s almost no reason to do so in combat. Spending your Action to heal in small amounts turns combat into an attrition fight, and players always lose attrition fights.

    Generally you’ll use Hand of Healing during combat as part of a Flurry of Blows. When you do this, you spend the Focus Point to use Flurry of Blows, then you can decide to replace one of the Unarmed Strikes with Hand of Healing. As far as I can tell, you can make this decision at any point, so you could make one attack and see the results before deciding if you want to make another attack or heal something.

    Since you can move between attacks, I believe that you can also move between attacking and using Hand of Healing, so you could use Flurry of Blows to heal an ally and then run over to an enemy and attack them some more.

    In many ways, this is like Healing Word, and until your Focus Point pool is fairly large, that’s how you should consider Hand of Healing: a tiny amount of healing, but enough to bring a dying ally back into a fight. As you gain more levels you can afford to use this more often, and Physician’s Touch allows you to quickly remove some problematic status conditions.

  3. Implements of Mercy: Insight and Medicine are both Wisdom-based, which makes them good skills for the Monk. Unfortunately, Medicine is borderline useless (although check out some of our suggestions to fix that), as its sole written function is made obsolete by the Healer’s Kit. Herbalism Kit does allow you to craft Antitoxins and Potions of Healing, though, which is nice.
  4. Physician’s Touch:
    • Hand of Harm: Hand of Harm adds the ability to make the target Poisoned with no save. Poisoned is an absolutely fantastic debuff against most enemies (though spellcasters who don’t rely on attack rolls can largely ignore it, and it’s the single most common status immunity in the game).
    • Hand of Healing: Hand of Healing adds the effect of Lesser Restoration and can also remove the Stunned condition. If this was an either/or it would be fantastic, but you get to both remove conditions and heal the target.
  5. Flurry of Healing and Harm: This provides a way to conserve some Focus Points a few times per day, as well as to rapidly provide a lot of healing all at once. You do still need to spend one FP to activate Flurry of Blows, but you got Heightened Focus at level 10, so Flurry of Blows is giving you three attacks instead of two.

    For Hand of Harm, this saves you 1 FP at the cost of one of your Flurry of Healing and Harm uses per day. You can only use Hand of Harm once per turn, so you get no additional value. It’s absolutely not worth the cost.

    Unlike Hand of Harm, you can use Hand of Healing as often as you like. Using Hand of Healing three times during a Flurry of Blows triples your ability to output healing. Weirdly, this also means that, rather than spending an Action to use Hand of Healing outside of combat, it’s more efficient to use Flurry of Blows and punch yourself and your party until everyone feels better. You get three times as much healing per Focus Point by doing this.

  6. Hand of Ultimate Mercy: Have a dead party member? Take a Short Rest to get your Focus Points back if you need to, then punch them back to life. You only need 5 Focus Points to use this and you get 17 per Short or Long Rest at this level. If someone goes down you likely still have a bunch to spend.

    The fact that this only takes an Action is great. It’s similar to Revivify, but lacks an expensive cost. You could absolutely use this in combat, and, in many cases, that’s a good idea. This doesn’t have the specific text around how mortal wounds or missing limbs are handled, but I assume it works like Raise Dead in most respects. The target notably doesn’t need to be willing to return to life, either, which raises some interesting ethical questions.

    The one serious limitation on this is that you can only use it once per Long Rest. But, with a 24-hour window in which it will function after the target’s death, if you need to raise 2 people, you can raise one, take a Long Rest, raise the other, and then still have a ton of time to mess around before you get anywhere near the 24-hour timer. Of course, if you have 3 dead allies, you’ll want to go find a cleric.

Warrior of Shadow (PHB)

The Warrior of Shadow Monk is a powerful Striker, using magical darkness to give themselves a huge mathematical advantage in combat. Their Darkvision and their ability to teleport can help with scouting, but their features almost exclusively focused on combat.

  1. Shadow Arts:
    • Darkness: 1 FP to cast Darkness is a pittance, and the ability to see within the effect makes it a powerful tool both offensively and defensively. Consistent Advantage on all of your attacks and Disadvantage on your enemies’ attacks against you is a massive mathematical advantage.

      Keeping your enemies inside the area of Darkness will have a huge impact. They’ll struggle to attack your party, and many effects can only target creatures which the creature can see, making many spells and special abilities unusable. Either Grapple enemies or take Sentinel to prevent them from moving away from you.

      Shadow Arts allows you to move the effect at the beginning of your turn without spending an action of any kind, but you’ll rarely need to do that. You can cast Darkness on an object, then hold it in your hand and carry it with you. Covering the object blocks Darkness, so you can stow the object if you need to reveal yourself.

    • Darkvision: Always useful, especially if your Species doesn’t have Darkvision already.
    • Shadow Figments: Minor Illusion is an absolutely fantastic spell.
  2. Shadow Step: Teleportation is great, and Advantage is great, but Monks get by on a large number of low-damage attacks, so Advantage on one attack isn’t particularly useful. Giving up your Bonus Action also means less attacks that round. Advantage on one attack helps make up for losing your Bonus Action attacks, but you probably have Advantage from fighting in Darkness, so you want to avoid using this in any situation where regular movement would suffice.

    You need to teleport from darkness to darkness, so Shadow Step may be a good reason to use Shadow Arts (Darkness) to move the location of your Darkness effect in order to give yourself a destination for teleportation.

  3. Improved Shadow Step: This makes Shadow Step much easier to use at the cost of a Focus Point. You can compare this to using Flurry of Blows and giving up two of the attacks to teleport.

  4. Cloak of Shadows: Cloak of Shadows and Shadow Arts (Darkness) compete for space. Both take an Action to turn on a powerful combat mode, and, since their benefits overlap, you’re only going to use one at a time.

    Being invisible means Advantage on all of your attacks and Disadvantage on attacks against you, but notably isn’t bypassed by the ability to see in magical darkness. Cloak of Shadows also lets you use Flurry of Blows for free, allowing you to go all-in on offense. In a typical 3-round combat, you’ll spend 3 FP for Cloak of Shadows and pay for the cost by making 3 flurries.

    Despite its obvious benefits, Cloak of Shadows doesn’t totally supplant Darkness. Darkness can still be used to blind enemies, reducing their ability to attack your allies. If you go into combat with Darkness running, you might use Shadow Arts’ ability to move the effect to repeatedly drop it onto your enemies while you rely on Cloak of Shadows to attack.

Warrior of the Elements (PHB)

Warrior of the Elements gives the Monk a Focus Point-powered combat buff which adds a pile of exciting features as you gain levels. Flight, better reach, elemental damage, and damage resistance all nicely complement the Monk’s role as a Striker. Elemental Burst allow you to dip into Blaster, but you won’t compete with a spellcaster.

Warrior of the Elements Monk Subclass Guide

  1. Elemental Attunement: With no action cost and a Focus Point cost of 1, Elemental Attunement is cheap enough to use in almost every encounter.
    • Reach: 10 feet of additional reach puts you well outside of other creatures’ reach. It’s not entirely clear if this affects your reach for Opportunity Attacks, but I think it’s intended to do so.
    • Elemental Strikes: Changing damage types allows you to easily avoid damage resistances. The push/pull effects let you break grapples, move enemies into dangerous positions, and position them to be hit with AOE damage. The text also says “toward or away”, but omits the word “directy”, so it appears that you can use this to move enemies off the ground to get easy falling damage.
  2. Manipulate Elements: Elementalism is fun to play with, but has essentially no mechanical effect.
  3. Elemental Burst: Fireball radius and you can change the damage type, but less damage and shorter range. You can use Flurry of Blows with Elemental Strikes to push/pull enemies into the area, allowing you to reliably hit large numbers of enemies.
  4. Stride of the Elements: Fly 15 feet above your enemies, punch them with your 15-foot reach, haul them into the air, drop them for 1d6 falling damage. Use Flurry of Blows to do this 5 times per turn.
  5. Elemental Epitome: More additions to Elemental Attunement.
    • Damage Resistance: Easy, adaptable damage resistance. Changing damage types multiples times mid-combat is rarely useful, but non-spellcaster enemies can rarely deal multiple types of non-weapon damage.
    • Destructive Stride: This turns Step of the Wind into a way to race past enemies for automatic damage. The damage per target is poor, unfortunately, so this only matters if there is a large number of enemies in a small enough area to hit a bunch of them. And if that’s the case, you should be using Elemental Burst in most cases.
    • Empowered Strikes: An extra 1d12 damage once per turn.

Warrior of the Open Hand (PHB)

The iconic Monk, Warrior of the Open Hand offers some excellent, well-rounded options that really help to squeeze the most effect out of the Monk’s core features. Unfortunately, while their features that augment existing Monk features are fantastic, their completely novel features are disappointing.

Warrior of the Open Hand Monk Subclass Guide

  1. Open Hand Technique: This dramatically improves the benefits of spending Focus Points points to use Flurry of Blows rather than default to Martial Arts’ Bonus Attack.
    • Addle: If you need to get out of melee, preventing the target from taking Reactions prevents them from making an Opportunity Attack, so you can usually choose to use Flurry of Blows instead of using Step of the Wind to Disengage.
    • Push: This pushes enemies “away”, rather than “directly away”. Upward at an angle is still “away”, allowing you to launch enemies into the air to cause falling damage and knock them prone. If your first attack in a turn is from Flurry of Blows, you can use this to knock enemies prone before spending the rest of the turn attacking them with Advantage.

      Provided that your target has a passable chance to fail the save, Push easily outdoes Addle and Topple. Pushing an enemy out of reach and knocking them prone with falling damage means that you won’t trigger an Opportunity Attack and that your target is prone, combining the benefits of Addle and Topple.

    • Topple: A great way to knock high-Strength foes prone. Those same foes can reliably pass the saves to resist Push or to resist you using an Unarmed Strike to knock them prone.
  2. Wholeness of Body: Basically a pool of additional Hit Point Dice. You should absolutely not use this in combat. The healing is too minor. If you’re feeling endangered, Dodge and prevent incoming damage rather than trying to repair it while still actively taking damage.
  3. Fleet Step: Effectively a free Dash every turn, massively improving your mobility. Take advantage of this to forcibly reposition enemies with a combination of Open Hand Technique and grappling. Put all of your enemies into a nice, neat little ball, then high-five your party’s Blaster.
  4. Quivering Palm: 10d12 damage averages to 65. This costs 4 FP to create the vibrations, then another attack during an Attack action to trigger the damage. The target makes a Constitution save, and since Constitution saves are consistently high, we need to expect enemies to pass the save. So is this worth the Focus Points to use?

    For 4 FP, you can trigger Flurry of Blows twice and Stunning Blow twice. The 4 additional attacks compared to Martial Arts will deal 1d12+5 damage each. Assuming all four hit, that’s an average of 46 damage without considering the possibility of crits, falling damage from Open Hand Technique, etc. The two Stunning Fist uses might rob the target of two turns.

    It’s difficult to make a direct comparison between Quivering Palm and our other options. Quivering Palm can be a big damage nuke delivered very quickly, but I don’t trust Constitution saves enough to make that gamble frequently. Personally, I would rather use Stunning Fist and spend a turn punching the target while they’re unable to retaliate.