Justice for Monks.
A deep-dive into Baldur’s Gate 3’s classes was posted to the Dungeons & Dragons official channel yesterday, bringing good news for fans of elemental fisticuffs. Larian Studios‘ lead systems designer Nick Pechenin sat down with Todd Kendrick, who assumes the dungeon masterly duties of video content for D&D, to cover the classes and subclasses included in Baldur’s Gate 3.
Touching upon the Way of the Four Elements monk subclass, Pechenin mentioned that they’ve „tweaked the Ki economy a little bit at higher levels to make sure that you never run out of juice as a monk“, which has huge benefits for the Way of the Four Elements subclass specifically.
For those without a background in pen and paper, the Way of the Four Elements monk—which I’ll start referring to as the ‚Elements monk‘ so I don’t have to make you read that every time—has been something of a community punching bag since 5th edition’s Player’s Handbook released back in 2014.
In concept, it rules—allowing you to blend elemental strikes with martial arts like you’ve just strolled out of Avatar: The Last Airbender. It achieves this by giving monks access to „Disciplines“, which allow the monk to use its class resource—ki points—to cast flavourful spells. For example, the „Clench of the North Wind“ discipline lets you burn ki points to cast Hold Person and bind a target in place.
In practice, this sucks—for two reasons.
