Best Feats for Astral Self Monk 5e
by Prince Phantom
The Way of the Astral Self promises a very enticing idea: a monk that only needs Wisdom to function effectively. Sadly, it fails in this effort entirely. We get to make unarmed strikes with our wisdom, and those strikes have reach, but this limits us to only ever striking with our fists, meaning that we deal significantly less damage than every other monk until high levels where our martial arts die catches up to weapon damage.
Our higher level features are even more of a joke, 6th level being entirely a ribbon feature, 11th being a slight damage bump, and 17th being another slight damage bump, but we only get those damage bumps if we commit to our unarmed strikes. Oh and they all cost a ton of Ki points and compete with our main class features, so that sucks too. However, unlike most monk subclasses, these problems can be somewhat remedied by a combination of multiclassing and feats, and I’ll detail the best picks of the latter here.
Best Feats for Astral Self Monk 5e
Magic Initiate (Lv 4): Now normally I recommend this feat with the intention of picking Wizard and grabbing Find Familiar. For this subclass however, Druid is the best pick as it allows us to grab Shillelagh, a cantrip that lets us attack with a quarterstaff using our Wisdom, meaning that now all of our attacks will be made with Wisdom. However, we still have some problems. Activating our Astral Arms and Shillelagh are both bonus actions, meaning without any setup we will be waiting two turns before we are attacking at full strength. Talk to your DM about just having Shillelagh at the ready at all times, as it is a cantrip and you could realistically cast it every minute in most scenarios. Also, taking a single level in Druid is probably better than taking this feat, as it gives us amazing spells like Entangle alongside everything I just mentioned.
Tough (Lv 8): This is normally just a fairly good defensive feat to grab at high levels when you’ve got everything you need, but this is a monk that wants to fight in melee and is not going to survive with just a D8 hit die for very long. This doesn’t completely fix that problem, but it does help.
Crusher (Lv 8): Yes, our 17th level ability encourages us to make attacks solely with our Astral Arms, but most of us never get to that point, and even if you do you’re likely to be wrapping up your campaign very soon after. With this we can push enemies 5ft away with our quarterstaff, setting up perfectly to hit with our Astral Arms’ reach and letting us run away without needing to disengage.
Skill Expert (Lv 8): Since our Astral Arms let us make strength checks with our Wisdom, we can use this feat to get expertise in athletics and become a very respectable grappler. It also helps that we have extra arms, meaning we have plenty of limbs to do other things like attack while grappling.
Fey/Shadow Touched (Lv 12): Adding a few spells really improves our utility both in and out of combat. Fey gives the better spells but if you want your monk to take a more stealthy approach then Shadow is a perfectly reasonable selection.
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