Best Feats for Mercy Monk 5e
by Prince Phantom
The Mercy Monk is the clear and obvious winner for best monk subclass, which isn’t saying very much. All Mercy had to do was have consistently good and useful features that didn’t eat up Ki points like they were candy, and it mostly accomplishes this task. Right away we get a very cool improvement to our flurry of blows, allowing us to replace one of the strikes with a heal to ourself or an ally, and assuming we heal ourselves this provides a substantial boost to our durability. We also get a cool damaging ability, which becomes extra spicy at level 6 where it automatically poisons your target for a turn.
Yes a lot of enemies are immune to being poisoned, but on the ones who aren’t this can be debilitating. At 11th level we basically never have to spend Ki points for our subclass features again, and at 17th level we can raise the dead, which hopefully won’t be needed very often. All of this together creates a monk who has good survivability, has a consistent and reliable debuff ability, is light on Ki point usage, and deals more damage than the average monk. None of these things require feats to empower them either, meaning we are free to take what we want to empower our character without feeling like there’s one feat that we absolutely have to have.
Best Feats for Mercy Monk 5e
Slasher/Crusher (Lv 4): Monks can take advantage of both these feats in a single turn by gaining proficiency in long swords and making it our monk weapon. Doing this allows us to push and slow enemies each turn with really empowers the frankly underwhelming skirmisher fantasy, and empowers our crits. I’d probably grab one of these at level 1 and the other at level 4 if I wanted to take advantage of both.
Fey/Shadow Touched (Lv 8): Both are good feats that improve our Wisdom and while picking up a few great spells. Shadow is great if you find yourself on stealth missions frequently, and Fey is good overall for most any scenario. I’d personally take Fey most of the time but pick your favorite (or both!)
Alert (Lv 8): Imposing the poisoned condition on an enemy gives them disadvantage on attack roles and ability checks, meaning if we can stick this before the enemy gets a chance to move they will be greatly hampered when they go to hit us back. We can then repeat this process for every turn if we’ve got the Ki points to spare, and at level 11 we don’t even have to worry about Ki points anymore.
Ritual Caster (Lv 12): Adding ritual casting will make your utility options far more vast than the average monk. At this level you are able to add basically every ritual spell to your book assuming you can find it, so talk to your DM about finding rituals as you adventure, or just ask your Wizard friend to let you borrow their spellbook for an afternoon.
Tough (Lv 12): This monk is primarily going to be in melee, and even with our self healing abilities we will still appreciate the extra HP. I’d max out the abilities you care about before grabbing this however.
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