Just Don’t Get Hit: A Drunken Master Monk Build for 5e
The Monk advertises a skirmisher playstyle, attempting to move into melee, smack an enemy around for a bit, then dip out and away from danger all in one turn. It also utterly fails to deliver this fantasy in every conceivable way. To do this, you must move into melee (a bad place for the low defense Monk to be), make your attacks with your action, then bonus action disengage with Step of the Wind, costing a Ki point, and use our remaining movement to get out of melee range.
Despite the Monk’s improved movement speed, you simply never get enough speed to pull this off, and Ki points are far too limited to be spending them on Step of the Wind every turn. This strategy also conflicts with bonus action attacks and Flurry of Blows, cutting into our already poor damage output. The Drunken Master subclass takes a small step towards fixing these problems with Drunken Technique, their primary 3rd level feature. It allows the combination of Flurry of Blows and Disengage, plus an extra burst of movement. This is good, but not enough on its own to bring this fantasy to life. We need more movement, more defense, and more things to do then just punch people, because there is very little we can do to increase our damage output. Our goal is a build that takes very few attacks thanks to never being a valid option for melee enemies, while also improving our defense against ranged attacks and spellcasters and providing our team utility outside of just damage. Let’s see if we can accomplish that goal.
Race: Tabaxi
Tabaxi are a popular pick for melee Monk builds, and it’s easy to see why. Claws give us a damage boost to our unarmed attacks at low levels, a climbing speed which we will seek to make use of as often as possible, proficiency in two of the best skills, darkvision, and most importantly of all, Feline Agility. This trait allows us to double our speed for one turn at no action cost, and it recharges whenever we spend a turn not moving at all. We will be taking heavy advantage of this trait to keep ourself away from danger while also being able to engage in melee. There are not many feats that benefit Monks, so we don’t hurt to not be a Variant Human or Custom Origin.
Starting Stats:
8/16/16/8/16/8 (+1 to Dex, Con, and Wis from race)
Dump Strength, 16 Dexterity for our attacks and AC, 16 Constitution for HP, dump Intelligence, 16 Wisdom for AC and many of our features, and dump Charisma.
Don’t be confused by the three +1’s, any race can give either a +2 & +1, or three +1’s, we just don’t use that option very frequently.
Level 1-5: Drunken Master Monk
We play things pretty straight for these first five levels. Use your good speed and Feline Agility to weave through combat, hopefully ending your turn outside of all melee enemies’ movement range. We’ve got Deflect Missiles to help with occasional ranged attacks, and uh, that’s about it. Our damage is mediocre, and if we get caught in melee we are likely taking a lot of damage with our 16 AC. We want to rush to level 5 for Extra Attack and Stunning Strike, but taking any more Monk levels is entirely unnecessary. Our remaining subclass features are dreadful, some even running counter to our strategy and asking us to end our turn surrounded by enemies. We will look to other, better classes to gain more power now.
Feat: Slasher
Our Claws will always provide a way to deal slashing damage, meaning we can easily make use of this feat even when wielding a quarterstaff (and we’ll be swapping that quarterstaff out soon anyway). The 10ft slow provided by this feat allows us to more consistently get away from melee enemies and keep ourselves safe from attacks. We’ll take the +1 to our Dexterity, even though it doesn’t increase our modifier.
Level 6-11: Drunken Master Monk 5, Twilight Cleric 6
It’s amazing how much taking 5 levels of one of the best subclasses in the game can empower even the worst of characters. First, we get armor and weapon proficiency, and while we don’t care about the armor, we can upgrade our quarterstaff to a longsword thanks to Dedicated Weapon and upgrade our d8 to a d10. The big deal is our Channel Divinity: Twilight Sanctuary. This allows us to create a sphere of dim light that travels with us and grants ourselves and allies who end their turn inside it temporary HP and protection against certain statuses. With our high movement, we can always have our sanctuary in the perfect position, even if the rest of our party likes to play at range. Also note that this sphere is an area of dim light, meaning it’s dim in there even on a bright sunny day. That might be useful to a Wood Elf or someone with the Skulker feat, as they can hide in this dim light. It will also be very useful once we get our 6th level subclass feature, allowing us to freely fly whenever we are using our Channel Divinity. The biggest thing we get are spells, so let’s go over those now.
Cantrips: Guidance, Toll the Dead, Thaumaturgy
1st level: *Faerie Fire, *Sleep, Healing Word, Detect Magic, Sanctuary
2nd level: Moonbeam*, See Invisibility*, Aid, Silence
3rd level: Aura of Vitality*, Tiny Hut*, Spirit Guardians, Dispel Magic, Revivify
(Spells marked with * are already prepared by our subclass)
Most of the spells here are pretty flexible, as our subclass already is providing plenty of great options. Swap out Guidance and Detect Magic if other players already have those spells. Most of what we select is geared toward giving us more utility, support and control options, something the Monk lacks entirely. At low level Cleric we have Faerie Fire as a great support spell to give our whole party advantage to hit a group of creatures, and Healing Word to bring up downed party members. We’ll mostly use Aid to bring up multiple downed party members at once, as we don’t have the high level slots spare to upcast it for maximum potential.
The real reason I want to go so deep into Cleric is Spirit Guardians. I’ve often preached about the amazing damage potential of this spell, and that definitely still applies here, but let’s dive into the other side of this spell: the movement reduction. Notably, the spell halves the movement of enemies inside its area. This is not the same as difficult terrain, as that costs twice as much movement to traverse. Let’s break down how this works. If a creature with 30ft of movement walks 15ft and then enters the area of our spell, their movement speed is now 15ft, meaning they have no more movement to spend. If the foe moved 10ft and then entered the spell, they have 5ft to spend. Even if a creature starts their turn 5ft outside the spell (the closest they can be), they would only have 10ft of movement left to spend, meaning they have to use all of their movement to get into melee range with us. That means that a creature with 30ft of movement must start their turn just outside the spell to be able to melee attack us.
With our great movement speed, Feline Agility, and Drunken Technique, keeping enemies away from us is now trivial. This is not to mention the fact that we can frequently spend entire combats in the air, making us basically immune to anything that relies on melee attacks, even flying creatures. At this point, you should never take another melee attack again. The only way a creature should be able to get to you is teleportation, of which few creatures have access to. Yes, spells and ranged attacks can still be a threat, so we’ll be taking steps to continue to improve our defenses against those.
Feat: War Caster
At Cleric 4, character level 9, we grab this feat to ensure our concentration is safe, as dropping Spirit Guardians would be very detrimental to our game plan.
Level 12-15: Drunken Master Monk 5, Twilight Cleric 6, Spores Druid 4
We continue our multiclass journey into Druid, a class that normally has trouble multiclassing but works well for us here. We get a bunch of both defensive and offensive features here to really boost our power. First let’s go over the spells.
Cantrips: Chill Touch*, Mold Earth, Thorn Whip
1st level: Absorb Elements, Goodberry, Fog Cloud, Longstrider
2nd level: Blindness/Deafness*, Gentle Repose*, Pass Without Trace, Spike Growth, Heat Metal
(Spells marked with * are automatically prepared by our subclass)
Our biggest pickups are Absorb Elements and Pass Without Trace. The first is a great defensive tool against a huge variety of effects and spells, and the latter is a party-wide buff that allows even full plate Paladins to stealth. The other spells are less important, as many require concentration and our main concentration spell remains Spirit Guardians. That being said, not every combat will be so difficult as to require Spirit Guardians, and in others it simply won’t be effective. I tried to select spells like Heat Metal, Spike Growth, and Fog Cloud to give us good alternatives in those circumstances, but you’re free to grab something else if you’d like. Longstrider is an especially fun addition, although it may be a bit overkill. You really only need so much speed, and we probably have enough already, but it’s nice to have a way to go even faster if necessary.
So why Spores Druid specifically? Well, Symbiotic Entity is a house of a feature, as we are specifically well attuned to take advantage of it. The temporary HP competes with our Twilight Cleric Channel Divinity, but the simple solution is to just use those two features in different combats. Save Channel Divinity for when flight would be most useful, and use Symbiotic Entity otherwise. The action to set it up means that you should be ideally using it right before combat begins, a strategy made much easier thanks to Pass Without Trace. With this, we have a shield of temporary HP and an additional d6 of necrotic damage with each of our many attacks. This is a nice bonus to damage that will help us keep up into the late game.
Feat: Resilient Wisdom
While we aren’t rounding our Wisdom up with this, we still really want to defend our Wisdom saves, as that is a major weakness of this character. Taking this now does set us up to round up both our Dexterity and Wisdom with our next ability score increase, most easily achieved by going two more levels in Cleric.
At this point, the build is set in stone and any further levels are just gravy. You can take more levels in any of our 3 classes and you’ll be satisfied. More Monk gives more Ki points, more Cleric gives us a fast track to our next ASI, more spells and spell slots, and Divine Strike for more DPR, and Druid grants more spells and slots, along with Fungal Infestation. Of the three, I think Cleric is the strongest option, but it’s not a runaway.
This build seeks to completely avoid all melee strikes while engaging in melee themselves, and I feel like it should be able to accomplish that in the vast majority of combats. This is done to help mitigate the Monk’s pitiful defense, as you will surely be dead if you let yourself get surrounded. This means that this build takes some thought to put into use, you can’t just run into combat blindly. Take the time during other players’ turns to figure out the best movement and attack pattern for you, and if you play right, you should get out of most combats with just as much HP as you started it with. Our damage isn’t amazing, but thanks to Spirit Guardians, we’ll still feel like we are contributing to ending the combat, not just surviving it. If you want to play a speedster who plays to their strengths and leaves their opponents unable to catch their breath, this build should provide that fantasy about as well as I can imagine.
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