Way of the Ascendant Dragon Monk 5e

Review by Sam West, Twitter:@CrierKobold

A mountain range stretches into the distance, top peaks breaking into the clouds. Just below them, mounted atop the highest tip of the range below the mists rests an ancient monastery, stretching down to a dozen smaller buildings with tight rope bridges. Here rests an order of monks devoted to becoming closer to the ancient resting majesty nesting atop the peak of the highest mountain top: an order devoted to becoming one with the dragon.

Way of the Ascendant Dragon, from Fizban's Treasury of Dragons, lets monks in on the fun when it comes to embodying the second half of the game's namesake monster. You take all of the basic monk abilities and juice them up with some dragon goodness in a flavorful way. You're still a monk, and this doesn't solve a lot of the problems the base class has, but does get a decent chunk of goodness that will satisfy your desire to play a practiced, patient devotee to draconic perfection.

3rd Level: Draconic Disciple and Breath of the Dragon

Unlike the majority of Monastic Traditions, Way of the Ascendant Dragon monks get two features at 3rd level, and are fortunately designed in such a way that gives you plenty to do in addition to extra ways to spend your ki.

Draconic Disciple exists to deliver a lot on the dragon fantasy portion with passive effects you'd expect a disciple of a dragon to have. Draconic Presence gives you a niche retry on failed Charisma checks when you're in charge of diplomacy. Draconic Strike lets you pick your favorite scale damage type and swap your unarmed strikes to deal that kind of damage (notably also dodging most mundane resistances in the process), and Tongue of Dragons is two languages, one of which being Draconic. Nothing here is game changing, but it all comes together as a reasonable ribbon with a bit of upside.
It pairs perfectly with Breath of the Dragon. This gives you an attack replacement that blasts a 20 ft. cone or 30 ft. line at your foes, dealing twice your martial arts die damage to anything in the area on a failed save. What really sets this feature apart from most of these monk damage expansions is it comes with its own resource pool (long rest uses equal to your proficiency bonus) in addition to the option to spend 2 ki to use it. If you adore this mechanic and want to spam it like crazy, you're getting ample opportunity to do so, even at just 3rd level. As you go, not only does the damage scale, but so does your number of uses. The opportunity cost doesn't go up, either, as Extra Attack still works alongside this. It doesn't take your entire turn to use, and can work in tandem with bonus action options like Martial Arts and Flurry of Blows with Extra Attack.

As far as starting points go, this is as much as I could ask for out of a draconic monk archetype at 3rd level.

6th Level: Wings Unfurled

Step of the Wind is one of monk’s most underrated abilities to me; Cunning Action may be free, but Step of the Wind gives you a tool to spontaneously jump 20 feet. Wings Unfurled does you one better by giving you flight for the turn.

It is strange to me that there is an additional resource gate here where you only can use the flight that already costs you a ki point a number of times equal to your proficiency bonus per long rest. Flight is fine and all, especially in that it gives monks a way to engage in both in and out of combat play in some new ways, but it isn't so powerful I'd think it'd need additional safeguards in place beyond its starting cost.

Wings Unfurled does a fine enough job getting you up in the air fairly early and continues to scale as your speed goes up with each passing level. A solid, flavorful, simple addition. Huzzah!

11th Level: Aspect of the Wyrm

Aspect of the Wyrm takes a page out of Breath of the Dragon's book in that you get a use without needing to spend ki alongside extra uses at the cost of 3 ki each. This ensures you're going to want to use it and get at least one meaningful use out of it per long rest, which I'm a huge fan of, especially when it only costs a bonus action to start. You get two benefits from using it: Frightful Presence and Resistance.

Frightful Presence lets you scare things over and over again one bonus action at a time. Monks do love making extra attacks as their bonus action, which makes this comparatively a bit trickier to find uses for, but when you're going against large, threatening enemies you'd very much like to take less damage from, having a tool to keep it frightened can be great.
Resistance does most of the heavy lifting here. It's like Protection from Energy, but it also comes with the optional frighten. Having a way to pick a damage type and provide you and all allies within 10 feet of you with resistance to that damage type can have a massive impact on a variety of fights. If any fight leans heavily on acid, cold, fire, lightning, or poison (such as a dragon fight), you can cheaply provide the entire team a defensive boon against it.

Older options would have given you one of these features, and I'd be lukewarm on it. Together, they're stellar. All encounters can get something out of Frightful Presence, but it's usually not the splashiest or most critical effect happening. Resistance can be a pivotal tool that massively turns a fight in your side's favor but isn't usable in every single environment. Together, then, you're left with a feature that always does something and sometimes does a TON.

17th Level: Ascendant Aspect

Closing out the monastic tradition is Ascendant Aspect, which is comprised of Augment Breath, Blindsight, and Explosive Fury. Another three-for-one bundle!

Augment Breath empowers your breath weapon further at the cost of just 1 ki point to double its damage and over double its area. With six free uses per long rest, you have an easy place to put ki to help push out a ton of damage against creatures in huge areas. If you want to be a character that blasts breath weapon after breath weapon, you absolutely can do it here.
Passive Blindsight at this stage isn't anything revolutionary but does have some niche upsides when fighting in heavily obscured areas or against invisible stuff. It's more of a ribbon at this point, but a meaningful ribbon.
Explosive Fury levels up Aspect of the Wyrm to not only frighten something, not only provide an area of damage resistance but deal 3d10 elemental damage as well!

All in all these three are going to feel more like passive buffs to the features, and I honestly wish they were considered that. I'd have loved to see a completely new draconic feature here while the other features scaled up, but all three of these together do add a good bit of power to your build. Is it worth the six extra levels in Monk? Probably not, but if you're having a great time already and don't want to dip into other classes, this is a great feature to look forward to.

All Together

I think it took them up until Fizban's Treasury of Dragons to finally get what monks need to function. New ways to spend their limited ki just aren't good enough for most tables who run few short rests. Way of the Ascendant Dragon provides a great mechanical baseline, plenty of new toys to play with, empowerment for base monk features, and additional resources to spend on these new features, leaving room to do the other stuff monks are known for.

I would recommend this option to anyone who just wants more to do on their monk, agnostic of fantasy. It can easily match an elementalist character’s fantasy, making it a great option to consider for satisfying your Four Elements element bender needs. If you love the archetype of the draconic disciple, this tradition is close to perfect.

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