Way of the Long Death Monk 5e

Review by Sam West, Twitter:@CrierKobold

Monks don't get a lot of “dark” options to play around with. Way of the Long Death is sold just as that; you master death in all its aspects, becoming one with the process of decay and having utmost control over life leaving the body.

Way of the Long Death does not in any way, shape, or form meaningfully deliver on this fantasy. You get a pile of features ranging from mediocre to outright terrible that leave you feeling like you're entirely lacking in control over anything, let alone killing people with a single blow.

3rd Level: Touch of Death

When I read the title Touch of Death, I envision dark energy draining anything the monk touches. A force that kills swiftly, a necrotic enhancement to unarmed strikes. What you get is a chunk of temporary hit points each time you kill something. Normally it'll start around four or five, and grow from there.

Out of the gate, I'm not a big fan of this. It doesn't really offer you anything new to do, it simply makes you slightly more robust in a fight that goes on a long time post the first enemy's death. It does benefit majorly from the temporary hit points lasting between fights, highly encouraging you to kill weak things around you for extra padding in the next fights, but when I get a 3rd level feature I want it to change some element of how I play beyond a larger hit point pool. Touch of Death can be a lot of temporary hit points, but won't have a major impact on most encounters, especially if you aren't the one regularly executing things.

6th Level: Hour of Reaping

Hour of Reaping, like Touch of Death, has some metal implications. It sounds like you set up a time to go nuts and harvest the souls of the damned around you, condemned by simply existing near a master of death. What you get is a single round action-costed fear that doesn't even have the decency to cost a ki so you can use your Ki-Fueled Attack bonus action attack.

Spending an action on a 30 ft. fear is somewhat interesting, but it doesn't mesh at all with what Touch of Death is trying to set up. When the rest of your class provides you with tools to attack better and better, taking actions other than the attack action gets harder and harder. In a pinch, a 30 ft. fear can be great. Getting nothing to support or at least work alongside your punching is a problem. You're rarely going to find this being a better option than just taking the attack action.

11th Level: Mastery of Death

As far as defensive features go, I'm normally against features that only work when you'd drop to zero. Mastery of Death could be an exception, as it lets your ki stretch your life for as long as you can keep spending them, but when Touch of Death is the only feature you have to really build around up to this point, you shouldn't be dropping to 0 all that often, and when you are, you're probably going to have used most of your other ki by this point making attacks. One or two extra rounds up can be life-saving. It isn't so good that I can forgive getting next to nothing new to do. You just get to live a little bit longer when you've already got the tools to do that.

17th Level: Touch of the Long Death

Touch of the Long Death feels like the entire reason this subclass exists, yet this feature feels generic. It's something any class with a resource pool could do, and doesn't work at all with what you're regular action is. You're forgoing potentially three attacks at the chance to deal 10d10 damage, with this costing you a fourth of your ki to use. Is 4d10+20 damage (roughly 8d10) worth of attack damage worth forgoing for a touch action and 5 ki for a bonus 2d10 damage? No! Not even a little bit! Way of the Open Hand actually gets a touch-to-kill mechanic that works alongside their punches. How this made it to print baffles me.

All Together

The Way of the Long Death fails spectacularly. All it will end up feeling like is a massive reserve of hit points contingent on your ability to kill things. If you can't or aren't actively murdering things to keep up temporary hit points and then spending those temporary hit points by getting beaten badly. This works against Mastery of Death's reserve of ki Death Wards that's pretty interesting at least, but ultimately still nothing that you can use encounter to encounter, session to session. Touch of Long Death drops the ball so hard the rebound could be heard from space; I don't know how they missed the touch enhancing the on-hit damage of unarmed strikes, or at minimum, just outright killed something. It's a 17th-level feature. It has room to be busted, and this is barely higher damage than just spending a regular round attacking with Flurry of Blows and costs five times as much. If you are dedicated to trying to build a “tank monk”, this has supporting tools for that vision, but with nothing else supporting it, I can't recommend it to anyone else.

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