Philosophy

This chapter is under revision.

Links and other information may be temporarily incomplete.

“Therefore, just as water retains no constant shape, so in warfare there are no constant conditions.

He who can modify his tactics in relation to his opponent and thereby succeed in winning, may be called a heaven-born captain.”

--The Art of War, Sun Tzu

As you reach level 3, it is time to choose a philosophy, a special feat choice for Monks where the selection of one new ki attack determines your character’s ultimate speciality. You must choose a philosophy.

Philosophies begin as a single feat selection. Then later, as do elemental attacks and stances, abilities of that philosophy are available and upgraded through action points. Your philosophy also determines your ability to make certain ability selections from Class enhancement trees.

Let’s break them down.

The Path of Harmonious Balance adds abilities to the character that help in healing and buffing themselves and party members. Players who want to use the Shintao Monk class tree must choose this philosophy to specialize in the destruction of the undead and aberrations as well as extraplanar creatures such as beholders and devils.

Monks who take this path are often nicknamed “Light Monks.” To pick this path, you will select the Fists of Light attack, a feat. The Fists of Light deals positive energy damage.

The Path of Inevitable Dominion uses ki to weaken, debuff, poison, and damage enemy defenses to destroy enemies. Players interested in the Ninja Spy class tree must choose this philosophy so they may learn proficiency in shortswords as ki weapons, recharge ki while in stealth, go invisible at will, and attack from the shadows with near-impunity.

Not as flashy as the Light Monk, the “Dark Monks” are most effective in pounding living creatures into dust. To select this path, you choose the Fists of Darkness feat. The Fist of Darkness deals negative energy damage.

Notes from the Old Master:A Most Challenging Path

To those who see the Dark Path as a way to easy victory, I caution you.

The Path of Inevitable Dominion is truly an opposite of the Light Path.

As a Dark Monk, you'll initially have fewer means to recover immediately. Your skills affect living creatures well but are hardly effective against the undead. Without the proper disciplines, it is unlikely for you to take on many adventures without the aid of a healer with you.

The Dark Path is hardly for beginners or the impatient. Unlike a Light Monk, you must rely heavily on every finisher you have. To simply run up to a group of enemies and begin to slug it out is tantamount to suicide.

Unlike your Light brethren, you can use your ki to paralyze, to weaken, to block spell casting, to blind. In later training, you will be able to charm foes to use them against others. Soon, you can use ki to kill your foes with a single strike, and in two modes.

As a Ninja, you can use shortswords and become as swift and invisible as the wind. In this training, with the right study, it is quite possible for you to enter an adventure completely alone to accomplish missions where fighting is the not the object.

Certain races that ordinarily may be less desirable as a Light Monk may be more interesting as a Dark Monk. For instance, Elves with their Dragonmarks of Shadow can add Displacement to their repertoire--something that Light Monks can do with Dance of Clouds, but with 50% concealment rather than 20%. A Drow's higher INT and CHA may make them more desirable to incorporate Use Magic Device or Combat Expertise for self-healing and better defense. Drow are also natural shortsword users, adding to damage as a Ninja Spy.

A Half-Elf may be the most interesting race by using the Cleric dilettante option, giving you a more useful healing option between fights.

If you are new to the monastic arts, I strongly advise you to choose the Light Path first, unless you'd like an extreme challenge and are comfortable with mastering your finishers. You can bring great honor to your dojo as an adherent of the Dark Path, but only with the highest martial disciplines. Do not disappoint us.

There is one class tree that can choose either path. The Henshin Mystic will gain the fundamental finishing moves of their chosen philosophy. They will learn to use quarterstaffs and leverage ki for powerful area-of-effect attacks.

Later in their Mystic training, they can achieve the Balance in Dawn attack. This adds a Light move to a Dark Mystic or a Dark move to a Light Mystic. That means that a Mystic has the potential to use all finishing moves in the game.

Fists of Light and Darkness

Let's summarize these two keystone attacks. Again, in choosing one feat, you define your specific finishing moves.

  • Fists of Light: You channel positive energy into your attack, dealing additional damage against undead, and apply a vampiric healing shield to your target which heals you and your allies that strike that target. On a vorpal strike (natural 20 followed by critical confirmation), you deal an additional positive energy damage to undead.
  • Fists of Darkness: You channel negative energy into your attack, dealing additional damage against living creatures, and the rendering the target shaken. (A successful Will save negates the shaken effect.) On a vorpal strike (natural 20 followed by critical confirmation), you deal an additional negative energy damage.

As you might guess, the selection of one of these strikes begin a chain of finishing move combinations that require that specific ki attack.

You’ll see the strikes of both paths in your character sheet, but the Philosophy attack you choose determines which attack you can use. So, the Fists of Light or Fists of Darkness attack feat becomes a key, literally, to use specific abilities or finishing moves. (As noted before, advanced Henshin Mystics with the Balance in Dawn enhancement can eventually perform all fundamentally granted finishing moves as well as any finishers trained from other trees.)

For instance, use a Fire attack + Fists of Light attack + Fire attack will charge up the finishing move called Walk of the Sun, a 1-minute buff to all allies for +2 to all saves, attacks and skills. Use Fire attack + Fists of Darkness + Fire attack and you get a debuff, Karmic Strike, which is an automatic critical hit on an enemy with the downside of leaving yourself open to a critical hit for 3 seconds.

Most finishing moves that use Fists of Light are buffs. You needn’t necessarily attack anything when using these. All you need is stored ki to activate them as you punch the air. But you can attack while charging these buffs as well, recharging your ki as you use them to help your party. Likewise, the finishers for Fists of Darkness are cursing attacks.

The Fists of Light and Fists of Darkness work unarmed or with weaponry.

Don't worry if you don't like your philosophy choice after playing a bit.

You can visit Fred, the feat respec NPC in House Jorasco to switch your philosophy feat. Once you do this, however, your enhancement class trees may reset and you'll need to reassign your Action Points to a compatible class tree.

Once you make a choice, drag the Fists of Light/Darkness icon to space 6 of your toolbar, if you’re following my recommended suggestions on toolbar use.

Although Fists of Light and Darkness ki attacks are feats (like your initial elemental ki attacks, the “Disciple” attacks in your feat window), later upgrades to your elemental ki attacks will be found as enhancements, chosen through action points.

Light Monk Finishers (Level 3)

Once you have the Fists of Light, you can buff defensive and tactical aids to you and your party.

Remember that finishers use elemental ki attacks with the Fists of Light. In the notation below, "Water" means you're using the Flowing Water Strike attack. "Earth" uses Strike of the Enduring, and so on.

The upside of Light Monk finishers is that they can be used at any time, and cannot be dispelled by enemies (no, not even beholders!). The downside? These buffs last only one minute.

  • Aligning the Heavens (Water/Light/Water): Reduces cost of spell point casting by 25%.
    • A favorite of parties; spell casters love you.
    • A Light Monk is often the very first character to cast a buff in the party for this reason.
  • Dance of Clouds (Wind/Light/Wind): Gives you and a party a Blur effect of 20% concealment.
    • When you don't have a Bard, a mass Blur is welcome. You can refresh this while fighting, which is more handy.
  • Grasp the Earth Dragon (Earth/Light/Earth): You and your party are immune from Stun, Daze and Sleep.
    • Some forget that Monks are good at preventing stuns as well as causing them. When maruts and pit fiends attack, you need to keep your party in the fight. Aside from a good saving throw, Light Monks are the only defense against preventing a stun attack (Heal spells can only remove the stun itself).
  • Walk of the Sun (Fire/Light/Fire): +2 untyped bonus to attack, saves, and skills.
    • A good one to use before traversing a known trap, or to add to a Rogue's skill DC to take it down.
    • A counterpart to Heroism, but stacks with other Heroism effects.

The best finisher is not a buff.

  • Healing Ki (Light/Light/Light): On striking an enemy with Fists of Light, you might cause a Healing Shield, a curse effect that is a form of Lesser Vampirism, granting you and your allies 1d2 HP for each attack you make on the cursed foe.
    • The cursed effect lasts for about 10 seconds.
    • After three strikes, Healing Ki can be released, granting a mass healing effect of 1d4 HP plus 1d4 points per Monk level to any ally in range.
    • Update 19 adds Elemental Curatives, which also are released with the Healing Ki at this moment (see below).

Healing Ki is the reason why Light Monks are amazingly self-sufficient. As long as there are enemies to strike, healing shields can be made, ki can be generated, and Healing Ki can keep a Monk going for as long as you play.

Healing Ki effects on you and others are amplified by enhancements and items such as

Healing amplification numbers will stack with each other, provided they are not of an identical type, such as Competency, Insight, or Enhancement bonus.

Thus, a Light Monk is extremely self-sufficient with healing, provided you equip properly and change stances if needed.

Healing Ki, unlike a Cleric's mass heal spells, does not harm the undead.

Light Monk Elemental Curatives

As you spend action points, Light Monks can add spell-like abilities that emulate fundamental Cleric party aids.

With Update 19, these abilities are found in the Shintao class tree as abilities you can add. Once you add them to your tree, place that enhancement on your toolbar. Before Update 19, you selected the target for the ability and clicked the ability on the toolbar. With Update 19, these Elemental Curative abilities are bound to your Healing Ki finisher as a toggled effect.

To select a specific curative, click its icon on your toolbar to activate it. If you toggle on another curative, it will deactivate any others; you can have only curative toggled at a time.

To use the curative, use the Light>Light>Light finisher and click the Finishing Moves icon. In addition to the Healing Ki, the curative will activate.

Update 19 retooled the curatives so that they are mass-effects, aiding all allies in the vicinity of the effect.

The downside to this new design is that you need more ki to activate it.

  • Lifting the Veil : Removes blindness.
  • The Receptive Earth: Removes disease.
  • Restoring the Balance: Removes curses.
  • Difficulty at the Beginning: A Lesser Restoration effect.

These four abilities are prerequisites for the last useful ability:

  • Rise of the Phoenix: This ability is available to a Monk when dead. On activation, you get Resurrection as a spell-like ability to yourself. Usable only once per rest.

The Rise of the Phoenix ability used to be quite the party saver when your healer was dead, as it was a Raise Dead spell-like ability that could be used for any party member, prior to Update 19.

With this change, the Monk can only revive himself (in an oddly self-serving fashion that doesn't fit the class theme). Only those who can use Raise Dead spells or scrolls or are lucky to have a Raise Dead clicky can further aid an endangered party.

Dark Monk Finishers (Level 3)

A Dark Monk's finishers are effectively cursing attacks, designed to weaken or debilitate enemies for easier destruction, stymieing their ability to cast spells, move or attack.

Remember that finishers use elemental ki attacks with the Fists of Darkness. In the notation below, "Water" means you're using the Flowing Water Strike attack. "Earth" uses Strike of the Enduring, and so on.

A Dark Monk's debuffing curse-effect strikes last 60 seconds if they land.

The only downside to these finishers concerns how you'll need to anticipate their use, "setting up"each finisher. Mages have many of these as basic spells but can apply them much faster. There's also the matter of ki regeneration, which means that using Fire Stance is your probable option.

Dark finishers are extremely powerful single-target attacks. Weapons that damage ability scores, especially STR and CON, will increase the chance of these finishers hitting their mark.

As with all finishing moves, the higher your WIS, the higher the DC needed by the enemy to resist your attack.

  • Freezing the Lifeblood (Water/Dark/Water): A humanoid enemy is left paralyzed and helpless for 60 seconds.
    • Take advantage of this one at all times; you typically don't see paralyzing handwraps or weapons until Level 12.
    • This special paralysis makes an enemy helpless. That means that the enemy is 100% vulnerable to Sneak Attacks and other effects, such as the No Mercy enhancement, to suffer additional damage.
  • Falling Star Strike (Wind/Dark/Wind): You blind an enemy for 60 seconds.
    • A handy finisher against a persistent foe when you need to get away.
    • Like "Freezing," a blinded enemy is also helpless and suffers more damage in this state.
  • Pain Touch (Earth/Dark/Earth): The enemy becomes nauseated for 60 seconds.
    • Another powerful move that can completely stop an enemy spell caster or melee attacking from doing anything, including spell casting of any kind or attacks. They can only move around. This works on most humanoids.
  • Karmic Strike (Fire/Dark/Fire): You're guaranteed to make a critical threat attack, increasing damage with that strike. You're left more vulnerable, temporarily, to being critically hit.
    • A nice boost to damage, even when not in Mountain Stance.

The best finisher is a super-debuffer, discussed earlier.

  • Touch of Despair (Dark/Dark/Dark): You strike your opponent down with a terrible curse, halving all positive energy healing done to the target, reducing its fortification and increasing its negative energy vulnerability by 25%.
    • The Ninjitsu effects (see below) also release on the use of the Touch of Despair.

Tier 5 of the Ninja Spy class tree, with the right prerequisites, gives you a very nasty ki attack:

  • Touch of Death: You strike your opponent down with twisted ki, dealing 500 additional negative energy damage. A successful Fortitude save reduces the damage to half (the DC is 10 + Monk level + Wisdom modifier).

Touch of Death is most effective by first cursing an enemy using Touch of Despair to make your target more vulnerable to the negative energy of a TOD strike. A 500-point hit turns into a 625 hit or more with other vulnerabilities or doublestrike effects.

Dark path curses have limits. For instance, Freezing the Lifeblood works only on humanoids (humans, Halflings, Dwarves, but not Duergar). Many tougher foes may resist your curses if your DCs are too low...which often means you need a higher WIS score.

Ninjitsu Attacks

Prior to Update 19, Dark Monks had to select four enhancements to get the Touch of Death attack. These attacks are no longer part of the Ninja Spy class tree, but are still available as Elemental Words in the new Henshin Mystic class tree.

In their place, Dark Monks who go Ninja Spy received quite the upgrade in the form of Ninjitsu: A series of effects that (like the Shintao's Elemental Curatives) are individually toggled and are released when using the Touch of Despair finishing move.

One of the new abilities in the Ninja Spy class tree is Ninja Poison, which can be added to any attacks with piercing or slashing damage. Ninja Poison is nasty stuff. Not only does an enemy receive damage from being injected with the poison, the Ninja Spy can use attacks that forcibly withdraw the poison for greater damage. The Ninja Spy also gains poisoned darts as a first attack. More information on this is found in the Ninja Spy chapter.

You'll need to take all Ninjitsu abilities to qualify for the Touch of Death in Tier 5. Here are the new moves. Study them well.

    • Impending Doom: If the enemy affected by your Touch of Despair dies within the next 30 seconds, you gain 25 Ki and 25 temporary hit points.
    • Poison Exploit: Your Touch of Despair finisher purges an enemy of Ninja Poison, dealing 1d20 poison damage per stack of Ninja Poison removed.
      • Once fully poisoned, the damage caused by ripping out the affliction is almost twice as greater than Touch of Despair.
    • Poisoned Soul: Your Touch of Despair finisher causes your opponent to gain a stack of Ninja Poison every 6 seconds for 30 seconds.
      • This ability is a very powerful damage-over-time attack that all enemies not immune to Poison damage (including Red Named enemies) can suffer very high damage per second.
    • Wave of Despair: Your Touch of Despair finisher causes all nearby enemies to suffer one negative level.

Ninja Poison effects do not work while unarmed, even with items that otherwise generate piercing or slashing damage, such as the Brawling Gloves, the Ivy Wraps or the epic feat Vorpal Strikes.

Ninja Poison does work with shuriken, through the Sting of the Ninja enhancement. However, Sting does not work with bows.

So, What Training Should You Choose?

Players new to Monks are recommended to choose a Light Monk philosophy and use the Shintao Monk class tree. These builds are more forgiving in terms of self-healing and can fight off most of the enemies in the game quite well. A Light Monk is especially adept at fighting undead, outsiders and aberrations such as skeletons, demons and beholders.

A starter build for the Shintao Monk as a human can be found here.

Players experienced to weapon fighting and spell casting and have rolled up and played a Monk before might find the Henshin Mystic a fun change of pace. You can choose either philosophy, but remember that Dark Mystics will have a harder time in self-healing. Note, as well, that some ki attacks require unarmed fighting styles. Stunning Fist is for fists only. You'll need to work in Stunning Blow to your quarterstaff build for stunning while wielding a staff. This requires a significant level of STR and DC boost effects to work--and the results will be much slower than Stunning Fist.

A starter build for the Mystic can be found here.

Experienced players, those seeking out a challenge, or players who want to deal the greatest overall damage may choose the Dark Path and the Ninja Spy class tree, or even the advanced weapon training of the Kensei Fighter. Be mindful that unarmed Ninja Spies won't gain DR bypassing without soaking points into the Shintao line, using weapons, or finding metal-laced handwraps that add the needed bypassing.

As they don't self-heal as well, a Dark Monk is a rewarding but advanced training style that requires you to think less like a typical melee fighter to pick your battles carefully and build your defenses of Dodge, Incorporeality, Concealment and Invisibility as well as Armor Class ratings to survive longer.

The Ninja Spy offers several build options. Similarly, Drow characters, which gain natural talent with shuriken, could specialize in using throwing stars as a dominant weapon.

You will find specialty builds for the ninja here.

Notes from the Old Master:The Dark Side has cookies. The Light Side has milk.

I cannot count the number of times that students have asked which is stronger: to follow the Path of Harmonious Balance and aid yourself and a party, or to follow the Path of Inevitable Dominion and become a powerful, invisible, deadly shadow.

There is truth in Teacher Syncletica's words when she suggests most of her students to follow the Light Path. Ki is energy of change. As with all energies, it should not wasted or misused. That is not to say that those in the Dark Path are wasting their energies. No, no, no...only the ineptly-skilled Dark Monks do such a thing.

Light Monks do slightly less damage as the Dark Monks, yet Light Monks are far more self-sustaining overall than Dark practitioners. Yet, with the right training, a Dark Monk knows how to infiltrate many difficult adventures, completely alone, complete the mission, with little bloodshed and little damage.

The Dark Monk path, including Ninja Spy training, is not for the timid. You will not likely advance in power as fast as those in the Light Path. Death is far more likely if you plod through an adventure like some buffoon of a Barbarian that expects others to continually heal them and at the healer's expense.

You choose the Dark Path for honor in knowing you completed a mission while few or no enemies know you were ever there.

If you choose the Dark Path simply because it sounds like you can become...what is that word...yes...a badass...then I fear I will soon know of you only as a few written glyphs on stone at a memorial shrine in the dojo's garden.

As well, if you choose the Light Path yet use your abilities only to find glory, you, too, are doing it wrong.

If you are in doubt as to your true calling, look to how the Henshin Mystics apply their training. They may choose either Philosophy and can soon master elements of both. Dark is not bad, but Light is not always good.

With your Philosophy selected, you can now fully concentrate on training enhancements that favor your path. Let's first look at the Shintao Monk.