A powerful Monk build in Baldur's Gate 3
A powerful Baldur’s Gate 3 Monk build is making its way through the RPG game‘s community right now, offering players the chance to make their characters hit harder than ever before, and significantly break the game’s intended difficulty curve in the process. Reddit user OrkoTheMage breaks down the build in an informative thread, which includes some pictures to help visualize how the build comes together.
As OrkoTheMage explains, the build takes advantage of the interaction between Bonus Actions and the Monk feature Flurry of Blows. By combining the Monk subclass Way of the Open Hand and Rogue’s Thief subclass, you can gain additional bonus actions for more attacks – which in turn, lets you hit harder and faster.
The result? On their own, OrkoTheMage says that “an average unarmed strike from a level 20 Monk deals about 30 damage. With 8 attacks, that’s about 240 damage in a single round.” However, the build also stacks modifiers for increased damage, and takes advantage of some high-level buffs to really drive the damage home.
Unarmed strikes will be hitting for an average of 60 damage per hit, dealing around 360 damage per turn – significantly more than any other character can achieve in any Baldur’s Gate 3 build, or indeed any other RPG game that I’ve ever seen. The author includes a short list of additional items that you can acquire to further increase the damage, but the point is that this is already a powerful build.
I’m torn between the obvious enjoyment of seeing these powergaming builds come together, and the knowledge that they will unquestionably break the game for anyone playing with them. The author admits to being conceptually obsessed with absurd builds in tabletop Dungeons & Dragons, but also acknowledges the potential to spoil the fun for other players in a multiplayer setting.
Baldur’s Gate 3’s single-player nature gives us little to worry about on that front, however, and I can’t deny that Larian Studios’ decision to include house rule tweaks and magic items that fuel the desire for more powerful builds is a big part of what makes the game so good.
