| Syndis |
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Good evening everyone, lately I’ve had a bit of a conundrum when figuring out how to deal with my party’s monks. To preface, I have a party of 7 level 11 adventurers. 3 members of the party are monks of various types. 1 is focused on archery, 1 is focused on control, and 1 is more of a generalist.
I am having trouble building adequately challenging combat encounters for the party. In more cases than not, the monks, especially the archer, waltz through combat with ease, no matter what I throw at them.
For example, tonights session had two of the three monks facing off against a Jotunn Troll (level 15). In about 3-4 rounds of combat, the two monks and the sorceror (who missed every time when trying to hit) killed it without much issue. They took some damage in return, but overall they did not really have a problem.
Later in the session, the archer monk did a flurry of bows with explosive arrows and caused around 430 points of damage to four creatures with a single action. Afterwords, the other monk grabbed the level 15 caster boss they were fighting and prevented him from casting at all. They proceeded to waltz through what I had intended as a boss encounter as if it was nothing.
I am having trouble figuring out how to deal with this issue, as it is reaching a point that the 3 monks, especially the archer, outshine the rest of the party. I have discussed my problem with one of my non-monk players and he agreed that it was starting to seem as though the class is OP.
It is starting to feel as though the monk class has no weaknesses, and exceeds all other classes in terms of combat. The archer monk in particular is better at close combat damage than everyone else in the party, is better at doing ranged/spell damage than the rest of the party, has the highest AC, and their saves are difficult to get around.
My questions are as follows. How do I successfully build engaging combat encounters when the monks (particularly the archer) just waltz through everything? How do I give other players the chance to shine in combat? Is there something I am missing, or is the monk class just that powerful?