Hey All, I'm going to be rolling up a monk here soon and I was just curious as to whether there was any consensus on archetypes for the monk. Specifically, I'm looking to continue to be able to Flurry, which eliminates a lot of the archetypes right off. With that in mind though, do any of the archetypes stand out as being clearly better (from a tactical standpoint) than the standard monk?
Zen archer is the biggest archetype for flurry advantage.
Maneuver master, flowing monk both are good monk choices. And qingong for all of them.
If you want to fight in the thick of a melee, and remain effective, then play Flowing Monk, and disrupt everything.
If you intend to dart in and out of combat and throw combat maneuvers to disrupt individual enemies and small groups, play Standard + Qinggong.
If you want to be able to disrupt ANYTHING that has its feet on the ground, from levels 1 through levels 20, play Underfoot Adept (Halfling Required), take the Level Bonus at every level and apply it to the Halfling Racial bonus for Monks. And add in Qinggong Monk wherever possible. And take Stunning fist at level 11 so you can apply the other half of the Halfling Monk Level Bonus that you don't get until you have Stunning Fist. Just remember to take Vicious Stomp at level 3 and Combat Reflexes at level 1, and party hard.
And if you intend to deal damage as opposed to disrupt, play a different class.
Weapon adept looks interesting. You lose stunning fist for perfect strike, which lets you roll twice on an attack roll and take the better result. The archetype later lets you roll three time per attack roll. Same limit of once per level per day, so you can do it fairly often. You also get weapon focus and specialization, at the cost of delaying evasion. Overall, you get a nice trade in for what you give up. It seems great for armed monks.
Weirdly, I have wanted to mix weapon adept with monk of the empty hand. Would a two handed weapon, treated like a quarterstaff due to the weird proficiencies, qualify for feats calling for a quaterstaff? If so, you could perfect strike with them, and use any two handed weapon your GM throws into the game and still get weapon focus and specialization on it. This bit does still rely on whether a weapon made improvised retains its enhancement bonus though. But given some favorable judgments, and combined with Improvised Weapon Mastery, every two handed weapon would act like a Greatsword that you could flurry, which might do some serious damage.
Crane style is another common defensive style. It is also a good option, even for monks that do not take MoMS. With the three style feats together, you: 1.) cancel out one melee attack per round, 2.) get an attack of opportunity on the attacker with full BAB, and 3.) trade a -1 penalty to attack for +3 AC. Not bad, though probably slightly better for a non flurry user. It might be a good justification for Using one handed weapons.
Martial artist is also interesting since it can ignore DR with a swift action, so you do not have to bother with golfbagging after level 4. Since you do not have alignment restrictions and you gain immunity to fatigue, a dip into Barbarian would not be too bad.
I can't deny that a sohei with reach is pretty sweet though, since it provides you with battlefield control (circle of PAIN 25 feet across) and you still have unarmed kicks to threaten if something tries to stay in close.
The secret to being good as a monk is to fight as differently from the iconic style of monk (no weapons or armor) as possible, and often with as few actual monk levels as possible. This is why Zen Archer is so good; archery is pretty far flung from punching and kicking.
If you want to flurry and don't want to be a Zen Archer, then be a Sohei. Get to level 6, and gain the ability to flurry with polearms (or whatever else, but polearms and bows are the most useful ones). Then go into your favorite version of Fighter - Lore Warden is never bad -- and don't look back, other than possibly going back to Sohei for levels 7-8 later on for the extra flurry attack (you can wait a bit on it; when you first could get it, the attack bonus will be tiny and seldom hit anyway). Never go beyond 8th level Sohei.
Doing the Sohei route, if not right away then certainly when you multiclass out, switch to using light armor / mithral medium armor (Sohei lets you flurry in full plate, but if you limit to light armor, DM is much less likely to flip the **** out) and don't bother with the wisdom stat. That way you "only" need str, dex, and con and are not as multiple ability dependent.
That is about it for good flurry options. You should open your mind to things that swap flurry (MoMS is the best, Maneuver Master is passably decent), though. If you have a bunch of racial natural weapons, like 2 claws and a bite, normal TWF with unarmed can be better, since unlike flurry that WILL let you string the natural attacks on the end. Even then, never go past Monk 6.
I'm not sure that Sohei can use armor and still flurry. There is some debate about that, with both RAW and RAI. Even if the armor proficiencies did allow them to use armor, I'd agree that it would be light at most.
The way you are saying it, you basically hate monks in general. I'll admit that it is often front loaded with essential mechanics that makes it attractive as a dip for other classes, but it is still a perfectly viable option. I think some of you problems with monks might be that you are too eager to jump other classes that you miss out on the scaling aspects.
I don't hate monks. The concept is my 2nd favorite if not favorite in the entire game. I hate how weak monks are. There's a difference. I'll go out of my way re-fluffing other things and multiclassing, and doing whatever I can to get the awesome wuxia martial artist character I want. And I've done it many times, in 3E and in PF, because the monk class has sucked for at least the past 13 years.
The scaling aspects are not very good, and the class can't fight that well, which is a problem when it's neither a caster nor a skill monkey, never mind that fluff-wise, it's supposed to be a good class at melee combat.
And the problem isn't front-loading...
Hey guys, thanks for the responses. I know that monk is not the optimal choice as far as combat goes, but I'm cool with that. Qinggong certainly seems to have some fun stuff going on as does the martial artist. Will definitely take a look at those and see what looks the most fun!