Monastic Weaponry for Advanced Monk Weapons

[Brício Mares]

Hello monks!

With the release of the Fist of the Ruby Phoenix, new monk weapons arrived, but some of them (if not all) are advanced.

But monks never get proficiency with advanced monk weapons and to do that, it would be necessary to take the general feat Martial Training 2 times and still just be trained with the weapon.

So, I have been thinking that one of two things happened:

1 - The designers never thought about advanced monk weapons when they created Monastic Weaponry and they might release a note or errata including them on the feat;

2 - They did it intentionally for monks not be able to use the weapon unless they are multiclassing and thus the Monk trait seems useless.

Monastic Weaponry: You have trained with the traditional weaponry of your monastery or school. You gain access to uncommon weapons that have the monk trait and become trained in simple and martial monk weapons. When your proficiency rank for unarmed attacks increases to expert or master, your proficiency rank for these weapons increases to expert or master as well.

Weapon Training: You become trained in all simple weapons. If you were already trained in all simple weapons, you become trained in all martial weapons. If you were already trained in all martial weapons, you become trained in one advanced weapon of your choice.

Special You can select this feat more than once. Each time you do, you become trained in additional weapons as appropriate, following the above progression.

Monk initial proficiences: Trained in simple weapons
Trained in unarmed attacks

[Gisher]

Why would multiclassing make the Monk trait useless?

[Angel Hunter D]

The difficulty of monks using their advanced weapons does seem some kind of oversight, there's no point in the monk trait on the advanced weapons right now.

[HammerJack]

Well, there is, but basically only for fighters with a monk dedication. But these aren't the first advanced weapons to only be useful to fighters. That isn't a new problem.

[Angel Hunter D]

A whole class of weapons for just fighters seems more than a little bit of a waste. Advanced weapons on the whole seem too difficult to meaningfully use.

[PossibleCabbage]

The "treat advanced weapon as martial" via the fighter dedication eats three class feats. They should probably just print a level 6 monk feat (like "Advanced Monastic Weapons") with Monastic Weaponry as prerequisite that lets you treat advanced weapons with the monk trait as martial.

[HammerJack]

I think it would be better to have a generally accessible way to make Advanced Weapons (or at least a single selected Advanced Weapon) work better, not a solution that only helps monks.

But then, while I really like PF2 on the whole, I think that nonscaling proficiency feats existing is one of the places the design went wrong. Even just using a general feat on Weapon Proficiency should, if not providing scaling proficiency out of the box, at least have a followup feat to make the proficiency scale to whatever level your class grants with other weapons.

Advanced Monastic Weaponry would only address a single specific symptom, not the problem we've had the whole time.

[vagrant-poet]

HammerJack wrote:

I think that nonscaling proficiency feats existing is one of the places the design went wrong. Even just using a general feat on Weapon Proficiency should, if not providing scaling proficiency out of the box, at least have a followup feat to make the proficiency scale to whatever level your class grants with other weapons.

It's really jarring, because it's a big limitations to lots of cool character ideas that it's so, so hard use advanced weapons unless you have an ancestry feat for them.