The monk fantasy archetype as it currently exists in game has several pain points:
1- Its iconic monk armor, the one Illarya wears (Empty Mind, Empty Fist, Empty Step set pieces; currently no glove piece exists for this set in-game), is rather abysmally cloth armor.
Put plainly, cloth armor for a melee playstyle sucks big time. The player character already has abysmal baseline poise that gets you ragdolled by most enemies in the game.
The extra resistances from cloth armor are useless because with exalting and current ring and armor upgrade values, you can reach the 70% cap on all elements with full mesh armor instead.
For reference, my armor has all “10% reduced damage taken based on durability)” for a total 40% added DR, and you are still wet toilet paper on cloth at pestilence lv4, and even mesh can have a hard time with more damage taken increase affixes in pestilence.
The difference is that mesh armor also grants you 50% physical DR, the most important DR in the game as that is the damage type most enemies, including bosses, apply. Cloth nets you 29% DR at a fully upgraded cloth set.
You are taking double the damage from enemies just by wearing cloth, and this is a serious problem against elite goliath enemies, minibosses, and certain bosses like Echo Knight and Darak who have rather high baseline melee damage(Warrick also does, but less extremely so).
At plague lv4, with enemy 50% stagger resistance, 30% extra health and multiple damage intake increase affixes to the player usually summing up to 30-45% extra damage taken, the game becomes unplayable for a cloth wearing monk at pestilence lv4, you are getting ragdolled and shredded, especially in multienemy fights where you can no longer stagger to control enemy groups and they hit like a freight train.
2- For a melee archetype that has rather low weapon reach and long attack animation commit strings, the archetype has almost nonexistent poise. It’s terrible.
Even using a full mesh set with the highest level Poise flask, I was getting chain stagger locked just by taking a single hit from most enemies that were not minor nith/gloam. Every single goliath enemy, False Remnant, monstrosity, giant, bear, miniboss and especially the bosses immediately staggered you in one hit at full mesh armor with poise flask on at pestilence lv4.
The Balak Taw archer chain firing arrows and dashing back constantly while firing arrows was chain staggering through mesh as well.
So you are an archetype made of toilet paper if you wear your intended fantasy set, and even if you wear mesh to compensate and be tankier, you are still significantly vulnerable with little upside compared to other melee builds.
This is using the 10% lifesteal gem on weapon with 60% increased healing from armor affixes, the survival is still bad for how exposed the playstyle is.
3- The stagger on gauntlets is abysmal. I can use a 125 focus rune attack like Buster Rift (the 125 focus version of Tremor Wave) aoe and it will not stagger a false remnant in the Crucible, let alone pestilence lv4 mobs with the 50% stagger resistance affix. Meanwhile on any caster build of any element or some curved sword or mace/greataxe/greatsword builds, staggering through the 50% resistance affix is significantly easier.
It seems really odd that all blunt weapons get large stagger values and poise damage while the glass cannon short range melee build dealing blunt damage with fists and kicks has almost nonexistant stagger.
The lack of stagger with short reach and long exposure through long attack chains then leads to lack of ability to control mob groups or stagger bosses to trigger effects like backstab or gear affixes related to staggering or crucible echoes that rely on stagger.
If the archetype is gonna lack meaningful CC and have low reach, then it needs to be compensated with far better self sustain through much better poise and significantly greater damage output to balance the risk vs. reward ratio.
4- The majority of rune attacks involving kicks and punch shockwaves have long windups and no enemy tracking.
This makes rune attacks like flying dragon kick horribly unreliable and not worth using outside a staggered enemy because the windup is such that it will never land most of the follow up kick animations on enemies since enemy AI tends to sidestep and evade or even reposition very frequently while under attack or when attacking themselves. The kick rune attacks require the enemy be completely stationary for a while to land its hits.
Buster Rift is another big offender because it relies on two hits, first the line shockwave aoe followed by a beam line aoe. The beam line aoe has enough delay after the shockwave that it will often whiff non-staggered enemies.
And this is a real issue with the archetype having such low stagger output, because with an inability to stagger reliably, most of its rune attack kit is really low value and unreliable.
5- A lot of these ugly warts with the archetype and its runes/weapons are being covered up by how OP Ring of Determination is as well as % damage stacking. If you stack 20% extra damage from ring of broken promises, with 30% extra rune damage from runic ring, with another 20-40% worth of damage increase affixes on gear (70-90% extra damage done), you can still cheese and one shot enemies through rune attack spam, but this is build agnostic.
Unfortunately, when a lot of this cheese gets patched up (as it should, rune attacks should not be too infrequent but they should also not be spammable; it should take a regular attack chain completed to gain 75-100 focus, so 2 attack chains for one powerful rune attack), the flaws and glaring weaknesses of the archetype will surface.
You won’t be able to burst enemies from ranged safety anymore or get massive life drain from spamming high damage rune attacks, fights will drag out, and you’ll have to do actual combat and boss choreography, where the severe survival gaps and lack of poise and stagger on a mediocre damage build will become an evident handicap.
6- Reconsider the 100% focus lost on focus use and 50% stagger resistance affixes on pestilence. Especially the 100% focus lost. What this affix does is it effectively prohibits you from using either channeled spells or lower cost focus rune attacks because it is not worth using a 50 focus spirit burst that does 1/4 the damage of a Buster Rift but drains all your focus just the same.
Certain runes are also rendered unusable, like Heal Aura immediately getting interrupted as the focus is drained at once in a single tick, and the Channel rune to sacrifice HP for focus has you just waste hp because the focus is completely drained out just as you generate it as it’s considered a focus spell even though it uses health.
It’s just a horrid affix, and it encourages spamming fish food for the focus generation to be able to function against massively tankier and more damaging enemies at pestilence lv4.
. I swear the “boots” look is the best in the game because the legs don’t look all skinny and weird. Works with so many outfits universally.