Talk:Way of the Leech (5e Subclass)

This subclass is strong, but I tried to manage the abilities to prevent it from being overpowered.

• First, the Path of the Leech damage is dealt at the end of the opponent's turn. This grants the opponent a chance to escape from the grapple, or to deal damage on its turn prior to the Leech's temporary hit point gain.
• Second, it doesn't grant Expertise, which is a necessary ability to really dominate opponents using your Acrobatics (Dexterity) score. That means the player (to reach the subclass' heights) needs to take a dip into Rogue, which reduces their Monk level scaling on Leech damage.
• Third, while the class has a way to regain ki, it's pretty slow, and not totally reliable. On top of this, most of their abilities cost ki to use; without careful management, their ki spending will pretty easily outstrip their ki recovery. The nature of their ki recovery also helps to balance grappling as a feature. Grappling is normally strong against single, powerful enemies, but weak against small, numerous enemies. However, because the Leech regains ki on a knockout, they are free to spend more ki against small, numerous enemies, as they are likely to regain a significant amount through knock-outs; against single, powerful enemies, they need to be more careful about ki usage, since there's only one opponent to knock out in the first place. This way, the Leech is always very useful, but never (I hope) overpowered.

In case it's unclear, this subclass takes inspiration from the Hungry Ghost archetype in Pathfinder, repurposing some of its abilities to orient them around grappling (which I think is thematically appropriate). --Aburaishi (talk) 15:51, 8 September 2018 (MDT)

Fair point, post from 3 years ago. Bewildering Throw is pretty weird to have(you want to be grappling people, why would you move them away?), so I might mix in acrobatics expertise with something else there. Good catch. --SwankyPants (talk) 12:06, 11 April 2021 (MDT)