The stalwart slayers, Monks serve as the disciplined brawlers of BG3. These martial disciples can deal massive single-target damage but require targeted builds to ensure survival alongside high damage. The best feats can make a Monk feel a lot more impactful but need to be taken carefully.
Monks are Dexterity and Wisdom-based brawlers who prefer to use their bodies over equipment. This makes them not very reliant on gear. Instead, they rely on class abilities and good stats to shine on the battlefield.
Best feat options for a Monk in BG3
The very best feat in BG3 for a Monk is Ability Score Increase for Dexterity, Wisdom, or Constitution. Monks are very reliant on stats in BG3, making Ability Score Increase the most common option for them. But for non-boring feats, the best Monk feats involve improving their defenses or ensuring their damage skyrockets.
We highly recommend getting to 20 Dexterity—either through Ability Score Increases, equipment, Ethel’s Hair, or the Mirror of Loss—before considering a feat. Improving Wisdom is usually worth considering, too.
For non-Ability Score Increase options, however, there aren’t too many choices that actively function properly. Here are some of our favorites.
5) Mage Slayer
Mage Slayer is a strange feat, more familiar on a Fighter than a Monk, but it still serves a unique purpose. It offers three distinct benefits for the lucky soul who takes it: you gain an advantage against spells from a spellcaster in melee range, can make attacks of opportunity against targets who cast a spell, and give a disadvantage on concentration Saving Throws to targets you hit.
Mage Slayer is a troubled feat in BG3. Most enemies play around it by running from you, allowing you to hit them but often before they cast the spell. There are a few methods to disrupt concentration guaranteed in BG3, from blinding to knocking prone, so the concentration part can be seen as a weakness.
But when it works, Mage Slayer can trivialize some of the most annoying encounters in BG3. By locking down movement with allies or knocking a target prone with Flurry of Blows, the Monk is capable of making a caster fear for their life without spending Ki Points on Stunning Fist. Flurry is an excellent way to turn off concentration as well, making the Monk a great answer to Darkness spammers in the late game.
This is far from the best feat for Monks, but it is a consistently good one that turns the Monk into a dangerous anti-caster—with some help. If you have no better solutions to casters, you might as well be the one that hits them really hard.
4) Lucky
Lucky is a fascinating feat that grants a pool of three additional d20 rerolls per day. In BG3 and DnD 5E, the ability to roll your d20 again can be a big difference-maker. Lucky serves as both a defensive and aggressive option, allowing the player to reroll attack rolls, saving throws, and ability checks.
Lucky is a restrictive feat. Out of all of the d20 rolls a character does in a standard day, rerolling three of them might not seem that important. Since the Monk rolls dozens of dice each fight—let alone how many they roll per day—three additional helping hands aren’t exactly going to save you from every mistake you make.
Lucky is best used in the late game for two reasons: health insurance and emergency damage. By rerolling a failed saving throw against devastating magic like Hold Person or Dominate Monster, the Monk goes from being a huge liability and free target to a continuously threatening force on the battlefield. That wouldn’t always be possible without Lucky’s reaction, and you can use Lucky to even dodge critical hits or big, damaging idiots whose goal is to cave the Monk’s skull in before they can move.
Lucky can be used aggressively for the Monk, but this shouldn’t be a commonplace use. Lucky’s three dice per day are usually not great for landing individual punches. But if a boss is just about to die and a reroll can be the difference between them getting a turn or not, maybe a bit of luck is in order.
This is far from the strongest feat a Monk can take, but it’s a solid defensive option for a class that would really prefer to not get paralyzed.
3) Savage Attacker
Savage Attacker rolls the Monk’s damage dice twice and takes the better result for their unarmed and weapon attacks. For the Way of the Open Hand Monk, this is a great way to ensure the three to four damage dice you roll per punch are dealing properly high damage.
Monks live and die by the amount of damage they can deal to a target during a fight. Taking someone out quickly is as good as having a high amount of defensive stats since your foes can’t hurt you if they’re dead.
Typically, Savage Attacker is rerolling between four and 12 dice per round, depending on your equipment, Haste, and build path. That’s well worth considering as low rolls on your d8 fists, d4 elemental damage, and any bonus damage from gauntlets can be the difference maker. Don’t be surprised if this feat’s rerolls get you upwards of 10 damage per punch in specific situations.
As usual, though, reroll feats are a double-sided blade. You could just as easily roll low twice. And the Monk has a feat option that gives them such high modifiers that they often don’t need to rely on the dice of their fists to kill targets. It’s best to stick with the higher-end options that the class can offer.
2) Tough
Tough is a simple feat that improves your health by two per level. The Monk is a medium-health class, meaning it can go down to chip damage relatively easily. Tough is a feat that essentially boosts your Constitution by plus-four, instead of the plus-two that Ability Score Increase would give.
You don’t get a better Constitution Saving Throw through this method. But the Monk gets excellent saving throws through Corellon’s Grace, making your saving throws less at-risk than most other classes. Instead, you can get 24 bonus health by level 12, giving your Monk a good chance to survive an extra hit or two during late-game fights.
That being said, 24 health isn’t going to make your Monk a Barbarian in terms of durability. The best you can hope for from Tough is a small increase in your day-to-day ability to soak a hit. BG3 enemies truck through low-health allies, making a myriad of defensive options required to survive. Tough can be a good building block or foundation tool, but it doesn’t save the Monk’s life by itself.
1) Tavern Brawler
Tavern Brawler is by far the strongest feat for a Monk in BG3. That’s because it’s a feat that grants a plus-one to either Strength or Constitution. Then, it allows the Monk to add their Strength Modifier to unarmed attacks and damage rolls, as well as the attack and damage rolls of improvised weapons. This can stack with either Strength or Dexterity, whichever is higher.
Tavern Brawler was changed significantly from its 5E roots. It used to be helpful for grappling, and it now will turn your Monk into an intercontinental missile. Through the various Strength-boosting methods of BG3, this feat can provide the Monk upwards of plus-seven to attack and damage rolls. And remember, Monks are more than capable of swinging multiple times a round. This feat can easily add upwards of 70 damage to an optimized build and make it 35 percent more likely to hit each punch.
The only problem with Tavern Brawler is build prerequisites. Monks are stretched thin as is between Dexterity, Constitution, and Wisdom. So, asking them to dedicate 20 of their stat points to Strength can be a fool’s errand. No matter what, the Monk will suffer slightly from stat fatigue with Tavern Brawler.
But this can be covered up, either by getting armor or by accepting the Monk will have low Constitution until the late game. Gear, such as the House of Hope’s Gauntlets of Ogre Power or the Amulet of Greater Health, can easily solve Ability Score issues and turn your Monk into a massive problem for any enemy. And the damage the Monk can pump out will easily make up for any issues arising from lower durability. Use Greater Invisibility, Mirror Image, or Elixirs of Bloodlust and watch as the Monk turns every single Absolute Worshiper into gelatin.
