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The Monk is a melee damage class and the game's premier puller. The official archetype phrase is Perfected Weapon. Feign death is the cornerstone of both its pulling and its escapes, and the class is described as having an indifference to vertical terrain, which in practice means it can take routes other classes cannot.

Field	Detail
Archetype	Perfected Weapon
Roles	Melee DPS, Puller
Playable races	Deep Elf, Human, Ogre
Armor and weapons	Leather armor. Fights with bare fists and kicks, fist weapons, or staves.
Rework status	Detailed rework published and shipped to the closed beta servers in update 0.27.0.0 on August 4 2026

Identity and role

A Monk off-tanks through avoidance rather than mitigation, relying on dodges and blocks, and it is explicitly limited in its taunt toolkit, so it holds a mob by outlasting it rather than by demanding its attention. Stances enhance damage, avoidance or speed on shared cooldowns, disciplines give long-cooldown bursts of offense or near-invulnerability, and the class can mend its own wounds.

The rework expanded the shared cooldown system so that players make genuine decisions during a fight rather than settling into a fixed rotation, pivoted the class theme away from elemental flavour toward Monk-specific lore, and reduced the buffs a Monk hands to other players. Way of the Water was removed along with its associated group heal.

Playable races

The Monk is open to only three races: Deep Elf, Human and Ogre. That is the shortest race list of any class.

Every race on that list is in the set playable when the game enters Early Access on October 1 2026.

Styles

The four Way of stances were remapped to three Styles. Each Style changes what Celestial Strike and Celestial Fury do, so the Style choice reaches into your melee abilities rather than sitting on top of them.

Style	Base effect	Interaction
Sun Style	Increases Offense.	Celestial Strike reverberates through to your target's soul, dealing Magic Damage after a few seconds.
Moon Style	Increases Dodge and Block.	Celestial Fury further increases Block and reduces Physical Damage received.
Wind Style	Increases Movement Speed.	Celestial Fury grants a chance to strike a second time on melee attacks.

Feign death and pulling

The rework fixed a long-standing bug that prevented any chance of re-aggroing mobs after standing up from a feign. Re-aggro after a feign is now possible, but the chance of it happening has been massively reduced. Two related changes came with it: damaged NPCs loiter much longer than untouched ones after a successful feign, and maximum loiter times were reduced overall.

Pulling ability	Effect
Pinning Throw	An upgraded Throw that immobilises, allowing you to stagger one of a pack a bit behind the rest.
Double-Handed Strike	Knockback plus a Movement Speed decrease.

Pulling is a core activity rather than a niche one, because the game is built around camping and pulling in shared zones rather than running instanced dungeons. See Gameplay and Combat.

Melee abilities

Ability	Effect
Round Kick	Scales with Dexterity. Has a chance to reset the Celestial Strike and Hundred Fists cooldowns.
Celestial Strike	Grants Celestial Fury and has a chance to activate Celestial Vitality. Enhanced by your active Style, and it now also procs Celestial Vitality if the opponent's Chakra is fractured.
Hundred Fists	Deals Weapon Ratio Damage four times, with a chance to stun if the target is off balance. Shares a cooldown with Celestial Strike and is reset by Round Kick.
Quivering Palm	Three escalating strikes. The first knocks the target off balance, the second blocks their Chi and reduces the Physical Damage they deal, and the third fractures their Chakra and increases the Physical Damage they receive.
Sweeping Kick	Stuns, and now also knocks opponents off balance.
Disarming Strike	Retained.
Flying Kick	A gap closer that scales with Dexterity.
Fleet of Foot	A short-duration Movement Speed increase.

Off balance is a cross-class state. A Fighter can knock a target off balance with Feint, which sets up the Monk's Hundred Fists stun, so the two classes interlock without coordinating anything more complicated than ability order.

Body Mastery

You can only have one body alteration ability active at a time, which makes these a choice about what problem you expect to face rather than a stack of passives.

Ability	Effect
Spirit Sustenance	Less food and drink consumption.
Slow Breathing	Less air consumption underwater.
Falling Petal	Reduces gravity, compounding with your Safe Fall skill.
Ascendant Body	All three at once, at the highest levels of mastery.

Cooldowns

Cooldown	Effect
Mend	Retained. Heals your own wounds.
Stone Stance	Retained.
Perfect Focus	Melee attacks temporarily land as Critical Hits.
Cyclone Staff	Channelled, and requires a two-handed staff. Greatly increases Block chance and deals Weapon Ratio Damage on each successful block.
Iron Fists	Temporarily nullifies Damage Shield effects.
Ethereal Body	Increases Agility and Dodge chance.

Playing a Monk in a group

Class details below come from the ability rework that rolled onto the closed beta servers through 2026. The developers state plainly that there is a high probability some aspects will change before they reach the beta servers, so treat specific ability behaviour as a snapshot of the beta build rather than a settled launch state.

The Monk is the class a group asks to bring the next pull, and the class that survives the pull that goes wrong. It is also one of the two damage benchmarks the team named when setting the Fighter's damage target, which puts it near the top of the melee damage order. Being able to feign, stand up and walk away is worth more in a game where death leaves your items on your corpse: see Death Penalty and Items and Equipment. See also Classes, Grouping and Travel.

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