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 | |
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.