Way of Mercy Monk Handbook

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Way of Mercy Monk Handbook: DnD 5e Subclass Guide
– RPGBOT
Way of Mercy Monk

Handbook: DnD 5e
Subclass Guide –
RPGBOT
Random Powell September 14, 2022
Way of Mercy Monk Handbook

Introduction
Coming to the game from Tasha’s as something of an
unarmored DPS paladin, Way of Mercy is one of only two
blue-rated Monk subclasses on the site for its incredible
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utility and versatility. It has some tools to improve the
Monk’s core competencies as a Striker, but also gives it
some battlefield control and, iconically, healing and
Support capabilities. Way of Mercy does still suffer from
the MADness that goes with most Monk subclasses, but
what you get for being willing to invest in those abilities is
pretty great.
The flavor of Way of Mercy is definitely strange. They “…

[present] themselves as the faceless bringers of life and
death,” which feels really out of place with what a monastic
tradition is supposed to be. This I can quote more broadly
because it’s from the basic rules, and I really want to
because it’s a hilarious moment showing how WOTC really
shot themselves in the foot:
“Three traditions of monastic pursuit are common in the

monasteries scattered across the multiverse. Most
monasteries practice one tradition exclusively, but a few
honor the three traditions and instruct each monk
according to his or her aptitude and interest. All three
traditions rely on the same basic techniques, diverging as
the student grows more adept. Thus, a monk need choose
a tradition only upon reaching 3rd level.”
So, clearly they didn’t futureproof this section. Regardless,

it just feels very strange that there would be a little
subsection of a typical monastery devoted to wearing a
different flavor of odd clothing and channeling the forces of
life and death rather than something more “normal” like
elements.
Table of Contents
Way of Mercy Monk Handbook Introduction
Disclaimer
Way of Mercy Features
Way of Mercy Ability Scores
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Way of Mercy Races
Way of Mercy Feats
Way of Mercy Weapons
Way of Mercy Armor
Multiclassing
Example Build – Stuck Halfway
Abilities
Race
Background
Skills and Tools
Feats
Levels
Disclaimer
RPGBOT uses the color coding scheme which has
become common among Pathfinder build handbooks,
which is simple to understand and easy to read at a
glance.
Red: Bad, useless options, or options which are

extremely situational. Nearly never useful.
Orange: OK options, or useful options that only
apply in rare circumstances. Useful sometimes.
Green: Good options. Useful often.
Blue: Fantastic options, often essential to the
function of your character. Useful very frequently.
We will not include 3rd-party content, including content

from DMs Guild, in handbooks for official content because
we can’t assume that your game will allow 3rd-party
content or homebrew. We also won’t cover Unearthed
Arcana content because it’s not finalized, and we can’t
guarantee that it will be available to you in your games.
The advice offered below is based on the current State of

the Character Optimization Meta as of when the article
was last updated. Keep in mind that the state of the meta
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periodically changes as new source materials are
released, and the article will be updated accordingly as
time allows.
Way of Mercy Features

3. Implements of Mercy: Insight and Medicine are both
Wisdom-based, which makes them good skills for the
Monk. Unfortunately, Medicine is borderline useless
(although check out some of our suggestions to fix
that), as its sole written function is made obsolete by
the Healer’s Kit. Herbalism Kit does allow you to craft
Potions of Healing, though, which is nice.
You also get a neat mask as a class feature. It doesn’t

do anything. You don’t need it to do anything and
technically you don’t even need to wear it.
3. Hand of Healing: Your Martial Arts die plus your
Wisdom modifier is roughly equivalent to a 1st-level
Cure Wounds. That’s not a ton of healing all at once,
but you get a ton of Ki Points per short rest as you
gain levels, and the action economy around this is
fantastic. This is also a great way to expend your
remaining Ki Points whenever you reach a Short Rest.
Cure Wounds is normally a hard choice in combat

because you’re spending your Action to not damage
your enemies when Healing Word is available, so the
Action Economy makes it hard to justify. But, while you
can use Hand of Healing as an Action, there’s almost
no reason to do so in combat.
Generally you’ll use Hand of Healing during combat as

part of a Flurry of Blows. When you do this, you spend
the Ki Point to use Flurry of Blows, then you can
decide to replace one of the unarmed strikes with
Hand of Healing. As far as I can tell, you can make
this decision at any point so you could make one
attack and see the results before deciding if you want
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to make another attack or heal something.
Since you can move between attacks, I believe that

you can also move between attacking and using Hand
of Healing, so you could Attack, use Flurry of Blows to
heal an ally, then run over to an enemy and attack
them some more.
In many ways, this is like Healing Word, and until your

Ki Pool is fairly large, that’s how you should consider
Hand of Healing: a tiny amount of healing, but enough
to bring a dying ally back into a fight. As you gain more
levels you can afford to use this more often, and
Physician’s Touch allows you to quickly remove some
problematic status conditions.
3. Hand of Harm: One Ki point to automatically deal as
much damage as an unarmed strike is more efficient
than spending a Ki Point to perform a Flurry of Blows
which has a chance to miss. This is also necrotic
damage, which is much less-commonly resisted than
bludgeoning damage (or whatever type your weapon
deals).
Since the damage is “extra damage” added to the

attack, the extra damage die is multiplied, much like
Divine Smite or Sneak Attack, so the most effective
time to use Hand of Harm is when you score a critical
hit.
However, this only works after you hit with an unarmed

strike so if you’re using a weapon (spears are my go-
to, and I recommend them for nearly every monk)
there’s an incentive to fight unarmed even if your
Martial Arts die would deal less damage than a
weapon. Of course, Flurry of Blows and Martial Arts’
Bonus Action attack only allow unarmed strikes, so
there’s always going to be some portion of your
attacks where you can apply this.
Physician’s Touch later improves Hand of Harm to add
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the Poisoned condition, making it an amazing way to
briefly debuff martial enemies without a save.
6. Physician’s Touch: Hand of Healing adds the effect
of Lesser Restoration and can also remove the
Stunned condition. If this was an either/or it would be
fantastic, but you get to both remove conditions and
heal the target.
Hand of Harm adds the ability to make the target

Poisoned with no save. Poisoned is an absolutely
fantastic debuff against most enemies (though
spellcasters who don’t rely on attack rolls can largely
ignore it). If you hit an enemy with an unarmed strike,
you can activate Hand of Harm to deal bonus damage
and make the target poisoned, then, while they’re at
Disadvantage on Ability Checks due to being
Poisoned, you can Shove them prone and/or grapple
them, then make any remaining attacks at Advantage.
If they’re Grappled, they’ll have a hard time escaping
(Disadvantage thanks to Poisoned), so you’re likely to
keep them on the ground until your next turn when you
can drop a full Flurry of Blows on them at Advantage
and if they don’t die you can always hit them with
Hand of Harm again to keep them Poisoned.
11. Flurry of Healing and Harm: This dramatically
reduces the rate at which you spend Ki to activate
Hand of Harm and Hand of Healing. You still need to
spend 1 Ki Point to use Flurry of Blows, but after that
you can use Hand of Harm/Healing for free. You could
heal twice in one turn, heal once and attack (and
hopefully use Hand of Harm), or attack once to see
what happens, then decide to either heal or attempt
another attack.
The wording around how Hand of Healing works here

is somewhat clumsy. It specifies that you can use
Hand of Healing with Flurry of Blows and replace both
attacks without spending Ki. You could already replace
one, but the text is trying to say that you can now
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replace both attacks, but you still don’t need to spend
additional Ki to do so.
Using Hand of Healing twice during a Flurry of Blows

doubles your ability to output healing. Weirdly, this also
means that rather than spending an Action to use
Hand of Healing outside of combat it’s more efficient to
punch the air or attack the darkness, then follow with a
Flurry of Blows and punch yourself and your party until
everyone feels better. You get twice as much healing
per Ki Point by doing this.
17. Hand of Ultimate Mercy: Have a dead party
member? Take a Short Rest to get your Ki Points back
if you need to, then punch them back to life. You only
need 5 Ki Points to use this and you get 17 per Short
or Long Rest at this level so if someone goes down
you likely still have a bunch to spend.
The fact that this only takes an Action is pretty

astounding. It’s similar to Revivify, but lacks an
expensive cost. You could absolutely use this in
combat, and in many cases that’s a good idea. This
doesn’t have the specific text around how mortal
wounds or missing limbs are handled, but I assume it
works like Raise Dead in most respects. The target
notably doesn’t need to be willing to return to life,
either, which raises some interesting ethical questions.
The one serious limitation on this is that you can only

use it once per Long Rest. But, with a 24-hour window
in which it will function after the target’s death, if you
need to raise two people you can raise one, take a
long rest, and raise the other and still have a ton of
time to mess around before you get anywhere near
the 24-hour timer. Of course, if you have three dead
allies you’ll want to go find a cleric.
Way of Mercy Ability Scores
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Str: A dump stat unless you plan on using some form of
Grapple/Shove
Dex: Controls attacks and AC since you can’t wear

armor if you want most features to work.
Con: We’d love more, but we’re too MAD as it is.
Int: Dump
Wis: This powers some class and subclass features
Cha: Dump
Point Buy Standard Array
Str 8 12
Dex 15 15
Con 15 13
Int 8 8
Wis 15 14
Cha 8 10
Way of Mercy Races

MMoM Bugbear has a fascinating interaction. Ordinarily,
you would need to be adjacent to both your target and a
party member at some point to be able to attack and flurry
Hands of Healing in the same turn. Long Limbs will let you
attack something at a short distance, flurry heal your
adjacent ally, and carry on without even provoking an
opportunity attack if you choose to walk away from
something with 5-foot reach.
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Way of Mercy Feats
We’re a MAD class and we already have tons of things to
do with bonus actions. Nothing much different than other
Monks when you finally get around to feats unless you
want to do something really dumb. If you don’t plan on
doing a ton of damage, you can become sort of SAD by
picking up Magic Initiate, grabbing Shillelagh, and using
that on your quarterstaff as the first bonus action every
fight. Then, on future turns (especially once you hit level
11), you bonk something twice with your Wisdom and heal
someone (eventually twice) with Flurry, also using Wisdom.
It means if you do ever have to spend a turn not healing
someone, your Martial Arts and Hand of Harm will suffer
because your unarmed attack is always going to be Dex-
based. But it’s certainly an option.
Way of Mercy Weapons

If you’re not a bugbear but your race gives you a weapon
proficiency and you’re using the Dedicated Weapon
optional class feature, having yours be a whip fixes the
only problem with a whip (low damage) while also letting
you do the same Reach shenanigans I described above for
the Bugbear.
Way of Mercy Armor

Please don’t.
Multiclassing
This section briefly details some obvious and enticing
multiclass options, but doesn’t fully explore the broad
range of multiclassing combinations. For more on
multiclassing, see our Practical Guide to Multiclassing.
A level of Druid would also let you do the Shillelagh
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shenanigans I talked about above while getting you nice
bonus things like Absorb Elements and Healing Word in
case someone’s out of reach of even your massive move
speed. A second level could get you Circle of Stars which
would get you some additional nice spells and the ability to
go into Dragon form to get Reliable Talent on Wisdom
checks.
I’m going to sigh heavily here, but a level in Peace Cleric is

also a fantastic choice if you wanted to be the SAD thing I
discussed. Emboldening Bond will neatly make up for the
fact that your Dex will be 4 points short of where it should
be by giving you an average of +2.5 to hit and it scales
with proficiency bonus so you’ll still get the full progression
of uses per day. This would also get you Bless and
Guidance, two of the best support spells in the game.
Example Build – Stuck Halfway

Halfway between cultures and halfway between the forces
of life and death, this build takes a half-wood elf and
modifies it heavily with Tasha’s rules to make something
capable of putting out great damage and healing using this
subclass.
Abilities
As described above.
Base Increased
Str 8 8
Dex 15 17
Con 15 16
Int 8 8
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Wis 15 16
Cha 8 8
Race
Half-wood elf. We take the Elven Weapon Training
replacement, then further modify that by trading the
longsword proficiency for whip proficiency and trading the
shortbow proficiency for Thieves’ Tools since our high Dex
and Wisdom mean we’re likely the Scout for the party.
Background
Acolyte makes good sense as a being trained in a
monastery, so we take that and trade the skill proficiencies
for Perception and Survival to take advantage of the high
Wisdom. If your DM is going to give you a hard time about
spending 52gp at character creation as a monk though,
take Haunted One, make the same skill trades, and sell
the free kit to fund your equipment.
Skills and Tools

From the class we get Acrobatics and Stealth, Perception
and Survival from the Background, and Thieves’ Tools
proficiency from the race. At level 3 we’ll pick up Insight,
Medicine, and the Herbalism kit, nicely rounding out the
uses of our high Wisdom. For the flavor tool we get from
being a monk, choose leatherworker’s tools so you can
fashion yourself a mask.
Feats
The hybrid feat you take at 4th level is going to be very
dependent on your table. If your table allows flanking or
has some other way of getting easy access to advantage
like a Wolf Totem Barbarian, take Elven Accuracy. If you
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did that, you’re going to be way ahead of the attack roll
curve for the rest of the game, so then levels 8 and 12
increase Wisdom to cap, followed by Gift of the Metallic
Dragon at 16 for more capacity to protect your party, and
finally cap Dex at 19. If you don’t have an easy way to get
advantage, take Slasher instead, shift the dex increase
down to level 8 and everything else one step later.
This example build will assume you don’t have an easy

source of advantage because flanking is an optional rule
(though more of my groups have used it than not).
Levels
Level Feat(s) and Notes and Tactics
Features
1 Unarmored At this level we’re basically just a

Defense monk, but one that can use a
longbow. Seeing as longbow
Martial Arts DPR is 5 whereas a quarterstaff
bonk and martial arts bonus
action is only 8, and seeing as
we only have 11 hitpoints and an
AC of 16, we should stay away
from melee for now.
2 Ki We now pick our whip as a

dedicated weapon, allowing us to
Dedicated attack with it and trigger Flurry of
Weapon Blows if we want to do a bunch
of damage in a turn. We only get
Unarmored 2 ki per short rest at this level, so
Movement think carefully about where you
want to spend them. Remember
that we have reach if we’re only
attacking with the whip in a turn,
so we don’t need to get into
range unless we want the burst
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damage. With this also being the
level you get faster, we’ll be able
to kite most enemies if you want
to go that route.
3 Implements Implements of Mercy is nice to

of Mercy make healing potions in
downtime and give us some
Hand of extra skills to use our high
Healing wisdom.
Hand of Hand of Healing is the big thing

Harm here though. Getting to spend a
ki point to Healing Word and
Deflect punch somebody is really good.
Missiles Like I said above, we should
never do this as an Action and
just always use it as part of
Flurry.
If you instead really want

something to die right now, you
could attack, flurry, and drop a
Hand of Harm for an average of
22 damage. That burns through
2 of our 3 ki per rest in one turn,
but it’s a lot of damage at this
level.
Deflect Missiles is also present.
4 Slasher Slasher is the rude present we

(Dex) deliver when we whip something
scary from 10 feet away and then
Slow Fall run 30 more feet to something
much less scary that you can
Flurry down in one turn. We’re
still no Defender by any means,
but we can absolutely help our
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battlefield controller by making
something less mobile.
If you’re instead taking Elven

Accuracy at this level, absolutely
heal when needed, but try to
save a ki point or two for when
you crit. At next level we get
Extra Attack which, combined
with Flurry and Elven Accuracy,
gives us a 46% chance to crit on
a given turn. When you do, apply
Hand of Harm for double
damage dice.
Slow Fall is also present.
5 Extra Attack This is a big level for us, bigger

even than most martials. Not
Stunning only do we get Extra Attack, but
Strike our damage die goes up a step,
which we can conceivably roll
Martial Arts five times in a turn.
die d4 -> d6
Stunning Strike is incredible in a
fight against something you don’t
expect to have great Con saves.
The fact that Stunned provides
Advantage to attackers is almost
good enough for me to
recommend Elven Accuracy
anyway, but, since Con saves
are statistically the highest
starting at CR 2 and continuing
for the rest of the game, it’s a
hard sell to base an entire build
off of it.
6 Ki- Our hands will enjoy being
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Empowered magical weapons going forward.
Strikes
The real boon here is Physician’s
Physician’s Touch. We talked about it at
Touch length above and covered it
pretty well, so I’ll just remind you
that we can whip the big scary
thing at range to apply the
Slasher debuff, walk 30 feet,
whip something once and Flurry
it once for damage, then walk
another 15 feet to our wounded
party member and heal them and
remove Stunned on them all in
one turn. Physician’s Touch is
notably one of the only ways in
5e to remove the Stunned
condition.
7 Evasion Neither of these contribute to our

tactics, but they’re nice defenses.
Stillness of
Mind
8 Dex 18 -> 20 Cap Dex for the best possible

attack rolls and an AC matching
full plate.
9 Unarmored Remember Prince of Persia: Two

Movement Thrones where you could wall
Improvement run for 20 feet before jumping off
and grabbing a crossbar with
your whipsword and flying
forward? Yeah. We can do that
now.
10 Purity of Now we’re immune to the

Body disease we’ve been able to cure
ourselves of with an action since
6th level anyway.
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11 Flurry of Whew what another great level.
Healing and Spend one ki point to
Harm unstun/stand up from dying two
people in one turn. Or be more
Martial Arts efficient with your Ki when you’re
die d6 -> d8 doing Hand of Harm for damage.
We can still only do that ability
once per turn, but now we can
afford to be a little more liberal in
our usage of Stunning Strike to
aim to give ourselves advantage
before we do.
12 Wisdom 16 - Up that AC. Also the DC of our

> 18 Stunning Strike and our bonus
for Hands of Healing and Harm.
Those put together let us stay

safe and put out the hurt when
we’re spoilin for a fight.
13 Tongue of The all important question when

the Sun and we hit level 13 as a Monk.
Moon
14 Diamond This is one of the best defensive

Soul features in the game. Remember
that both halves of the ability
don’t specify what kinds of
saves, which means they apply
to Death Saves too. Hang out
near a Paladin with a Charisma
of 18 and we can’t fail on
anything but a 1.
15 Timeless Similarly to level 13, this doesn’t

Body affect a character at all except in
rare cases when someone is
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trying to siege us all by
ourselves.
16 Wisdom 18 - We cap our Wisdom. We now

> 20 match a character in full plate
with a shield and your Stunning
Strike DC is as high as a full
caster’s spells are without magic
items. You also have 16 ki points
per rest by now so you should
probably just try to stun things
every round.
17 Hand of This is like that scene from Dr.

Ultimate Strange except in reverse where
Mercy we punch the soul back into
people.
Martial Arts
die d8 ->
d10
18 Empty Body Since this isn’t the spell

Invisibility but the condition, it
won’t break on attacks. We can’t
use this every fight with it costing
4 ki, but we can probably use it
every other fight and still have all
the ki we need to do the rest of
our tricks.
19 Gift of the Finally, a reaction that helps our

Metallic party instead of just us. It can
Dragon also help us, but that’s not really
the point of the build. We also get
a free Cure Wounds in case
you’ve lost all your d4s but have
a d8 laying around.
20 Perfect Self Say, you know what costs 4 ki?

Empty Body. If a fight starts you
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weren’t prepared for, just go
invisible and be a d10-damage
and move-speed-penalty
dispensing annoyance.
About The Author

Random
Random Powell
Powell
Random Powell. RPGBOT.Podcast co-
host and RPGBOT contributing author.
Random started playing D&D around
2003 and met Tyler just a couple years
later. Thousands of hours of play and theorycrafting later
(much of it with Tyler), he was grateful to be offered an
outlet to exorcise some of the head full of characters and
imagined arguments with DMs about how semantics relate
to spell effects.
RPGBOT@RPGBOT.net | Advertise with RPGBOT | Support us on Patreon | © RPGBOT.
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Home  Dungeons And Dragons 5th Edition – RPGBOT

Way of Mercy Monk

The flavor of Way of Mercy is definitely strange. They “…

“Three traditions of monastic pursuit are common in the

So, clearly they didn’t futureproof this section. Regardless,

Red: Bad, useless options, or options which are

We will not include 3rd-party content, including content

The advice offered below is based on the current State of

Way of Mercy Features

You also get a neat mask as a class feature. It doesn’t

Cure Wounds is normally a hard choice in combat

Generally you’ll use Hand of Healing during combat as

Since you can move between attacks, I believe that

In many ways, this is like Healing Word, and until your

Since the damage is “extra damage” added to the

However, this only works after you hit with an unarmed

Physician’s Touch later improves Hand of Harm to add

Hand of Harm adds the ability to make the target

The wording around how Hand of Healing works here

Using Hand of Healing twice during a Flurry of Blows

The fact that this only takes an Action is pretty

The one serious limitation on this is that you can only

Way of Mercy Ability Scores

Dex: Controls attacks and AC since you can’t wear

Con: We’d love more, but we’re too MAD as it is.

Wis: This powers some class and subclass features

Point Buy Standard Array

Way of Mercy Races

Way of Mercy Weapons

Way of Mercy Armor

A level of Druid would also let you do the Shillelagh

I’m going to sigh heavily here, but a level in Peace Cleric is

Example Build – Stuck Halfway

Skills and Tools

This example build will assume you don’t have an easy

1 Unarmored At this level we’re basically just a

2 Ki We now pick our whip as a

3 Implements Implements of Mercy is nice to

Hand of Hand of Healing is the big thing

If you instead really want

Deflect Missiles is also present.

4 Slasher Slasher is the rude present we

If you’re instead taking Elven

Slow Fall is also present.

5 Extra Attack This is a big level for us, bigger

6 Ki- Our hands will enjoy being

7 Evasion Neither of these contribute to our