Monk Wizard Multiclass Guide for Dungeons and Dragons 5e

Speed, you are Speed Monks are the pinnacles of discipline and martial technique that test the limits of humanoid capability. Wizards are the studious researchers of universal truths and the masters of arcane secrets. Put them together and you get a jumbled mess BUT with a bit of work we can turn that mess into a whirling ball of knives that moves faster than humanly possible. Grab your monk weapons and your spellbook as we go through everything you need to know.
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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Monks are the pinnacle of discipline and martial technique that
test the limits of humanoid capacity. Wizards are the studious
researchers of universal truths and the masters of Arcane's secrets.
You put them together and you get a jumbled mess.
But with a bit of work, we can turn that
mess into a whirling ball of knives that moves faster
than humanly possible. So if any of that speaks to you,

(00:21):
stick around for today's multi class video. Monk levels won't
add much to a wizard's spell casting, but a bit
of wizardry can be a huge boost to running fast
and punching people in the face. You basically run a
monk wizard build to run faster than Watsei would ever

(00:42):
have thought a player could possibly run. With a bit
of effort, we can maintain some good DPS while essentially
becoming immune to melee attacks unless our target can also
run like the wind. The ability split is going to
be a bit upsetting, but we can stack a few
wizard and monk abilities together for a truly impressive ac
meaning that even when facing ranged opponents will be nigh
impossible to hit. Now, of course, there are some downsides.

(01:05):
The biggest issue with a Wizard Monk build is the
ability score split. Like I just mentioned, monks already really
need three scores Dexterity, constitution, and wisdom. Wizards add intelligence
into the mix, and there just won't be enough points
to spare to get all of our scores as high
as we would really like them. There's a few rules
interactions that are a bit unintuitive in a way that

(01:27):
spell attacks interact with monk features like martial arts. We
can work through these and still make these class combinations work,
but you'll need to be a bit on top of
using the character correctly to play without breaking rules or technicalities. Finally,
as with any other multi class character, we're going to
be reaching our mid tier class options a little bit
later and not reaching twentieth level capstone features at all.

(01:49):
This build isn't too bad in this regard, but still
expect to have a couple awkward early levels where the
synergies haven't really clicked yet and you lag behind your
other party members in power. In terms of when the
Monk Wizard actually does start to kick in, we have
a couple variations to talk about here today, but each
of our builds start with a core of two monk
levels and two wizard levels. This means our monk wizard

(02:09):
kicks in around fourth character level, with some additional stuff
down the line. So let's get into the class features.
We've got the one core bill here that depends heavily
on several core class features. So we're going to go
through each of the special abilities that will factor into
it and at least comment on the features that provide
us with a bonus. Starting with the significant monk features,

(02:30):
we have unarmored defense. Monks get an AC equal to
ten plus their dexterity mod plus their wisdom mod so
long as they're not wearing armor. Wizards are already known
for not wearing armor, so this is a pretty easy
synergy so long as we can make sure we have
a decent dexterity and wisdom. And then we have martial
arts and this is the core defining monk ability that
improves our unarmed strikes and allows us to make an

(02:52):
unarmed strike as a bonus action. Remember that this is
different from flurry of blows and it's basically the default
free punch that we can make without spending key or
any other resource. The monk unarmed strike damage die is
a one D four instead of just a measly one,
and it improves with monk levels to a D six,
a D eight, and eventually a D ten. Next, we

(03:13):
have key and these are your mystical resources that you
spend to fuel most of the monk's abilities. Technically you
gain a number of key points as shown on a table,
but it's basically equal to your monk levels starting at
second and starting at second we get three abilities we
can spend these monk points on, starting with Fluri of blows.
This is the one we'll be using most often, and
it works exactly like our martial arts bonus action attack.

(03:35):
But if we spend a key point for Fluri of blows,
we make two extra unarmed strike attacks. Instead. There's patient defense,
which lets us dodge a bonus action at the cost
of one key point, which is situational but extremely useful
in those situations. And finally, step of the wind, which
lets us dash or disengage as a bonus action for
one key and also doubles our jumping distance for the turn.

(03:56):
Step of the wind for a free dash is one
of the ways we can get to that ludicrous speed
I was mentioning earlier. And then we have unarmored defense.
Very simply, monks get two move faster when you first
gain the future with your second monk level. It's ten
extra feet of movement, and it improves to fifteen feet
at six level, twenty feet at tenth level, twenty five
feet at fourteenth level, and thirty feet at eighteenth level.

(04:18):
Just the ten extra feet is a huge bonus to
speed on its own, but you'll see just how high
we can stack that as we go on. And then
we have dedicated weapon in the Optional rules, Monk's got
this new second level feature that lets them turn any
weapon into a monk weapon, so long as it doesn't
have the heavy or special weapon properties. We won't get
any particular use out of this, but if we happen

(04:38):
to find a particularly nice magic weapon that isn't technically
a monk weapon, we can still make use out of it.
And then, also gained from the Optional Rules, we have
key fueled attack. Monks gain this ability at third level
to spend a key point not on unarmed strikes, but
on another attack with a monk weapon. Usually we're going
to be better off with a flurry of blows instead,
but there are some situations where one bigger hit will

(05:01):
be better than two little ones. And then we have
deflect missiles. Starting at third level, we can use a
reaction to reduce the damage taken by a projectile by
one D ten plus your monk level plus your Dexterity modifier.
You only have the one reaction, but it's incredibly handy
to essentially negate the odd arrow that flies your way,
especially since we plan on being an unreachable melee character.

(05:23):
And then with quick healing gained at fourth level, you
can spend two key points to heal a number of
hit points equal to a roll of your martial Arts
die plus your proficiency bonus. It's not a huge amount
of healing for the cost, but you regain key on
a short rest and that healing can come in very handy.
And then at fifth level we have focused aim and
with this combatibility, you can increase your attack roll by
plus two for every key point you spend up to

(05:46):
a max of plus six. This means every time you're
pretty sure you were close to hitting, you can bump
it up after the roll to push through and hit.
And then at fifth level we gain extra attack. This
means that we can make two attacks with our primary
weapon and make a bonus ad unarmed attack using martial
arts or with a key point. A flurry of blows
gives us a total of four attacks, two with our

(06:06):
primary weapon and two unarmed strikes, and then also gained
At fifth level, we have Stunning Strike, and with Stunning Strike,
our fist functions like a sort of save or sucks
spell at the cost of a key point when we
land a hit. If they fail to save, they'll be
stunned until the end of their next turn. Stunned is
a pretty nasty condition in five E and should usually
spell doom for whatever you manage to hit with it.

(06:27):
And then with our monastic tradition, our core build doesn't
need the Monk subclass at all, but it can be
enhanced by one. We'll go into the variations of the
build we can accomplish using different Monk archetypes later mainly
using their abilities. At level three and then gained at
seventh level, we have evasion and this lets us take
half damage from failed deck saves and no damage from
past deck saves. And I'm pretty sure I don't have

(06:49):
to tell you how useful that can be. And now
moving on to our significant wizard features, We of course
have spell casting. We're going for a martial build with
a bit of the arcane spice, so we're not going
to make us use of most of the wizard's massive
spell list and will instead be focusing on just a
few spells at the early spell levels. Notably, we're going
to be taking advantage of the frankly Broken Sword, Cantrips,

(07:10):
Booming Blade, and Green Flame Blade, and we're going to
get even more speed using the spell long Strider. And
then with arcane recovery, a somewhat underplayed ability unique to wizards,
once per short rest, you can regain some expanded spell slots.
For us, this will essentially just amount to an extra
casting of long Strider, and then we have arcane traditions.
Wizards pick up their archetype at second level, with most

(07:33):
options providing a unique ability alongside a specialization in a
specific spell school. For us, there is only one option,
and that's Blade Singer. Blade Singer lets us enter a
blade song using a bonus action which lasts for one minute.
While in this blade song we get to add our
intelligence to our ac which stacks with unarmed defense, we
get yet another ten feet of extra movement speed, advantage

(07:56):
on acrobatics checks, and a bonus to concentration checks equal
to our intelligence modifier. You get a number of uses
equal to your proficiency bonus as well. And now to
talk ability scores. With this class combination, we're in a
pretty weird and tough ability score spot since we care
about four of them. However, since we're not planning on
using our Wizard spell casting for actual damage, we really

(08:17):
only need the minimum ability scores for Wizard and can
mostly play it off like a normal monk. Our primary
ability scores should be Dexterity since it factors not only
into AC but also our attack roles, and it should
be the main place for all of our ability score improvements.
Our second highest score should be Wisdom since it factors
into our AC and while it doesn't directly affect our attacks,

(08:38):
it will contribute to many of our important monk features.
After that, we need to make sure we meet at
least the minimum intelligence score for multi classing with Wizard,
which is thirteen. However, I recommend spending the point to
push that up to fourteen since that'll increase our AC
during our blade songs. And finally, any points we have
left over should go into constitution, since while we're going

(08:59):
to try and not to get hit, it'll still be
nice to have a little buffer there. I'd also recommend
going with a human lineage for this build. By putting
one point into both wisdom and dexterity, we can get
the starting ability scores up to where we need them
to be with a strength of eight, a dexterity of sixteen,
a constitution of ten, a wisdom of sixteen, an intelligence
of fourteen, and a charisma of eight. And if you

(09:20):
don't want to go with the human you can, of
course go with a TOBACSI. They're a pretty a great
option and they have the improved speed and their natural clause,
so that actually, hmm, that's pretty awesome. Maybe go with Tobasi.
I'm officially recommending Tobacsi. And when it comes to equipment,
this is actually pretty simple since we don't really have
any armor proficiencies or anything to really worry about in

(09:42):
terms of a shield. If you maxed out dexterity and
sort of ignored wisdom, you can also consider making use
of mage armour, which may end up being a higher
AC and still doesn't count as wearing armor. For all
of our monk features. For weaponry, we need to stick
to one handed and specifically we want to use things
that can count as monk weapons, which is mostly simple
weapons and a sparse selection of martial weapons. I'd probably

(10:04):
recommend putting a short sword in each hand and just
keeping a spell casting focus on your person rather than
in your hand, since most of our proper spell casting
will happen outside of combat. And when it comes to
which class you should start with, the short answer is
start with Monk. We don't gain any proficiencies at all
when we multi class in Wizard, but with our starting
ability scores, we'll be fine with Monk, but an absolutely

(10:26):
terrible Wizard. Now let's take a moment to talk about
Monk wizard feats, as there are some tempting options here.
Mobile is pretty simple and provides us with a few
pretty good bonuses. We get an additional ten feet of
movement if we need to push our speed up for
any more reason. Whenever we dash, we can ignore difficult
to rain. If we target somebody with a melee attack,
they can't make attacks of opportunity against us for the

(10:48):
rest of our turn. And every bit of this is
amazing for a little little speed demon guy that we're
building here. The extra ten feet should be self explanatory,
given us even more movement. Dashing is only something we'll
need to do if the enemy also has something really serious,
but this also allows us to overcome what would be
one of the build's weaknesses in difficult ter rain. Finally,

(11:10):
the crown jewl that makes everything work here is ignoring
opportunity attacks. Unless the enemies are stacked up in such
a way that you can't single one out, we'll always
be able to avoid repercussions when we bolt in and
out of combat. Not to briefly touch upon monk wizard spells,
We honestly won't be spell casting that much, but as
with many Arcane Marshall builds, we're going to take advantage
of the sword cantrips, namely Booming Blade and Green Flame Blade.

(11:33):
I'm lumping these two together because they're functionally similar, and
we're going to be abusing the heck out of both
of them a lot. Both of these cantrips use weapon
attacks as part of casting the spell. This means we're
stacking the extra damage these cantrips do on top of
whatever damage we do with our melee attack. Note that
this counts as casting a spell rather than taking the

(11:53):
attack action, which is unfortunate because both Martial Arts and
Flurry of Blows only trigger when we take the attack
action and make an attack. However, there are going to
be many turns where we need to use our bonus
action for something else, like activating our Blade song or
dashing to reach the target. On those occasions, these cantrips
allow us to essentially make up for the lost damage.

(12:16):
As for the actual effects of these spells, when you
hit with green Flame, you deal extra fire damage to
another target adjacent to them, and when you hit with
the Booming Blade, you force the target to stay still
on their next turn or take one D eight thunder
damage if they move. Both spells improve drastically at fifth level,
with green Flame in particular, adding one D eight fire
spell to both the initial target of your attack and

(12:38):
also two extra adjacent targets or excuse me, one adjacent target. Now,
with all that out of the way, let's get into
the Monk Wizard multi class build. Now. Remember we need
two Monk levels and two wizard levels. Selecting the Blade
Singer Wizard archetype. Our starting class needs to be variant
human and select the mobile feet. If your DM doesn't

(12:58):
allow variant humans, or if you want to be somewhat
cooler and more original than that, we can instead spend
our fourth level ability score increase to pick up mobile.
In any sort of dungeon diving situation, or any scenario
you think might turn into combat, you'll want the Long
Strider's spell cast on yourself. Worst case scenario. It's only
an action to cast, so you can just start combat
off with it. Finally, we just need a couple of

(13:19):
regular old short swords in each hand. And so how
does this build work well at the start of combat
or right before if you've got the drop on them.
We use a bonus action to start our blade song,
the final ingredient in our recipe for ultimate speed, we
will have thirty feet of base movement, ten feet of
movement from the Monk's unarmoured defense, ten feet of movement
from the Long Strider spell, ten feet of movement from

(13:41):
the mobile feet, and ten feet of movement from our
Blade song without dashing or doing anything else. We've now
accomplished seventy feet of base movement, which is frankly quite nuts.
Seventy feet is a sort of magic number because it
allows us to move thirty five feet towards an enemy
and thirty five feet away in the same turn. This
means for most at least humanoid enemies, we can run up,

(14:04):
attack them, and then get to a distance that they
can't even dream of getting within melee range of thanks
to the mobile feet. The target of our attacks also
can't make attacks of opportunity against us, and we can
essentially make runs at them every turn until they die.
If seventy feet isn't enough as a monk, we can
dash as a bonus action just by spending a key point,
which means we can run a lightning fast one hundred

(14:26):
and forty feet in a single turn while still using
an attack action. Might I add as for actually dealing damage.
On turns where just our movement can reach our target
and get away from them, we can make our short
sort attack and choose between making another one using our
other short sword, or spending a key point for a
flurry of blows. You don't need a free hand to

(14:47):
make an unarmed strike, by the way, For situations where
we need to use our bonus action, either for dashing
or activating our blades Song, we can use our action
to instead cast green flame blade or booming blade through
our soord attack, essentially making up for the lost attacks. Lastly,
if they have range or somehow managed to catch up
to you, your AC should be pretty healthy thanks to

(15:09):
unarmoured defense. With plus three in wisdom and Constitution, we'll
have a base AC of sixteen, but thanks to blade
Song adding our intelligence hopefully eight plus two, we get
a lovely eighteen AC and as one final fallback deflect
missiles can catch the odd arrow that manages to find you.
Now that we've established the core of the build, we
can get into some variant pass that you can take

(15:30):
as you advance in levels. First, we have monk Ambulance.
This one is pretty simple. By taking the Way of Mercy,
we take our speed demon and turn them into a
one man healthcare delivery system. The Way of Mercy provides
the ability to turn our key points into healing, not
a ton, but enough to pop somebody back from zero,
certainly with a touch. Normally, the big limitation here is

(15:51):
proximity to your down. Ally, but with the potential one
hundred and forty feet of movement, I don't think that's
going to really be a problem, as you could probably
get them from a whole city block away. Next, we
have the Speedy drunk No I did not name this one.
We can get even faster using the power of Booze
by taking the way of the Drunken Master. We gain
a few bonuses whenever we use our flurry of blows.

(16:12):
When we flurry, we get to take the disengage action
for free, which means that even when the enemy is
grouped up, we can still run away scott free. Whenever
we flurry, we also get ten extra feet of movement
that stacks our base movement all the way up to
eighty feet. Sadly, since flurrying uses our bonus action, we
won't be able to dash for the full one hundred
and sixty at least while also making an attack, but

(16:35):
the extra movement may well be worth a drink or two.
And then we have the Supersonic Dragon, which is one
last way we can take advantage of all this movement
by taking the way of the Ascendant Dragon. This will
take a bit longer to kick in, since the feature
we really care about is at the six month level,
but hey, in the meantime, we get to play around
with some draconic breath weapons and alternate damage types. The

(16:57):
trick here is the six level feature Wings Unfurled, which
lets us sprout spectral draconic wings already so freaking cool
whenever we use the step of the wind, the key
dashing feature. These magical dragon wings only last for a turn,
but they grant us a flying speed equal to our
walking speed, and our walking speed, if you haven't noticed,
is quite fast. This supersonic dragon dash basically lets us

(17:21):
do all of our previously established speedy nonsense but while flying,
which means you'll be able to threaten enemies over in
the next area code if you really want to, or
at very least just ones that are up on a ledge.
So I had a friend at my table play a
version of this multi class and their character essentially turned
out like Donnie Yen's character from Rogue one. I don't

(17:46):
I don't remember the name of his character, but I'm
sure someone that's going to be in this comment section
does know. And please tell me. Thank you guys so
much for watching. I really appreciate it. Be sure to
like and subscribe for putting out new multi class guides
all the time. As well as other content. Go see
what we're up to over on skullsplitterdice dot com. Check
us out on Instagram, and if you plan on building
this multi class, or if you have had run ins

(18:08):
with the character that fits this multi class, I would
love to hear all about them down in the comments.
My name's Patrick Ferguson from skull splitter Dice and until
next time, farewell