Flame Blade Drunk

[UinseanRianAchta]

I love the idea behind a monk producing his flaming weapons purely by force of will. I realize there are a couple ways to go about this build, and I'm wondering what you guys consider better.

My first thought was Elf. Get that Valenar bonus to Scimi's, and go Dex build for the Grace enhancement.
My second thought was to splash 2 Ranger for the free TWF feat. Then as I was building and adding levels, I was thinking about feats. Dodge, Mobility, Spring Attack...all I needed was Combat Expertise and I could take Whirlwind Strike. So I went back and redid the stats to come up with 8, 19, 14, 13, 12, 8.
Then it came down to getting that feat line completed as fast as possible. I moved the Ranger, Druid, and Monk level progression around but still couldn't manage to get them all by level 7 (I use Vet Status). Because Monks don't get Spring Attack and WWS as class feats, I decided on splashing 2 Fighter instead of Ranger. This gave me the ability to get the entire WWS line by 6, with an open feat at level 3 (took Toughness to ease the pain of the 14 Con).

For my additional spells I went with Cat's Grace (quick +4 Dex without worrying about an item off the bat), Jump, Longstrider, and Vigor.

Wind Stance for another +2 Dex. At level 4 I put the Attribute point into Dex, and with +2 from ship and another +1 from the Elf enhancement I'm sitting at 29. Decent, sure, but not as good as the 34 I managed to get at the same level on my Rog/Mnk/Drd stick fighter build.

So this brings up another way to build this, and that's Wisdom focus.

With a Wisdom focus I have the choice to either: A) stick with Elf for Valenar and just not take the Grace enhancement, or B) Go with Human. Going with Human gives the extra feat at level 1 but Spring Attack and WWS both require +4 BAB. Because of this, wanting to get WWS as soon as possible still requires two levels of Fighter.

So basically, while this is a cool concept for roleplaying in p&p, is any Monk + flame blade build going to be too gimp for DDO?

[unbongwah]

There are two main problems with Flame Blades:

• It scales with caster level, so the more you MC a druid, the weaker your Flame Blades become, unless you're in a Primal ED or have CL-boosting gear to make up the difference. [The druid PL feat scales with char lvl, but can only be used 3x per rest and swapping what's in your hands dispels the blades.]
• It caps at CL:20 - it's okay to start in epics (as long as you're not fighting fire-resistant mobs), but it's woefully inadequate DPS compared to any "real" epic weapons.

I don't think Whirlwind Atk is worth the 5-feat cost in general, but certainly not on a feat-starved build concept like this.