Monk a is hard route to take. Mostly because prior to becoming a Monk, you're a squishy support with next to no damage output. Levelling is
painful. Luckily, you got api to protect your butt and do all the damage for you! So don't get discouraged. I for one love monks
Because once you do become a Monk, things change quickly! You start beating things up nicely. Disadvantages are your skills do drain resources quickly if you want to keep your DPS at max so you have to restrain yourself often, and you don't really have any proper AoE options at any level.
What I love about monks though is that they have a lot versatility other mostly auto attacking classes don't. For one, you get an amazing nuke which helps ever so much against bosses and in PvP of course. Another is Mental Strength, which gives you 90% damage reduction. This, is godly. Dedicated tanks with exceptional equipment can't compare to this amount of damage soaking you can do. Does disable you from using skills while you have it active though, and it slows you down. And it's temporary. If it runs out in a bad situation, you're dead.
Another cool thing is Snap. Snap moves you from point A to point B at super sonic speed. No one can out run you, no one can catch up to you.
The drawback to all the versatility is of course, it takes a lot of skill points to get all the cool stuff, so you have to make some sacrifices if you want to specialize.