You don't need anything to level as a monk. Spend some time in the newbie zone killing skeletons until you have a full set of cloth armor. Use cracked staffs until you can buy a staff from the merchant but really you don't even need a weapon and that's from a vanilla classic perspective. In Kunark things change. Kunark is a monk's paradise with insane new weapons that become cheap on the market pretty quickly and you can now choose Iksar. The monk class is one of the truly great and even overpowered classes. Top end melee damage and tanking, block fires off a lot, mend every 6 minutes, Iksar regen and Feign Death. You're not going to be as powerful as a caster but you can live in dungeons and the class costs nothing unless you want to save up for weight reducing bags.
On the other hand, the bard class is possibly the most unique class ever created in any MMO and if you haven't tried it I'd recommend it just for the experience. I played a bard in classic and I thought I was a melee class at first and it was tough sledding with bad equipment. Kunark adds some easy to come by cheap but good weapons but you are going to want to either play a support role in a group or really embrace play as a weak caster who doesn't ever have to stop to cast magic. It's a super group class with haste, regen, mana regen, DS and crowd control and excellent roleplay possibilities. When I soloed I used charm, single dot kiting and fear/snare melee. I tended to stay away from area dot kiting as a patch message came out limiting the amount of critters that could be affected and it was worded in a way that I thought Verant frowned on the idea of mass kiting so I stayed away it. On P99 it's now the common way to play bard and you could play a bard nearly naked with just instruments and do the mass kiting for fast experience. Not my cup of tea but it's there. If carpal tunnel is a worry stick with the monk. I won't play a bard again unless the melody command is introduced.
Praise Amun!
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