Anything that requires certain weapons/gear to be competitive is gear dependent. Champions need a lot of care and feeding. They are vuln bash, semi vuln dirt disarm and vuln grapple, strip, weaponbreaker. You lose your weapon while blind and you are running or dead. So now you have to try and cover those weaknesses. Monks don't have that weakness. You can blind my monk all day long, and I can still survive, because my defenses don't depend on a weapon. There are some things that will nerf defenses on a monk. Anything that attacks Str/Dex(Boneshatter) will nerf a monks defenses if they don't have it covered. But as a monk I'm not likely to die to that, just more likely to GTFO and return when I'm better.

Elf was a decent choice for champion, but after comparing to the storm thats running around right now, I wonder if storm isn't a better option with a polearm in certain situations. Storm won't bat for crap, but Fend is nice, and if you enlarge, theres a high chance of lag there, almost as much as Bat I think. But don't bother wielding a staff as a storm. I didn't do much testing on elf with pole for defending but I know Elith does it a lot and seemed to do as well if not better than mine, so my assumption that staff was the go-to for elf might be misguided, but I didn't do enough testing.

Hope my rambling helps.