Monk Guide - Mind Over Matter

[Unicorn]

Hey everyone, I thought I would share this recent monk guide/build that I stumbled across on the Diablo 3 Monk forums a few days ago. I have been doing really well with it in both group and solo play in inferno, and it is really starting to feel like it is the way monk is supposed to be played; without a shield.

All credit goes to the creator of the guide which can be found here.

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Introduction

This guide is ment to show one how to survive in a way that even keeps breath of life healing you for most of your HP. Yes you heard me. This guide is intended mostly for Group play however, I will include solo information aswell, but comeon, Diablo 3 is a multiplayer game.

Stat Breakdown

eHP: Aka Effective Health Points: eHP = HP/(1-DR%)

What this means is that you have to take your eHP in total damage before you become a grease stain for Diablo and his friends. So, if you have 21k hp, 91% resist damage (combined resist percentages) you end up with about 220,000 hard damage that has to hit you before you die.

LPH: Aka Life per Hit:

This is the bread and butter for this build. You want this to be high, even at the cost of dps, if you’re in a group, you’re going to be the tank. You kite adds to a choke point, stand there and enjoy the “DUDE WHAT THE HELL” from your friends when they watch your health pool fill and empty rapidly but never hitting zero.

IAS: Aka Increased Attack Speed:

This stat ties in greatly with your LPH. The faster you attack, the faster you regen hp, simple really.

The Theory

Now those of you who played a wizard and are familiar with the broken wizard spec, this build is almost a child of that spec, however it is in no way abuse of game mechanic. The way the wizard spec worked was you say instead of having 50k hp at 60 in act 2 inferno mode, you had about 20k hp, and when hit you took 35% of your hp, and regen it faster then you could lose another 35%.

This build bases off that, by keeping your eHP endless. It is key to have a low vitality, I run at 21k hp and do just fine. Now, you won’t be auto scaling monster damage to an x% of your hp, however you do turn a 20k swing into about 2000. So at 21k hp, with 91%DR (my actual DR is a little over 92%) you end with an HP total of 19000. You take that 19000 and run it through the eHP calculation, you get 211111. From your 220k eHP pool, you lost 8889, still less then the 20k swing.
What this all means is, your hp is going to go down in small manageable chunks. With that, your attacking fast, while attacking fast you’re also likely hitting 2+ mobs at a time, meaning that LPH you’re stacking, is going to be healing you retarded amounts. Currently I’m at 768 LPH. They aren’t the hottest weapons, but I have seen LPH over 700 on a single 1 hander.

And remember, ontop of all of this, I am rocking a hot and sexy 55% dodge. So when, and if you get hit, its barely going to chip the paint on your armor.

Skills

Original: Monk - Game Guide - Diablo III

Newest, most updated: Monk - Game Guide - Diablo III

Spirit generation:

I chose to go the dodge route, you may want to go the armor route via Keen Eye rune, its all preferance.

Secondary ability:

I enjoy running with my palm strike, it does alot of damage, and on explosion i get a LPH boost, but realistically you can run anything you like here.

Serenity:

Pally bubble is too str0nk. Need I say more?

Breath of Life:

This ability sucks when you ahve a ton of HP, too bad we don’t have a ton of hp, nyuck nyuck nyuck.

Cyclone Strike:

This with the rune is a necessity. You can arguably go the route of the heal, if you have a lot of dodge already.

Mantra:

I prefer to use the healing mantra with the 20% resistances, simply because its cheep and easy and the hps is very nice when youhave low vita.

The other option is Hard Target rune in Mantra of Evasion.

Passives:

One with Everything is key here. You will stack a resist + resist all. You will also make mages qq.

Path of the guardian is a lot of dodge, you can arguably swap this one for Beacon of the Ytar or Resolve.

Seize the Initiative is very very strong when you want to get some extra DPS but not lose alot of DR for it. I don’t recommend swapping this out.

Wrap Up

All and all, Stack armor, resistances, and almost completely ignore vitality. I recommend no higher than 35k, after that you’re wasting talents almost in your BoL, and if you do go higher then 35k, you may want to get more dps talents.

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How much resist do you have?

((((1-armorDR%)*(1-resistDR%)*(1-30%[monk/barb have 30%DR passive]))*100) - 100 = your resist

My current live DR is: [NOTE: no buffs]

((1-66.85%)*(1-53.01%)*(1-30%)*100)-100=
(0.6685)*(0.5301)*(0.3%)=89.368845%

So in my gear, before concussion or resolve, I take 89% dr, before any buffs.

Think about that. With MoH/MoP it pushes over 92%.

Vitality, how much is enough:

20k hp = a1 inferno ezpz
30k hp = a2 inferno
35k hp = a3 inferno
40k hp = a4 inferno

In my current gear, the 2nd boss in A4 Inferno is hitting me with his teleport backstab for about 36k. Yes, 36k. An ability that 1 shots anyone, I can take 2 if i have 37k hp. His bubble beam hits for about 29k.

Taken from another thread

You need to comprehend one thing, monster level.

This is using my current Armor value of 4890 which on the stats page says 61.98% damage reduction. The formulas are lurking about on this forum so I don't feel it's needed to repost them. But a table will help. Everyone loves tables.

 ML: DR%:
A4 Hell: 60  61.98
A1 Inf:  61  61.59
A2:      62  61.20
A3:      63  60.82
A4:      64  60.44

At least that's what I think the monster levels are for the Inferno Acts. It might be only 60 to 63 from A1 to A4. But as you can see, going to the later difficulties only drops a couple % off your damage reduction. There is a drop, but it's not as massive as i think most people are thinking it would be.

[Confucius]

Nice guide! +Rep 7, if you want to give rep you can use this link http://www.ownedcore.com/forums/repu...tion&p=2266010 since it's all messed up in the first post.

[Lunera68]

i guess you don't use a shield since you have the dual wield passive, but then you really need good life leech on your weapons for this to work.

[Unicorn]

Yea life per hit is very important for this build if you want to last in the long run, but I can do many things just fine with very low life per hit because of the different defensive spells that you have. As said in the OP - your healing spells are pretty op now that you have low HP but high eHP.

[jguax]

Nice guide, easy to follow and really useful for nub monk like me, wish could give +reps

[sNes]

How far into Inferno did you make it ?
I tried a similar build but with % Life Steal and it didn't work.
Although I didn't get my resist as high as you.

Thing is just. Act2+ will get impossible with this since your resists are useless vs enemies lvl 62+.
Just read the Tooltip for your resists. It says "90% vs lvl 60 enemies".
It will decrease dramatically vs Inferno mobs wich are 61 Act1, 62 Act2, 63 Act3 etc. so ... yeah.
You just decreased your 220000 eHP to around 55000 eHP.

Inferno is damn hard for the monk (at least Act2+).
You just have to be patient and gear up.
I'm Sitting at 40k HP, 700 Resist All and around 17k dps atm and I'm able to clear Act2 in a group.
Didn't try Act3 yet.

[Unicorn]

The creator just updated his post with this which can probably help answer some of the questions you have.

How much resist do you have?

((((1-armorDR%)*(1-resistDR%)*(1-30%[monk/barb have 30%DR passive]))*100) - 100 = your resist

My current live DR is: [NOTE: no buffs]

((1-66.85%)*(1-53.01%)*(1-30%)*100)-100=
(0.6685)*(0.5301)*(0.3%)=89.368845%

So in my gear, before concussion or resolve, I take 89% dr, before any buffs.

Think about that. With MoH/MoP it pushes over 92%.

Vitality, how much is enough:

20k hp = a1 inferno ezpz
30k hp = a2 inferno
35k hp = a3 inferno
40k hp = a4 inferno

In my current gear, the 2nd boss in A4 Inferno is hitting me with his teleport backstab for about 36k. Yes, 36k. An ability that 1 shots anyone, I can take 2 if i have 37k hp. His bubble beam hits for about 29k.

Taken from another thread

You need to comprehend one thing, monster level.

This is using my current Armor value of 4890 which on the stats page says 61.98% damage reduction. The formulas are lurking about on this forum so I don't feel it's needed to repost them. But a table will help. Everyone loves tables.

 ML: DR%:
A4 Hell: 60  61.98
A1 Inf:  61  61.59
A2:      62  61.20
A3:      63  60.82
A4:      64  60.44

At least that's what I think the monster levels are for the Inferno Acts. It might be only 60 to 63 from A1 to A4. But as you can see, going to the later difficulties only drops a couple % off your damage reduction. There is a drop, but it's not as massive as i think most people are thinking it would be.

[andric1]

This is acutally making me change my mind on how to play Monk. Thanks OP.
The only thing I would recommend people to think of BEFORE changing, keep in mind that you probably used a shield before, which gave you a huge amount of armor, you just lost that by switching to dual wield, don't forget you need about 1k armor more before you're at the same DmgR% as you were before taking off your shield.

[yvalf]

I'm just hittin 60 , could someone tell me what kind of item (stats) I should aim for ?