Best in Slot for Condemn Crusader? I've been going off the Icy Veins site. Says The Furnace for main hand and Frydehr's Wrath for a shield. Is this still the case? I've been running with The Furnace had another weapon drop last night that seemed better. Just wanted to check. Is it best once you have the full Akkhan set? Diablo 3's Monk class relies on a flurry of fists and high-powered kicks to dish out its damage, and if you're looking for a melee class that packs a genuine thrill, you can't really go wrong with it. 70 Choose Skill. Level Requirement. This is based on the level requirement of the selected skills and slots that are used. Required level: 1. You must choose a. It's best in slot for a support monk. Haven't played one, but looking at DMG reduction, cooldown, a free passive, resource reduction, it seems ideal.

Build Guide

Greetings everyone,
Since 2.1 my friends and I wanted to create a build revolved around the new Exploding Palm Monk Skill. We have created something so powerful, the difference in clear times
is quite high. Keep in mind this build is intended for farming purposes only (Torment 1-6 Rifts or Greater Rifts up to level 35, depending on your gear).
This build requires group play as it is not viable in solo play.
- SKILLS AND GAMEPLAY
I made some gifs you can take a look at [ here ](http://gfycat.com/PoorMaleChinesecrocodilelizard) and [ here ](http://www.gfycat.com/IdealisticCharmingBarb).
This Build has very high spirit cost abilites. One being Cyclone Strike and the other Seven-Sided Strike. Your only spirit generation is Epiphany.
Which is why you want to have cooldown reduction everywhere you can on your gear.
With decent gear and Gogok of Swiftness Rank 25 you should have over 90% uptime on Epiphany.
You should almost never cast Exploding Palm. It's there so Seven-Sided Strike can apply the Cold rune on its Exploding Palm.
The only flexibility in skills is Mantra of Conviction.
You could sacrifice giving this speed and damage boost to everyone for Blinding Flash:Replenishing Light if you have spirit problems(due to low cooldown reduction).
But your clear times will be slightly slower.
The general idea is to Dash in, Cyclone(everything gets frozen; Bane of the Trapped, Relentless Assault, Strongarm Bracers come in),
Cast Your Seven-Sided Strike and everything explodes. If 1 mob dies, with good gear everything else should also die or atleast get very low depending on your gear.
You have to be very fast and very precise. Dash ahead of your team, set things up for them so when they come, everything explodes.
As for the Rift Guardian you can't do much apart from providing Mantra of Convition or maybe pull some mobs next to the guardian and blow them up.
Your insane clearing will be more than enough to make up for the slightly slower Rift Guardian kill. Sometimes it could even be much faster if you can get a lot of mobs around him.
- GEARING
A few things to point out before I go in depth with this.
This build cannot work without the legendary spirit stone: Madstone. Get it. It's amazing.
It requires very high cooldown reduction to be effective. Born's and Cpt Crimson's Sets are required.
Okay now for the sweet details.
You're going to need to craft a couple of items to get things started. First of all you'll need Born's Shoulders/Chest, Captain Crimson's Legs/Boots and your Ring of Royal Grandeur.
Those items alone will take you to about 50% Cooldown reduction with Paragon Points, a Diamond on your Madstone and the Beacon of Ytar passive.
Just those 6 items (2 Borns, 2 CptCrimson, Madstone, RoyalRing) will make you cruise through T3-4 depending on how good your Weapons are.
Next Step, craft a Utar's Roar, get Strongarm Bracers and Sockets on your jewelry.
If you're uncertain about what stats or gems to get for every piece of gear please follow my list above.
Now that you have a lot of cold damage and a lot of damage multipliers you should be able to destroy T4-5 depending on your group and your other weapon.
From that point on it should be easy to get a vigilante belt and the frostburn gloves.
The item that will boost you to T6 God Mode is also the hardest one to get because it has to have almost perfect rolls. It's the amazing Fist of Az'Turrasq.
This item alone will almost double your Exploding Palm damage which is where this build really shines.
Now that Exploding Palm is weapon based having a good Fist of Az'Turrasq is GAMEBREAKING.
I haven't covered every gear slot in this short gearing-up guide.
For the rest of the pieces and what stats to get for every single piece I highly recommend you take closer look at my best in slot list above.

Diablo 3 Inna's Mantra Build

-BREAKPOINTS AND LEGENDARY GEMS
It's pretty easy to see that Bane of the Trapped and Powerful are required at all times.
A well geared Monk should have over 65% Cooldown reduction with the most being 74.94% without Gogok of Swiftness.
Note that 74.94% is 99% uptime on Epiphany which makes Gogok of Swiftness useless. In this case the best gem is Boon of the Hoarder rank 25 by far.
You're rarely going to get to max Swiftness stacks but it's enough to fill up the imperfections in your gear so you can get higher uptime on Epiphany and more Seven-Sided Strikes.
Well, that's all I've got for you. As you can see this is a very empowering build in any farming group as it boosts your clear times quite a bit.
I've put together a video of us running into high mob and elite density. The outcome is quite explosive. It will be up soon due to my bad Internet.
I hope this helps you understand the new Exploding Palm Monk and make you farm a lot faster with your friends!
Special thanks go to Simpsoon#2726 for helping me experiment and putting this build together.
If you have any questions or just want to hang out and farm please feel free to add me on Megasus#2795.
If you want to see more guides and videos from me please let me know.
Thank you!
Megasus

by JR Cook - 7 years ago show comments

Welcome back to BlizzPro. I’m Dannie “Illness” Ray, and today we will be taking an in-depth look at a certain Monk passive skill.

What Does it Say it Does?

Combination Strike increases your damage for each resourcegeneratorrecentlyused. At a glance, you would think that this passive has been implemented in order to allow for builds that use multiple different resource generators. While that most certainly was the intent, if you look at all of the builds that use Combination Strike you will realize that most of them use only a single spirit generator.

Diablo 3 Monk Guide

Why Does This Happen?

Using a single generator doesn’t really scream of “combination”. I doubt that the intent the developers had when they came up with passive, was for players to use it as a flat and boring 10% damage buff.

But why are players only using Combination Strike for the first 10% bonus? Why don’t they exploit this wonderful passive to the fullest? Let me tell you why:

1. Almost every Monk build out there uses at least one generator. You don’t have to give up anything in order to get the first 10% increase.
2. Using extra generators means that you have to give up other useful skills. Extra slots for generators mean less slots for things like Mantras, Serenity, Breath of Heaven, Blinding Flash, etc. While specific runes on generators may provide a certain level of utility, it is often inferior to actually using utility skills.
3. Using a single generator is way easier than alternating between three different ones, especially when you need to cycle them in an specific order to get the most benefit out of the strategy. This gets even more chaotic at high attack speeds.
4. The first generator will move your damage from 100% to 110%, effectively increasing your damage output by 10%. The second will move your damage from 110% to 120%, and that’s just a 9% increase. If we were to use all 4 generators, the last one would only grant us 7.7% damage. Diminishing returns put the final nail in the coffin for multiple-generator builds.

How Much is an Extra Skill Slot Worth?

This wouldn’t be a Dannie Ray article if we didn’t get into the numbers. Let’s compare how much do we give up numerically when we select a second or third generator.

Best Monk Skills Diablo 3

Mystic Ally – Fire Ally: This is a straight 10% damage increase. When you factor in both the passive strikes from the companion and its active ability, it becomes hard to justify adding a generator instead of this.

Breath of Heaven – Blazing Wrath: 10% increased damage with 9 seconds duration. It’s base 15 second duration means a 60% uptime, that gives you 6% increased damage out of BoH. 50% CDR would ensure a 100% uptime for a total of 10% increased damage. Of course, an extra generator just won’t heal your party like BoH will.

Inner Sanctuary – Forbidden Palace: 30% increased damage with a 6 second duration. It’s base 20 second cooldoown means a 30% uptime, that’s a 9% damage increase that also affects your party members. 50% CDR would double the uptime to 60% and the damage bonus to 18%. The 50% damage reduction is also nothing to sneeze at.

Blinding Flash – Faith in the Light: 29% increased damage with a 3 second duration. It’s base 15 second cooldown means a 20% uptime, that’s 5.8% damage increase. 50% CDR would double the uptime to 40% and would set the damage bonus to 11.6%. The crowd control that this skill provides is a great help.

The Monk has a lot of other options, but these 4 skills allow me to showcase how Monk’s can use their skill slots to increase their damage. Although the above-mentioned skills can be a tad situational, Combination Strike still seems like the inferior option when we consider the 4 points that we discussed earlier.

Where Should This Be Adressed?

First of all, we need to let Combination Strike really fullfil its intent. You don’t want to tone down any of the Monk’s other skills or in any way upset the balance of the generators. What needs to be adressed is Combination Strike itself, it shouldn’t buff single generator builds and it should give us a strong reason to consider the harder to play Bi-Gen or Tri-Gen builds.

Combination Strike could read something like this:

“All your damage is increased by an amount based on the number of Spirit Generators you’ve used during the last 3 seconds.

• 2 generators: 20%
• 3 generators: 45%
• 4 generators: 75%”

75% might seem like an insane amount, but you would be giving up 4 skills slots to use generators. You would likely want to have 1 spender to actually use that 75% bonus with a hard hitting skill. That would leave you with just one skill for utility.

And these are just numbers of the top of my head, it would take a few hours work to actually determine what the ideal amount would be.

When Will This Be Fixed?

Sadly, that’s something I cannot answer you. If you’ve been itching to play a multiple generator build without feeling that you are gimping your character, patch 2.1 might be your best hope. The Monk has been promised a big revamp, and while combination Strike might or might not be reworked when 2.1 hits; at least you now know what the issues are and how they could be resolved.

Meanwhile, keep coming back to BlizzPro for some of the best Diablo 3 content on the web.