The 500k Challenge - dropping all my gear and re-equipping with only 500 thousand gold

This guy is fucking great. His presentation style was fantastic and I absolutely hope that he continues to produce quality Diablo 3 content.




After seeing everyone complain about melee classes and the steep difficulty curve I decided I wanted to have a piece of that pie. (Mmmmm, Dark Souls....)

Roll my monk, simple rules, 20k on level 1, 100k on level 20, 200k on level 40, and 1.2 million on level 60. (I had 900k when I hit 60 on my wizard and sold a 400k item 1/2 way through act 1, I wanted to see how far I could go)

I start buying my new gear. I stacked pretty much everything in the video (arcane instead of cold). I spend about 800k on everything. After taking a bit of time to read I see everyone emphasizing the importance of a shield. I decide to go against the flow and duel wield my way to death. I buy another weapon for 250k, stash the shield. Overall 1.05mil isn't too bad. I had 10% IAS on gear, no crit gear at all.

Inferno Act 1 was disappointing. The two monks I know had spent just as much on gear as I just did and they had to fight tooth and nail through it. (Of course that was closer to release)
Butcher down, took a little under 2 hours.

Act 2 was so exciting, my main as a wizard I would die if I caught a full string of mosquitoes.... I took two straight lines of them and was still alive, I broke down laughing. It was 3 am and I was on sleeping pills. Needless to say I died whilst laughing.

I push forward. Mahgda down, ZK, down...
Belial down! (I should mention this was pre-1.0.3, with only 10k dps I don't think I would have made it before the enrage).

Act 3-
Ghom down, didn't try to tank the poison though.
This is where the difficulty started to ramp up. I started having to kite champions while waiting for cooldowns to reset. I also started dying at least once to every other pack, a few packs managed to break my armor. However this wasn't really a problem as my main is a glass cannon, a change in strategy and I was golden.
Siegebreaker down.

Cydaea down.
Azmodan was a challenge. Downright hard. He was slow and I ended up with a good deal of down time running away from the poison, running to the summoners, moving away from the fireball, etc.
I finally manage to kill him off.

Act 4-
I haven't found a single upgrade up to this point. I've not bought anything. Zero upgrades.
Rakanoth falls. I start getting a bit angry. Took me three tries to kill Rakanoth with my monk, took almost a dozen on my wizard. I push forward, getting closer and closer to where my wizard is. I move faster than my wizard now, earlier I moved slower but in Act 4 my wizard barely moved at all and most champion packs were a pain. The monk didn't have these issues so much.

Posted in: Guide, monk, Tips and tricks