Saturday, 1 September 2012

A Monk mini guide

Saturday, September 01, 2012  sQren  


Introduction
There has been a lot of monks coming back with the new patch with no idea of what to buy or build. Hopefully this will help out some of them and give them an idea of how to progress with items. The overall goal is to farm act 3 with ease.

LpSS vs Regen vs LoH vs LS vs Pick up Radius
LpSS:
  • Pros - Cheap, High burst heals,
  • Cons - Spirit dependent, only found on certain items(diablo, fist, spirit stones)
Regen
  • Pros - Cheap, consistent heals
  • Cons - Need to get more then 1k regen, difficult to find good monk gear with high regen, Can not handle burst damage.
LoH
  • Pros - High consistent heals during battle
  • Cons - Expensive
LS
  • Pros - Cheap, High consisten heals during battle, Heals from any damage, Big heals from big groups
  • Cons - High damage required
Pick up Radius
  • Pros - Cheap, High consistent heals during battle
  • Cons - High damage required to kill monsters quick for more orbs.
For act 1 farming you could get away with LpSS and Regen. I have never tried either of them myself so don't take my word on it.
For act 2 farming it would be a good idea to have LoH as your primary source of heals. The amount required depends on your defensive stats. This will take some experimenting to find the amount required to survive. Too little LoH and you'll die. Too much LoH and it becomes a wasted stat. What I mean is that you over pay for LoH when you could use that gold to buy something with more dex or crit damage.

Now for Act 3 farming. I have been using LS and pickup radius lately with much success. You do not want to start using LS until you have around 40k unbuffed DPS. LS is nerfed by 80%, so you need high damage to get the full benifit from it. Once you can burst elites down in seconds then pickup radius becomes superior to all the other heals. One orb can heal you up to 25% of your maximum health. If you do the calculations, the amount healed is insane.

For any given act you want to have a combination of 1-3 different source of heals.

tl;dr LpSS=LR<LoH<LS<Pick-up
Defensive Stats
Most monks with tell you to get around 700 AR, 7000 armor, and 30k+ HP. With these kind of stats you could do act 3 with no problems. The only problem is that maintaining these stats and increasing your DPS is expensive. What they forget to tell you is that your dps plays a huge factor in your defensive stats as well. If you have 20k dps then the above stats are perfect for you. The more DPS you have the more defensive stats you can drop. For example, I have 500 AR, 5400 armor, 26k HP, and 64k DPS.

For now lets set 700AR, 7000 armor, 30k HP, and 20k DPS the starting point. For every 10k increase in dps, you could drop 50AR, 500 armor, and 1k HP. This will not work in all cases, you will have to experiment on how much you can get away with while increasing DPS.

tl;dr More DPS, less defensive stats
If I missed anything please let me know so I can add it, thanks. Questions about your build or mines is welcomed.
Good luck hunting.

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