Rating
+5

Istvan Generator Healing Monk (Climbing GR80+)

by last updated Oct 13, 2015 ( Patch 2.3 )
Regular
Hybrid
BBCode Link
Edit

Skills

  • Crippling Wave Tsunami
  • Cyclone Strike Implosion
  • Blinding Flash Crippling Light
  • Inner Sanctuary Forbidden Palace
  • Mantra of Healing Sustenance
  • Mystic Ally Enduring Ally
  • Resolve
  • Near Death Experience
  • Harmony
  • Beacon of Ytar

Items

More Details

  • Legendary Gems

    • Molten Wildebeest's Gizzard
    • Esoteric Alteration
    • Gogok of Swiftness

Kanai's Cube

  • Flying Dragon
  • The Crudest Boots
  • Ring of Royal Grandeur

The gear setup is quite similar to the basic Istvan Healer designed for speedruns. A few differences comes from the use of the classic Laws of Seph + Blinding Flash combo. Which the non climbing setup uses Leorics (for double exp bonuses from Ruby gem) and Epiphany for mobility and anti-CC protection. But the biggest changes are the replacing of Born's set with the 2pc Raiments, which is there solely to boost the base Attack Speed, this is done to raise the proc chance of Flying Dragon even more (even without Raiments, you should be able to reach 5.0 APS with the normal setup), thus resulting in a higher uptime of 5.0 APS. For more information, read Heisenberg's thread regarding Flying Dragon proc rates.


Strongarms is also removed in favor of Spirit Guards. The 40% damage reduction is necessary for higher GRs, you can probably do without it with some really heavy fishing.


Gear and stat goals:

For the most part, there are no definite baseline on where and how high certain stats you should have and/or go after. There will be too many factors involved that would determine how far you can go in a Greater Rift, and I'm not qualified enough to determine the best and what's required to reach a certain rank in GR, so I'll leave absolutes out of this and leave what's mainly a guideline than anything else.


  • Try to reach at least 1 mil Life per Second with only passives.
  • Try to reach on average around 2k resist across the board, if you can't, try getting at least as high cold resist as possible. Perfect rolls would net you somewhere around 2.2-2.6k resists.
  • I don't believe elite damage reduction is necessary for a healer, it's going to be very rare you'd force the group to fight more than 2 packs at once with dangerous affixes on really high GR if not ever. And the listed defensive stats should be enough for the rest.
  • Melee damage reduction on the other hand is very precious, and should be valued highly.

Important Note! Try to avoid having Area Damage on any piece of your gear whenever possible. AD adds to lag, and your AD damage is completely inconsequential to the party's DPS. This is more important in higher Greater Rifts due to the extra time required to kill packs and the size of the packs you'd be fighting most of the time.

Paragon Priorities

Core

Vitality
Movement Speed
Primary Stat
Maximum Resource

Offense

Cooldown Reduction
Attack Speed
Critical Hit Chance
Critical Hit Damage

Defense

Life Regeneration
Resist All
Life
Armor

Utility

Resource Cost Reduction
Gold Find
Life on Hit
Area Damage

Fill movement speed to 25% based on what you have on your boots. Grab as high CDR as possible and then fill Attack Speed as the next one.


Important Note! Do NOT, I repeat Do NOT fill Area Damage on your Paragon, for the same reason as mentioned in the gear section.

Build Guide

Before I start, this build is designed to work with a Static Charge Monk in your party, this is a subpar healer without one, but an extremely good if not downright broken when paired with one. This build is the high GR / climbing / fishing variant of the three, and dedicated for that purpose. This build does not incorporate any exp boosting, relatively lower mobility, but with extra toughness, and the highest SC triggering capabilities out of the other variants.


This build is one of the three variants of the Static Charge Healer build :

Due to the rising trend of Static Charge Monks, and since several people asked me to post the build on dfans, I decided to do so. Credits for this build goes to Hon, for one he was the first one I've seen on the 3 man US leaderboard to incorporate Istvan into his healer Monk, in which he used it to take #1 at the time. And while I don't know if he was the first to come up with it, he was the one who inspired me to try out the build the first time.


This build is designed to run and climb higher Greater Rifts (78++). Unlike the other variant of the build, this one has relatively lower mobility in favor of more utility (CC from Blinding Flash) and more toughness all around. In addition, the build also focuses solely on trying to keep APS cap as often as possible at all times during the entire run, even more than the other variant of the Istvan healer setup. As everyone knows, anyone in your party can trigger Static Charge's charges, and who's better to proc them other than the healer who's almost always be in the middle of a pack and able to tank everything around him. In terms of proc'ing the SC, damage is irrelevant, you as a healer can hit for 100 damage per hit and the lightning damage would still be taken from the SC Monk's character damage. So to accommodate this, all you need is to get as stable and as high Attack Speed as possible. That's it. This concept allows for some interesting things :


  • Having an Istvan healer is almost as equivalent as having another SC Monk in your party, so in a sense, a 3-man run becomes a 4-man run, a 4-man run becomes a 5-man run in terms of damage output.
  • Istvan healer allows a functionality almost the same as having an additional DPS in your party. And if you're reading this, I'm pretty sure you'd know the significant implication of this means for the entire run. Adding to that, an Istvan Healer with this specific setup has the ability to maintain a 5.0 APS more often than the actual SC Monk himself. Which means, depending on how your group plays, it doubles your SC Monk's DPS output if not more, and allowing for a better SC debuff spread all around.

One of the main downside of using this setup in pair with an SC Monk is the lag it causes. It is normally not much of an issue in mid and lower GRs, but when it comes to climbing higher ones where you'll take more time to clear packs, it's a big deal. Screen freezes will happen, especially when your group tries to pull to much in a 4 man scenario. And this is probably one of the reason why this build is more popular in 3-man leaderboard than 4-man.