This is only an addition to the "Guiding Palm Monk" thread by karma. All the credit to him! Some people convinced me to put this in a new thread, so here it goes.
For those who're lazy: there's a TL;DR.
I've played this build all weekend and tested many many different gear combinations. I'd also like to add that I'm usually not playing a dex class, so I essentially started my gearing at zero (or close to zero; my previous tank monk had a completely different design idea so I couldn't reuse lots of his gear). Many people in this thread have said that this build requires lots of effort and is not suitable for beginners. Well, I beg to differ. Within one weekend my noobish monk went from nowhere to T6 roflstomp mode. Plus, I don't consider myself a good/skilled player, so if I can do it, everyone can. The only thing is to get the gearing right.
Important note: I do not play a monk for DPS, in my opinion there are five better classes right now. If you intend to merge gear with a DPS monk gearset, stop reading. However, if your monk is your main you should have a much easier transition anyways. This is a guide for people like me who only actually want to play a support monk and start his/her gear from scratch.
Phase 1: The basics
Your goals are 70% CDR, 2k all resist, and 10k armor. Everything else is less important; you need to get to these three figures to get the build running. Once you've reached those numbers you will be able to run this build at least on Torment 5 without problems. Your Exploding Palm won't be strong yet, but make sure you stay alive first before boosting your EP damage!
1) Non-craftable gear
The first slot that we want a non-craftable item in is the belt. My choice is a Thundergod's Vigor. It does absolutely not matter which stats it has; it always has at least 160 lightning resist and 426 vitality. You will re-roll one of the random rolls (or dex if it's a dex TGV) to all resist, so this belt alone will provide you with 250-300 all resist. A very good alternative is the String of Ears. Many say it's better than TGV, but note that the melee mitigation currently doesn't work on many elite affixes. TGV's all resist always works.
Secondly, you absolutely need a Ring of Royal Grandeur, preferably a non-dex one (450 str for 450 armor or 450 int for 45 all resist are better than dex). If you have a spare RoRG that you don't mind destroying re-roll any stat to cooldown reduction. Even if you can't do that no worries, we will get there. Just get ANY RoRG.
Thirdly, and this is probably the most difficult item to get, you need a spirit stone (monk helmet). Do some "Rift it Forward" or rifting with other characters and gamble on your monk; you either want a Kekegi's Unbreakable Spirit or, in my opinion even better, The Mind's Eye. Many people prefer the Kekegi's because of its CDR, but I think you can get to 70% CDR even without it and then profit from the insane spirit regeneration that this helmet offers. Kekegi's has a 30 second internal cooldown and even a perfectly rolled one would only allow you for 13.3% uptime of the buff; The Mind's Eye provides you with up to 15 spirit per second and since you're standing in Inner Sanctuary 100% of the time (100% IS uptime with 70% CDR) you get +15 spirit regen per second all the time. Win-win. This is my endgame choice, so it's worth gambling for it. If you get neither of those it's still possible to play this build! Another option to consider, especially in the beginning, is The Laws of Seph. It provides you with insane amounts of spirit, but you need to give up your Mantra of Conviction for Blinding Flash - Repleneshing Light. (Thanks Kueken for the hint!)
Furthermore, you need one additional ring and one amulet. The stats priorities here are simple: 1) 8% cooldown reduction (we don't accept less), 2) lightning resist (mandatory), 3) resource cost reduction, 4) health globe bonus. Toughness stats don't hurt (vitality, life%, strength, intelligence, armor, socket) but don't suffice alone. It doesn't matter which amulet/ring it is, as long as it has at least 2-3 of the first four mentioned stats.
Last but not least, look out for a "crappy Sun Keeper" that would otherwise be salvaged. A Sun Keeper with less than 2000 DPS and no socket is going to get salvaged by anyone, but for us only the elite damage is important. Furthermore, we are going to enchant it for +10% CDR. In the meantime, any other crappy weapon with 10% CDR is fine as well; if you can grab any crap mace or sword with 10% CDR you can even put 10% resource cost reduction on it and you have a pretty good weapon until you get the desired endgame weapon: The Fist of Az'Turrasq, or in short FoA.
2) Craftable gear
Most of your gear can be crafted. You will craft three sets: Crimson's, Born's, and Aughild's. Furthermore, we will craft gloves; this is a perfect opportunity to get rid of all the Adventurer's Journals, or you can craft Asheara's Gloves to be used on your other classes later on if the rolls turn out to be "good". Note that you should craft those on a crusader/barbarian to get strength as main stat roll. Here's a list of all the items you need to craft and the stats you should prioritize:
- Born's Furious Wrath: 1) 10% CDR, 2) socket, 3) RCR (strength or vitality are okay as well)
- Born's Priviledge: 1) 8% CDR, 2) lightning resistance, 3) RCR, 4) health globe bonus, 5) strength, 6) vitality (only the first two absolutely mandatory, though it doesn't hurt to craft a couple of those, can be re-used on barb)
- Aughild's Search: 1) lightning resistance, 2) strength, 3) vitality, 4) physical damage, 5) armor (don't waste too many re-rolls here, any good EHP bracers will do; only need those for the set bonus and eventually you'll replace them with Strongarms.)
- Aughild's Rule: 1) 3 sockets, 2) lightning resistance, 3) health globe bonus, 3) elite damage reduction, 4) high armor roll (550+), 5) strength, 6) vitality (getting both secondaries right is difficult here, but helps a lot)
- Captain Crimson's Thrust: 1) 2 sockets, 2) lightning resist, 3) high armor roll, 4) strength, 5) vitality.
- Captain Crimson's Waders: 1) lightning resist, 2) health globe bonus, 3) strength, 4) vitality, 5) armor.
- Asheara's Ward or Pender's Purchase: 1) 8% CDR, 2) lightning resist, 3) RCR, 4) strength, 5) vitality (note: unless you plan on using Asheara's on your barb/crusader I'd recommend crafting Pender's Purchase).
For most of those items you only need 2 or 3 of the first 4 priorities, re-roll one with the Mystic, and you're done. This is really not that difficult. If you think you can't farm the materials then join one of the "crafting mats farm" communities; they're awesome and let you get the materials really quick.
Here's a breakdown in Excel of what a really "badly rolled start set" would look like, with only ~3-4 of the desired stats on each gear (really, with crafting and the Mystic this is absolutely doable):
http://i.imgur.com/aLDfLuD.png
This is assumed that you have paragon 300, 5x 74 all resist diamonds and one top tier diamond for the helmet (plus optional diamonds for weapons or jewellery if you decide to pick a socket here). Furthermore, I've assumed an 8% CDR RoRG; however, as you can see, CDR is already higher than necessary. If you don't have a CDR RoRG you need to hit all the max rolls on every other slot; otherwise you can be below the minimum roll on a few slots and still get to 70% CDR.
3) Paragon points/skills
You will have movement speed on boots, so you need to put between 26 and 30 points there in paragon. After this, max spirit. If you have points left put them in vitality. On the offense tab the order is CDR, IAS, CC, CHD. On defense it's all resist, armor, life%, life regeneration. On utility it's resource cost reduction, then area damage, then gold, then LoH (it's useless in this build).
Start by using this build: http://eu.battle.net/d3/en/calculator/monk#VfPRdk!UbVf!ZZbcaY (you can later swap the Strong Spirit rune to Flesh of the Weak.)
4) TL;DR: Breakdown of items/stats
For those that are too lazy but can handly acronyms, let's make it a bit simpler: you want Born's shoulders+weapon, Aughild's chest+bracers, Crimson's pants+boots, any RoRG and TGV, and any amulet, gloves, other ring, weapon, and helmet. All gems are diamonds (max in helmet); that includes weapon.
Stat priorities are (in this order): 1) CDR, 2) sockets where possible, 3) health globe bonus, 4) lightning resist, 5) resource cost reduction, 6) strength, 7) elite damage reduction, 8) armor, 9) vitality, 10) IAS.
Stats you really don't want because they don't help at all (or only help so little that it's not worth it): critical hit chance, critical hit damage, dexterity, life on hit, life regeneration, any proc effects (like Thunderfury's proc or chance to stun/slow/freeze), crowd control reduction.
Phase 2: Upgrading from "I can barely do this" to "we own the night"
I'm going to keep this short, because karma covered the BiS gear in his OP already. I'm just going to weigh in my opinion on some of the items that I would choose differently:
1) As I said, The Mind's Eye in my opinion is way better than Kekegi's. I'm close to 40 spirit regeneration now and my EP cost is down to 24 at a spirit pool of 300... I can faceroll my keyboard, I never run out of spirit.
2) TGV over any other belt unless you hit really high all resist (2500ish). It's a freaking 300 all resist. String of Ears, in my opinion, is pretty much useless at the moment as most of the badass elite affixes aren't mitigated by it (seems to be a bug) and those are the only things that kill you. TGV's all res works on everything - ranged, melee, elite. I guess it's a matter of preference, but whenever I died it was due to a situation where the String of Ears wouldn't have helped at all.
3) Born's versus Aughild's. I think many people dismiss Born's too easily. Having more CDR is just insane because it makes stuff so much easier if you have almost zero downtime on Epiphany and you can cast a new IS before the old one disappears. It works so well together with The Mind's Eye and helps me to get over the 8% CDR I lose over my Kekegi's (although it's not necessary anyways to get to 70% CDR). It really helps if you have awesome items (a nice SoJ or Halycon's Ascent) that come without or little CDR. In the spreadsheet below I still chose Aughild's, but right now I'm running Born's (because I just have too damn good rolls on my Born's set items and like the 73% CDR).
4) Max CDR and survivability before thinking too much about physical/elite damage. If I can squeeze in one more EP and palm one more mob, the additional explosion will help more than just a few palms that do higher damage due to maxed out physical/elite damage gear. More palms also help to spread the explosions over a larger area. Your first priority is to stay alive; your second priority is to palm everything.
5) Alternatives for the SoJ: I know that the SoJ is an insanely good ring because of maxing EP, but like I said, I think there are other rings to consider. One that works really well is Krede's Flame. If you have a large health pool (I'm at 650k at the moment) you can easily survive a couple of Molten explosions, but they re-fill my spirit. I want to test a Bul-Kathos's Wedding Band as well, though not sure how good the heal is. I just like that on other rings I can get my perfect stats (8% CDR, 8% RCR, 500 strength, 500 vit, lightning resist or health globe bonus) as opposed to a SoJ that always has a couple of "useless" ones. Other alternatives that are easy to acquire because they're very easy to get are the Litany of the Undaunted (thanks Thaya for the hint) or the Oculus Ring. Both have four fixed primary stats (elite damage reduction, all resist, main stat, and life regen (Litany) or IAS (Oculus)). Note that they can never have lightning resist, you need to re-roll them to CDR, and they absolutely need to have health globe bonus to be worth considering.
Here's a snap shot of my personal "BiS gear" I'm trying to get:
http://i.imgur.com/BoJpDyE.png
Feel free to point out any mistakes/areas for improvements. It's exactly at 70% CDR but all other stats are insane (super high RCR, 99% elite melee mitigation, and so on). Assumed paragon 500.
1
Other: I'll do the journey (for tab and 'best' portrait) and then stop playing D3 altogether.
As pointed out, the changes in S6 are minimal. I'll come back next time there are major/core changes or new content. Just shifting the meta/balance a bit is not enough to "refresh" the game for me.
Not that this is a bad thing, I've put a bit over 1k hours into the current state of the game. Think it's pretty normal to have had enough of it, lol
1
"Can't or won't do it" - why they won't do it?
i.e. they don't want to / don't enjoy it - the question is, why they don't want to / don't enjoy it. As a developer or a designer you're constantly asking yourself "why/what do people enjoy/don't enjoy about my game/product"
And you still don't understand. There is no excuse. I'm not saying that there is an excuse, either. I am just saying that the subject is more interesting than "people who cheat should go play another game".
If there's a lot of people who say that your product sucks (or a certain part of it sucks) - via words OR ACTION (action in this case) - then it's all worth reviewing, analyzing, and learning from.
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"Why they're cheating" would be a super interesting thing to know for a developer of a game like this.
It's a useful discussion.
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To be honest, Uglytoes does have a point.
There are two types of botters: those who do it for competitive reasons (to gain an advantage over other players, to crush the leaderboard/paragon ladder, etc), and those who do it for convenience reasons (the only purpose is to make the game more fun for themselves, they don't care about the leaderboards or paragon race or whatever; people who "lack time" or are just straight up too bored of TX rifts/bounties all fall into this category).
People who bot for competitive reasons are directly malicious to the games competitive integrity, and they will cheat and bot whenever it is not too risky (most common reason being "well, everybody else does it, so will I"). The only way to fix this type of behavior is directly punishing it. The risk of losing an account is virtually the only thing keeping this type in check, but the efficiency of this strategy only depends on how active Blizzard is with updating detection and banning. It is, however, very possible to scare away all of these (even a single big banwave at the end of each season will be enough).
People who bot for convenience are a more interesting phenomenon. For them, the game is simply not fun if they are forced to play the intended way (e.g. a statement like "if I do get banned, I don't care, because these bots/cheats made the game significantly more fun for me, I acknowledge the risks and I believe it's worth it"). The intent itself isn't malicious - the intent is just to make the game more enjoyable for themselves. These players don't really damage the competitive environment simply because they don't participate in it (generally). Now the most important thing is, these players aren't afraid of getting banned - they literally state that they aren't. If you do ban these players, especially without fixing the things that they are willing to lose their accounts for, you are more than likely losing them permanently. From a developers point of view, it's much wiser to first fix the core issues that created this group, and then proceed to warn and/or ban people. (This is exactly how they handled their recent banwaves in WoW, for example.)
Note that I'm not defending anyone and my point isn't that any one type of botting/cheating is justified. I'm not making a "this is ok"/"this is not ok" statement. I am just analyzing two things which I think are different, and I am doing it from developer standpoint. I think this might explain why their bans were quite selective, and the bias towards competitive players can be clearly tracked. Those players will still come back (most of them), just on different accounts.
1
I've ran all variations of the Energy Twister specs that I've come across and the ones I stopped at are:
Group build with Illusory: http://www.diablofans.com/builds/70756-s5-gr100-4-man-push-with-wd
Group build with SoJ: http://www.diablofans.com/builds/76965-s5-gr90-100-4-man-farm-push-boss-kills
Solo: http://www.diablofans.com/builds/77315-s5-gr97-solo-energy-twister
Difference between Illusory and SoJ builds are in their gameplay. Illusory setup is better at killing trash and is more mobile, thus it's better suited for high GR gameplay. It's the best setup right now for pushing, both in my experience and based on leaderboards.
SoJ is for a more direct 'elite hunting' playstyle, which is how groups typically play in lower tiers (80-100). It's viable in high GR too (there are 110 clears with it, but only 1 or 2 I believe), but is way harder to pull off.
I can't really choose which one to recommend to a new player. The Illusory setup relies slightly more on your understanding of the game (you need to understand which trash is worth killing or not, and how to position in a way that trash surrounds you and dies really fast, etc), the SoJ setup is a more direct "find elites and kill them" thing and may be more useful while you learn the GRift dynamics (it's also more challenging in transitions so it teaches you to how to run and not die in transitions faster - you will just die if you screw up, Illusory doesn't offer this "opportunity").
Solo build is basically set in stone at this point. One thing I don't see these guides mentioning though is the importance of physical resistance (esoteric gem only reduces non physical dmg). Check secondary resists before salvaging duplicate items from the gear set - they may be worth keeping just for that.
Speed farming build is the already linked http://www.diablofans.com/builds/70681-flash-fire-wizard-t10-speed
Don't use Taeguk though. Use Wreath of Lightning for even more runspeed or Bane of the Powerful for more damage if you're still not oneshotting T10.
For Bounties, you want to use Familiar/Arcanot instead of Diamond Skin/Prism, Power of the Storm rune for Storm Armor, and the AP passive (forgot its name) instead of Elemental Exposure. Put Aether Walker and Goldwrap in cube and craft a Cosmic Strand at the blacksmith. That way you can just spam teleport all the way to the bounty objective, do it and bail. Ignore everything else - the legendary drop chance only works in rifts, not in world, so during bounties you ignore literally everything and just do the objective. (Goblin bandit shrine is the only exception I can think of)
Also for normal rifts, you might want to get a Sage's set (also crafted, helm/gloves/boots). It increases Death's Breath drop by 1. You can drop Firebird's set for it and use Corruption for shoulders.
I love the ET playstyle in GRifts and the current group meta. It's the reason I still play - I just enjoy the gameplay.
As for tips... one mistake that I did early on is waste mats on crafting stupid shit. The thing about itemization in Diablo is that the only slots that are really hard to get right are rings, amulets and weapons. So my pro/bro tip would be to do the mat shuffle properly since day 1:
1. Look at number of Forgotten Souls you have
2. Divide by 10. This is the amount of bounty mats you need. Divide by another 10 - this is the amount of bounty runs you need to do. (I just do 10 bounty runs every time I collect 1k souls.)
3. Do bounties. You will end up with tons of blue/white materials from them. You also probably have quite a bit of yellow due to Kadala and random looting of stuff.
4. Use Forgotten Souls + bounty mats for rerolling your weapon (until you get a good ancient one). Make sure you have a Twisted Sword or two in your stash for this purpose.
5. Use white/blue/yellow mats + death's breath for upgrading rings/necks which you craft at the gem vendor for basically free. You can also collect yellow swords off the ground and upgrade those for a higher chance at a good ET sword, but that's advanced techniquez. Crafting swords at the BS will use up a part of your mats for upgrades - you can do that if you want to, but it just increases the price per roll and imho just isn't worth it (depends how desperate you are for a weapon though).
6. Hope you get lucky
Don't waste mats on your farming gear. Upgrading wands for a wand of woh is maybe worth it (cuz it's pretty damn rare drop), but otherwise I wouldn't. Also, for comfortable build switching, you could make another wizard character. The GR and farming builds are completely different so its super easy like that.
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My 1k hours of gear farming are pretty real and I still have room for 3 big upgrades :\ Even with all of the things you mentioned it's still not easy to get full ancient, properly affixed gear with high rolls on the important things (key legendary effects, weapon damage, etc).
I also haven't seen a "bis" profile yet either. Not once, and I check wizards in leaderboards quite a lot (both solo and 4p).
If item hunting is your cup of tea, then in my experience there's plenty enough of it in this game. If you can't find it, you're just not looking.
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D2 wasn't really about item hunt as much as it was about trading. You didn't hunt for certain items, you "hunted" for ALL good items (it's more appropriate to call this collecting). What mattered is your knowledge and understanding of the game and market, how efficiently you farmed (or with how many accounts you've botted), and just being around at the right time at the right place to do the good trades.
I realize this is fun for a lot of people (and it even used to be fun for me long ago), and there's nothing wrong with that, but tbh one of the things I really like about D3 is the complete absence of trading. Trading is the reason I'm not touching Path of Exile. And lets not forget that trading existed in D3 at one point and it was removed because it was fucking terrible. At this point, adding trading to D3 would make it not D3 anymore. This is one of the things that is unique about D3 - it's an ARPG with no trading at all. I don't think any other even exist?
Also, to add to what Shapookya posted: the lack of respecs (both build and stat points) was one of the big contributors to D2's replay value. When I look back on it, I think that was actually kind of fun - you needed to build something to try it. Needed to fully embrace and 'live and breathe' a spec/build, from level 1 and to the end. However if that existed in a game right now, I'd just be discouraged and view it as an artificial and stupid limitation. They even added 1 respec to D2 because that concept is just outdated by now. This is called "moving on", and when thinking about design, we should try to move forward, not backwards. Try to build on or improve the current concepts, or come up with new and better ones to replace the current ones (while keeping the vector 'forward'). "Lets make D3 more like D2" would be a terrible design decision.
Edit: "the same thing over and over" could be said about LoL, DotA and Hearthstone too. Imho the problem is that there's not enough endgame, not that there's too much of it. D3 endgame is literally just GRifts and nothing else. My character feels just as powerful as it did 2 months ago in all other areas of the game except for GRifts, and the game even forces me to do those "other areas" all the time, almost sadistically so.
There have to be other activities in which you can feel progression. It can't be just GRifts.
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Overall I think bounties are a pinnacle of bad design. Just think about it: it's a solo activity, but you have an "option" to invite 3 other people to make it 3 times faster. That's it. The experience itself (the gameplay) is still solo - you just get the shit done much faster. You don't even interact with the people you invite in most cases, you just need them to 'be' in the group and that's it. It feels like a dirty and cheap trick, not a complete and intended design. It's also extremely counter intuitive for solo players and I feel sorry for anyone who's ever done bounty runs solo (a noob trap of this scale existing is a critical issue from a game design pov btw).
What really blows my mind is that not only this has existed since the beginning of the game and remained largely unchanged, it was even promoted and encouraged when they added more and more rewards to bounties. I mean, I get why they did that, game content going to waste is really bad... But why do it like this? They're completely aware of split farming and the rewards even seem to be balanced around split farm, not sequential completion. They basically solidified split farming as an 'intended' design despite all the issues and downsides of it.
Imho a complete overhaul is needed. Reducing the amount of acts to do is an okay bandaid fix for solo/smaller groups, but it doesn't fix the core issues. Split farming just needs to go. Group runs for objectives would be infinitely more fun, but of course they'd need to redesign and rethink everything to make it work.
P.S.
Also, do you know how people farm for specific bounty mats? They wait until the act they need is first on bonus rotation (which shifts every hour), then they join public games, do just one act and leave the game. This leaves the group with 1 less player permanently, because the public game stops recruiting once a quest is completed. Players just having to leave mid runs for whatever reasons leads to the same issue as well. This is yet another noob trap and example of horrible design, imho.
Why not make public bounties a "call to arms" sort of thing with just one act active - the bonus one. Make it the actual INTENDED way to target farm for specific mats. This would be incredibly useful for crafting blacksmith items, for example.
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Am I the only one that actually enjoys the mat shuffle? I have close to 1k hours played and 2k paragon on my Wizard (this season) and I still don't have a good ancient amulet or rings, and my weapon could use a significant upgrade. I don't feel like I'm particularly unlucky, as I always get an upgrade once every week or two, which I think is fine tbh because my gear is literally 3 steps away from 'perfect'. I'm also still looking for good pieces with higher int rolls than on my current set, as well as pieces with physical resistance for solo GR pushing purposes.
Mind you, I never do NB runs and I get like ~500 souls a day, I do bounties and I rarely have over 2k of any material. I think about items all the time while playing this game, so I can't really relate to this issue people are talking about (the game not being about items anymore etc). I don't know, it could be because I play Wizard? I guess gear matters much more for us than other classes at the moment for 4players, but don't you all still have solo specs which are extremely item dependent? I thought that's how support always worked - it's very easy to gear up support specs, and the main 'progression' is in solo (or another char).
My only gripe with D3 is the amount of time bounties and rifts take, and the fact that this time doesn't "scale" with your character power. I am farming T10 just as fast right now as I did months ago. And honestly, it's getting boring as hell to do those things. Why not introduce more Torment levels? Or make the world scale similarly to GRifts (infinitely)? The rewards should scale too, of course. Imagine doing Nephalem Rifts that are scaled like 95 GRs, but drop a whole bunch of keys. Or bounties which are actually hard and you run as a group (limit them to 1 act though in this case), doing 5 small objectives/mission as a group sounds pretty fun to me.
Would honestly not mind doing bounties/rifts for an hour or two every day. The problem is that very often I need significantly more time for it. Sometimes I get like 700-1000 forgotten souls in a day - that's 2.5-3 hours of running bounties (in a good group that does 15 min per run, which isn't always the case). Sure, I "like" bounties, but this is just too much... And then there's also Nephalem Rifts which have to be done, and they share the same gameplay and the same set of problems that I just described. Ugh.
Being so burned out over it right now literally makes me want to skip next season or just stop playing until there's a sense of progress in the 'farming' part of the game. It shouldn't be JUST about GRifts.