Any tips on play with it? I do find that I can end up being squishy, since I'm essentially replacing serenity with Bell, and Near Death Experience with Combo-strike, but damn it's fun to just one-shot an entire group of mobs instead of waiting around for cyclone to kick in, etc.
Well it's really straightforward, and requires more activity than say, WW barb.
What I find is that you benefit greatly from medium to large sized packs, small packs of 2-3 or even solo mobs are fine too, but you get the extra 15 spirit per mob crit when you can clobber a couple of mobs together.
It doesn't require a lot of set up, like an EP build would, small grouping, dashing strike around to get your best position where you can strike a few at a time and I end up doing the following most often on MP9:
Fists of thunder to full spirit (couple of attacks)
MoC Overawe
Fists of thunder once more
3-5 Bells (anything other than big guys many times are dead here)
--- still more mobs or groups falling in behind?---
Fists of thunder
2-3 Bells again before overawe ends
Typically the spirit regen is so quick with 3+ mobs that you can just attack once or twice between full bell dropping fun before overawe ends or perhaps you miss overawe on the last couple of bells, but they're usually just for clean up anyway.
Even if there is just a group of 2-3, the spirit regen is still good enough to attack once or twice and drop a bell or two to knock out small mobs.
It's also great to see only 3% LS needed at a certain dps level, with being able to drop more bells even at my crap DPS I can already see a reduced need for as much LS as I have.
For making monk not suck with your current spec on Shakespears!!
Hats off to you for the most enjoyable monk spec I've tried, finally something with enough spirit gen to use bells like they should be used, and enough dps to get solo elites, trash mobs and goblins down without issue, bonus for being a spec that should work great in the xpac with the buff coming to dashing strike and bells not pushing things all over the place.
The major bonus, HATE HATE HATE HATE screenshake with thundercap, glad to not be using that.
I've tried nearly everything on monk in past, and every time I am severly dissapointed or the spec / gearing is lacking in some regards to it being fun, like, at all.
I always went back to barb and recently P100'd a WW barb with rend becuase it was the ONLY fun spec to play, but always I go back to monk trying to make it fun or work in some fashion.
Nirvana spec was sort of fun but:
- lacked any damage outside of nirvana
- SW drop off was devastating when moving into a new pack
- goblins or elites by themselves or not around enough mobs, forget it
- leaves too many good exp trash unkilled because of the need for packs
- forced to drop a good passive for lowered cooldowns on ONE button that actually has a cooldown
Tempest rush
- forget trying to kill keywardens or elites without freinds around.
- goblins were downright impossible without trash around.
- Required a dumnbing down of gear for spirit regen or less attack speed
- out of spirit, go die in a corner, it's all thats left for you, it takes less time to res with spirit than it does to generate more
- even EP tempest rush, same issues as before when not in groups of mobs
Standard TC SW Overawe
- Screenshake, un-effing-bearable
- slow chasing down mobs
- spirit gen was crap
- if you wanted to use EP or Bells even with spirit regen EP or lowered cost bells, you only got to cast these things once in a while
- spec was almost useable with EP spirit regen, but there is the whole screenshake issue, bleh.
On a side note, I've always disliked blind in general, so it's great to be playing a spec that doesn't need it.
The only issue even remotely worth mentioning is a lack of tornados in this spec, but that will most likely be fixed with being able to spec paragon points into offensive stats and perhaps when I get a little better gear with mor IAS.
Well, I find Overpower with Crushing advance to be way way way more useful than WotB, just personal experience, it's like an extra ignore pain, with dps and some aoe to beat down some zerging melee.
But in the end, you're definitely going to need some loh, I've tried everything to get life steal to work but in it's current form with the -80% inferno modifier (if that is right), it's basically useless as any type of main stat to shoot for.
Overpower might seem weak if you have a low crit % chance, but I am using it pretty consistently at 30% crit.
I find it amazing because it's not really range that kills you, or melee, but those combinations of both, where you're stuck plowing through melee just to get to that range shooting fireballs at you. If you pop overpower it buys you time to get through them and or buys you time to get that extra revenge proc, to buy you more time.
If you get some LoH as well, it can really save you when you get stuck in a desecration for a bit (everything reflected gives you that loh proc as well) and does a decent chunk of dmg to the mob that cast that desecration.
I've spent 10s of millions of gold trying to figure out a spec that allows me to not go full on tank and still do decent dmg to mobs, so I'm not going through the content too slowly, trying to farm act III. It's working so far with 9k armor 950-1050 resists buffed.
Same build with a few different passives, brawler, nerves and ruthless, and overpower vs. wotb. I also changed ignore pain to iron hide, for the extra duration, again, just buying time to get another revenge proc off.
0
Well it's really straightforward, and requires more activity than say, WW barb.
What I find is that you benefit greatly from medium to large sized packs, small packs of 2-3 or even solo mobs are fine too, but you get the extra 15 spirit per mob crit when you can clobber a couple of mobs together.
It doesn't require a lot of set up, like an EP build would, small grouping, dashing strike around to get your best position where you can strike a few at a time and I end up doing the following most often on MP9:
Fists of thunder to full spirit (couple of attacks)
MoC Overawe
Fists of thunder once more
3-5 Bells (anything other than big guys many times are dead here)
--- still more mobs or groups falling in behind?---
Fists of thunder
2-3 Bells again before overawe ends
Typically the spirit regen is so quick with 3+ mobs that you can just attack once or twice between full bell dropping fun before overawe ends or perhaps you miss overawe on the last couple of bells, but they're usually just for clean up anyway.
Even if there is just a group of 2-3, the spirit regen is still good enough to attack once or twice and drop a bell or two to knock out small mobs.
0
This is what I am using now, still gives you an option or two on passives, but I need the resists atm, so I take OWE.
Ideally I would like to use pillar once my APS is higher, and I generate a little more spirit.
0
1
Hats off to you for the most enjoyable monk spec I've tried, finally something with enough spirit gen to use bells like they should be used, and enough dps to get solo elites, trash mobs and goblins down without issue, bonus for being a spec that should work great in the xpac with the buff coming to dashing strike and bells not pushing things all over the place.
The major bonus, HATE HATE HATE HATE screenshake with thundercap, glad to not be using that.
I've tried nearly everything on monk in past, and every time I am severly dissapointed or the spec / gearing is lacking in some regards to it being fun, like, at all.
I always went back to barb and recently P100'd a WW barb with rend becuase it was the ONLY fun spec to play, but always I go back to monk trying to make it fun or work in some fashion.
Nirvana spec was sort of fun but:
- lacked any damage outside of nirvana
- SW drop off was devastating when moving into a new pack
- goblins or elites by themselves or not around enough mobs, forget it
- leaves too many good exp trash unkilled because of the need for packs
- forced to drop a good passive for lowered cooldowns on ONE button that actually has a cooldown
Tempest rush
- forget trying to kill keywardens or elites without freinds around.
- goblins were downright impossible without trash around.
- Required a dumnbing down of gear for spirit regen or less attack speed
- out of spirit, go die in a corner, it's all thats left for you, it takes less time to res with spirit than it does to generate more
- even EP tempest rush, same issues as before when not in groups of mobs
Standard TC SW Overawe
- Screenshake, un-effing-bearable
- slow chasing down mobs
- spirit gen was crap
- if you wanted to use EP or Bells even with spirit regen EP or lowered cost bells, you only got to cast these things once in a while
- spec was almost useable with EP spirit regen, but there is the whole screenshake issue, bleh.
On a side note, I've always disliked blind in general, so it's great to be playing a spec that doesn't need it.
The only issue even remotely worth mentioning is a lack of tornados in this spec, but that will most likely be fixed with being able to spec paragon points into offensive stats and perhaps when I get a little better gear with mor IAS.
Thanks again,
Monks +1
0
0
But in the end, you're definitely going to need some loh, I've tried everything to get life steal to work but in it's current form with the -80% inferno modifier (if that is right), it's basically useless as any type of main stat to shoot for.
Overpower might seem weak if you have a low crit % chance, but I am using it pretty consistently at 30% crit.
I find it amazing because it's not really range that kills you, or melee, but those combinations of both, where you're stuck plowing through melee just to get to that range shooting fireballs at you. If you pop overpower it buys you time to get through them and or buys you time to get that extra revenge proc, to buy you more time.
If you get some LoH as well, it can really save you when you get stuck in a desecration for a bit (everything reflected gives you that loh proc as well) and does a decent chunk of dmg to the mob that cast that desecration.
I've spent 10s of millions of gold trying to figure out a spec that allows me to not go full on tank and still do decent dmg to mobs, so I'm not going through the content too slowly, trying to farm act III. It's working so far with 9k armor 950-1050 resists buffed.
Same build with a few different passives, brawler, nerves and ruthless, and overpower vs. wotb. I also changed ignore pain to iron hide, for the extra duration, again, just buying time to get another revenge proc off.