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It stacks multiplicatively. For example, if you have a 28% reduction Uhkapian Serpent the total damage reduction would be 1 - ((1-0.1) * (1-0.28)) = 1- (0.9 * 0.72) = 1 - 0.648 = 0.352 => 35.2% total damage reduction.

 

Quote from Jaetch »

Oh, man. I'm going to try using this thread idea on the official wizard forum.

I bet it WILL NOT work.

Make it work. Heavy moderation. Kind of works here as well, there just needs to be one mod quick enough

Well and it helps that DFans members are super smart and redirect people to this thread because they know what's gonna happen <3

Guiding Palm Monk: Gearing up for beginners
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.

RiF was subject in the anniversary stream, and I can only echo what the devs said:

It's not an issue. You sacrifice too much.

I've done RiF extensively on both sides - as a runner (mostly in groups of 2 or 3 and then invite someone to save rift keys) and leecher (tried to get some set pieces and earned about 10k shards for very few rift key fragments - yeah, I got super lucky, but Kadala didn't give me a single set item so I guess I paid my debt). My conclusion is the same as that of the devs: RiF is nothing Blizzard has to worry about. Running rifts in a well-geared T6 group is much much better in terms of overall legendaries, gold, and XP than rifting it forward. It only allows you to earn a ridiculous amount of blood shards, but if you're unlucky you can easily spend 10 minutes in a channel and not getting an invite or run out of keys quite fast (I once joined a rift with the other three guys being average level 630; GG).

The game is not designed around RiF and will not be designed around RiF, hence there's no need to act (or "overreact"). People might get carried in T6 RiF groups - so what? They're likely to pay the price because those people usually don't get the invite for free, and even if they do, they can get the same within their clan. We occasionally take some low level geared guys in our T6 rift runs. (Well, let's be honest, as soon as a pull monk and a jade WD meet in a T6 group everyone else is gonna get carried anyways; but that's a different topic.)

Quote from Lawlie

http://us.battle.net/d3/en/forum/topic/12674727740

Holy crap. There's no nice way to say that, so I'll be very upfront... that thread is a huge pile of bullshit. Computers aren't truly random, but the "pseudo randomness" is only of relevance for large amounts of data (and no, looting 1000 legendaries is not a large amount of data).

Even if you play 10000 hours - what you experience will be true randomness. Here's a link to a thread that actually makes sense:

http://us.battle.net/d3/en/forum/topic/6193839632

Please for the love of Diablo stop pretending that the "computers aren't truly random" lesson any programmer learns in his first semester has anything to do with Diablo un-randomness. It just makes it obvious that someone read up about "pseudo randomness" without understanding it.

No, not at all. I have plenty of crafting materials - enough of all of them except for the legendary ones that you need to specifically farm, of course. I have thousands of gems. But I can't just randomly craft all the items I could craft or all the gems into perfect 280 main stat for all characters because gold is always scarce.

Sure, in a night of T6 farming I make a few dozen million gold but in the end I could always spend another 50 re-rolls on my amulet to get that 88% CHD to 95%+. But every re-roll costs effectively 900k (gem upgrade cost). Or trying to re-roll my Thunderfury to 1470+ cold damage to have one more EE proc, but every re-roll costs a couple of million already.

There's always stuff to craft/enchant in the endgame, and I doubt that many players have too much gold (except for those who brought billions into RoS, of course).

Quote from ot4ku »

I like this thread.

Edit: Akkhan Set helmet nr. 12 today. I suppose I should still open the community you suggested Bagstone.

You. It's you. You are the reason everyone is getting bad drops. You're taking up all the good ones!

Edit: Thanks for the Akkhan set. If we can ever dye it with sponsor labels I think my crusader needs a big "sponsored by Ot4ku" sign all over.

Quote from Niddro »

Although, if you play more casual which I assume he is, that weapon will improve the everyday gaming session significantly while farming lower torments where there's no need for perma-AC. Don't be blinded by the BiS-build that you have in your head. In my opinion, he didn't ruin that weapon at all.

I absolutely agree that you shouldn't be blinded by "BiS builds". However, way more people are blinded by sheet DPS. Which is surprising because it's been many months since we all discovered that pure sheet DPS doesn't say much about your character. If this weapon had an above average damage roll he definitely ruined it. High CDR builds can do sooooo man amazing things, especially for classes that can create builds which require you to have 5 of 6 spells in your action bar to be cooldown spells.