I would like to start out by saying this guide is mostly opinion, based on my time playing, testing various things, intuition as an RPG enthusiast, as well as snippets of information I've picked up around these forums. I am by no means an expert on the game or the class in specific but I do think I learn relatively quickly and a good deal of the information I have learned thus far could be of great use to new players. If you think you have better ideas for some areas or straight up cold-hard facts and math that disprove things I've said then by all means feel free to post here or message me and I will make adjustments as needed.

Overview

Monks are offensive melee specialists. Monks combine attacks that generate spirit with attacks that expend spirit for deadly combinations. Their finishing moves, when executed properly, deliver overwhelming damage. Unlike most classes, monks can always rely on their bare fists in combat. Monks use spirit as a resource to power their skills. You gain spirit every time you use a skill that generates spirit as well as with each critical hit.

Class Orientation: Offensive Melee, Healing, Leather Armor

As far as Races, Monks can choose from Human, Half Elf, Halfling and, most recently, Gnome. I will go more in depth on Races in a later portion of the guide.

The Monk Starts with +10 Strength, +10 Stamina and +5 Dexterity, regardless of race. I will go more in depth on Stats in a later portion of the guide.



Races


The most important factor your race will have on your character and how you play it will be their racial ability, or in some cases, passive. Stat-wise, the race choices are largely inconsequential in the long run. If you are into min-maxing, however, here are the facts.

Human - The race with the highest inherent Strength and Stamina but lowest Dexterity and Agility. Possibly one of the strongest Racials in the game, Second Wind gives you a quick regen to health and mana as well as a boost to damage dealt and reduction to damage taken on a short cooldown.

Half Elf - Stat-wise, a happy medium. Decent in all Stats of importance. Also have a very powerful defensive Racial, Hybrid Vigor, which breaks them out of Stuns and Fears and gives them a large boost to health regen.

Halfling - Very Strong Stat-wise with the highest natural Dexterity and Agility and good Strength and Stamina to boot. Several Passive Racials including Reduced Run Skill Cooldown, allowing you to flee more effectively if it comes to that, as well as faster experience gain and treasure finding abilities. On demand they can hide, which allows them to ambush oppents, doing extra damage and stunning them for 5 seconds.

Gnome - Stat-wise, by far the least impressive in all areas. Racials are also not particularly suited to the monk as silence immunity is virtually useless to us. Strategic usage of Warp Field can likely save your life or allow you to more easily set up chains so it's not all doom and gloom if you wish to RP a Gnome Monk

Verdict: I find Halflings to be the best Race over all, especially given the reputation of the monk as a gear farming machine, as the treasure finding passive comes in quite useful there. Quicker leveling is also nice, though that matters not at all once you hit cap and becomes a dead passive. The ambush from Hide is also fairly strong if utilized properly. Your mileage may vary in all these matters though and at the end of the day you have to go with whatever you feel is the best for you. None of the options are completely awful so have some fun if numbers aren't your thing.



Also of note, I believe Male 100% to be the superior option for the monk for the extra +5 to Strength and Stamina that option provides over the Wisdom and Regen of Females, though, again, these stat gains are very minor at End Game.

Stat Weights

I will generally grade stats that I take the time to list on a scale from Okay to Good to Very Good, Okay meaning it's a decent enough stat but don't let item decisions completely hinge on it, Good meaning definitely grab this if you can and Very Good meaning drop everything for this stat! Stats I don't list are negligible for the monk. Again, this is all opinion through testing and play.


Main Attributes

Strength: Increases the majority of your damage. Most Important Stat.

Agility: Purely defensive stat for all classes but the Rogue from what I've gleaned. Increases Physical Mitigation(similar to armor), Dodge, Parry and Riposte chances. Good stat.

Dexterity: Increases Critical Chance, Critical Damage, Weapon Proc Chances and Hit Chance. Second Most Important Stat.

Stamina: Increases your Maximum Health. Okay stat.

Armor: Receives honorable mention here as an Okay stat on every item EXCEPT your boots. For boots Armor is the Be All End All stat as it directly correlates into Finisher Damage.

Hit Chance: Also receives an honorable mention here as a Very Good stat as it reduces your chance to miss which is quite strong but through Dex I seem to have capped this passively.

Offensive Stats

Critical Chance: Important for Spirit generation but not overly so due to roughly 1/3rd up-time of the Eagle Strike buff, assuming you use it on cooldown. Good to probably Very Good Stat.

Critical Damage: The amount of extra damage your Critical Hits do. I believe, but am not 100% sure, that this caps out at 150%. Very Good Stat all the way to cap as it directly correlates to a very strong damage increase.

Attack Haste: Keeps your auto attack, and by proxy things like Critical Hits and Procs flowing at an increased rate and giving you a nice trickle of Spirit. Also effects your attack ratio which has a big effect on your Kick damage, making this tied, or maybe even better than Strength.

Skill Haste: Depending on how high your Spirit flow is, this stat swaps between Very Weak and Very Strong. If you don't have much Spirit with which to use abilities than the speed at which you can use them matters very little. However, with the usage of all your cooldowns and also at very high gear levels you will have a decent overflow of Spirit in which case you will want a good chunk of Skill Haste so you can pump out more Crane Kicks more rapidly. Grab it where you can, but don't prioritize it over Attack Haste. Good Stat.

Dual Wield Chance, Double Attack Chance, +Skill abilities(I.E. +1-Hand Blunt, +Hand to Hand) and +Physical Damage/+%Physical Damage, +Offense - I feel like these Stats, especially when combined on an item, are very strong but I don't know specifically how strong. If it comes down to it, I think it might be best to ditch these for the more uniform Offensive Stats and the Main Attributes. If anyone has done any math with these, it would be much appreciated. I rate them as Good for now.

+All Skills is also probably a very solid Stat wherever you can find it.

Defensive and Recovery Stats

Resists - Second most important Defensive stat, especially when dipping into Nightmare Difficulty and even more so going forward into Hell, both of which I'm fairly certain you receive some sort of Percentage Penalty to Resists simply by stepping foot into them. I'd rate them at a Very Good level on a per-case basis, I.E. Equip a bunch of Cold Resist gear when facing off against Maelentia, etc. Eventually you will cap these in the best gear.

Reduced Duration Stats: Most important Defensive stats, especially Stun Reduction as stuns are the majority of the times I've died randomly while not paying complete attention. Fear reduction, however, is almost entirely useless as there is no reason not to take the Intimidation talent. I'd say at least a good portion of Stun Reduction is actually required. You will eventually cap all these through high end gear as well, even Fear Reduction, under which circumstance you can actually drop Intimidation if you wish, opening up 20 Talent Points. Very Good Stat rating.

Life Leech - Most important of the Health Recovery Stats as gaining Health back for each attack is very potent especially during the few seconds that Tiger Strike is down. I don't give much weight to Regen or Health on Kill however and for whatever reason they also seem harder to come by. Good to Very Good for Leech.

Dodge Chance, Riposte Chance, Parry Chance, +Block Chance, +Defense, +Physical Reduction, +Magical Reduction - Similar to their Offensive counterparts, I feel like these Stats can be very powerful, especially in tandem, though I'm not 100% sure on the precise potency. Worth snapping some up at the very least with an Okay Stat rating.

There is a caveat with Stats. As much control as you'd like to have over this it all comes down to what RNG has in store for you. You will utilize the best of what you get, generally speaking, and luck will play a huge part.

Gearing


Now, generally you're going to go for whatever pieces you can find that have nice heaping-helpings of our preferred stats of Strength, Dexterity, Critical Hit Chance, Critical Hit Damage, Attack Haste and the other strong contenders I outlined in the Stats section of the guide. Keep an eye out for any well rolled Rare(Yellow) items to round out slots that you haven't found a strong Unique for yet.

Boots are probably your single most important piece of gear for the reiterated fact that the Armor on them directly translates into your Finisher(kicks) Damage. Boots only incur a 5% GCD(Skill Haste as well as Cast Haste but that is inconsequential for the Monk) penalty from Plate and a 2% Penalty from Chain, a very small price to pay for the immense returns you will see on your damage. It should be noted that Boots with the "Reduced Weight" modification act as if they are a weight class down, I.E. Chain with the mod will act as though they are Leather for weight purposes, etc. This is what makes the Shadow Dancer boots so strong for when you get them.

Weapon Choices
Your best bet is generally to just go full H2H while leveling until you find a decent 1HB, 1HS or Piercer to stick in your Offhand as a stat stick. Prioritize Attack Haste and Strength. If you can get ahold of one early, Baron's Glissando will carry you a long way with it's super high Attack Haste and nice Stun proc on top of that.

Some Recommended Pieces

These are mostly some solid Unique options to keep an eye out for, listed in order from when you can equip them.

Boots



1HSers



Piercers



1HBs



Chests



Belt



Ranged



Helmet



Rings



Legs



Gloves



Shoulders



Necks



Shields
If you're finding yourself a little squishier than you'd prefer you can always rock a shield. These are especially good in Hardcore. Again, just look for our favored stats.



The Rogues Bloodletter's Set also has some good options until you can find more End Game pieces.



Friar's Set
The Monks Exceptional class set.



Grandmaster's Set
The Monks Elite class set. Very solid options for almost every slot.



Warlord's Set
The Warriors Elite class set. Several of the pieces are very strong on their own, and the set bonuses are absolutely absurd for us with immense Strength and Attack Haste. May be worth using overall and several pieces are worth using no matter what.



Assassin's Set
The Rogues Elite class set. Several very strong pieces from this set to fill gaps.



Again, I'd like to reiterate the Stats caveat here as Stats are about 99% tied to gear(the other 1% being Race/Sex choice). Most of this will come down to what drops for you.



On Upgrading

When it comes to item upgrades, only two items truly matter offensively. If you guessed that those two items were your Boots and your Weapon then you would be correct! Unfortunately Jewelry, Back and Range slot items cannot be upgraded. It is still a very good idea to eventually upgrade everything you can because you gain 120 All Resist(around 31% Resistance to all schools of magic in the game on Hell Difficulty) over all, which is very important for survivabilty. You also a decent chunk of Armor with all with all 8 Armor slots upgraded which will give you decent returns against physical attacks.

Now for your weapon, you get a flat increase to either +%Physical or +%Magical damage, up to 15 percent once fully upgraded. You obviously go with Physical as the vast majority of your damage is such. Set it and forget it!

Now, Boots are where things get a little more interesting. Boot Upgrades are very important, as they give you extra Armor per upgrade. The amount of extra Armor seems to scale based on the Required Level of the item as well. Let's take a look at the effect of this on two of our most powerful finishers.





As you can see, the effect of uprading your Boots is especially potent on Flying Kick, but is a rather strong upgrade to your Finisher damage either way.


Talents


As a very basic and bare-bones build you are near required to max out the Crane Kick(super boost to your main source of damage) and Intimidation(Nice extra damage debuff on Boss fights as well as the amazing Fear Immunity) Talents. From here you have some options.

I don't personally grab The Tiger Strike talent because in the grand scheme of things the damage from this skill is negligible, even maxed, and on top of that I hardly use it due to Critical Hits and cycling through Cheetah Strike and Inner Peace keeping me with a decent amount of Spirit most of the time.

Dragon Strike is my front-runner for next strongest Talent option as the +30 resist when you cap it is very strong and the coefficient on the +damage each time you level it seems to be one of the highest scaling that I've seen.

The Inner Peace Talent gets my vote as the next best option from here. Extra Damage Reduction on, what becomes, a 1 Minute Cooldown and the passive doubling of your damage debuff length for Boss fights through your fear is very strong.

I feel that the next two options that I would consider are basically tied, those being Stone Fist Reversal and Flying Kick. SFR making you immune to both Physical AND Magic damage for 3 seconds is absolutely absurd. The more offensive option, Flying Kick, amps up your main 1-Hit Boss Nuke, as well as adding some passive damage to any elemental damage you might have, including Dragon Strike. I haven't tested the 20 Skill Bonus for Flying Kick yet so I'm not 100% sure on the exact potency of this talent when capped.

As far as every other talent is concerned, I don't consider many of the others to be contenders besides perhaps Ancestral Flurry or Eagle Strike and even those seem entirely situational to me.

Here's my current path.


Feel free to try out any combination and see what works for you. I may also just be completely missing something on some of these. If so, let me know.


Advanced Monkery

The Opener

For a normal enemy my opener tends to be Cheetah Strike into Inner Peace to get the Spirit flowing, followed by Eagle Strike to get the Critical Hit Buff and then Dragon Strike for the Damage + Spirit and then a dumping of Spirit through Crane Kick until the enemy is low, at which point I chain and then spam Crane kicks ad nauseam.

On a Boss/Rare/Champion enemy my opener is the same up until the Crane Kick dump. Here I toss out an Intimidation to get the Debuff rolling followed by Flying Kick for a fat nuke of damage followed by general Crane Kick spam.

Defensive Cooldown Usage

After your opener on a Boss/Rare/Champion the enemy may not always be dead. At this point it's time to cycle Defensives and Recovery/Healing abilities. I tend to open with Stone Fist Reversal when the enemy begins hitting me again, buying myself 3 extra seconds of Crane Kick spamming. Once I take a little extra damage we default to Cobra Strike. You can alternatively keep Cobra Strike mostly on cooldown. The important thing is to have the Leech effect when it matters though. It can bring you from nearly dead to full HP easily from a few Crane Kick dumps. Next up are our emergency buttons of Mend and Chakra Blast. Use these accordingly. Alternatively, Intimidation can be saved as an emergency button as well.

Skill Mastery

Now, a mechanic I'm not 100% sure everyone who plays this class is aware of is the one surrounding 5 of your abilities. That happens to be the Invincibility mechanic. Dragon Strike, Flying Kick, Chakra Blast, Windmill Kick and Ancestral Flurry all make you invincible while they are happening. This is especially important for Ancestral Flurry, and Windmill Kick has it's very own mechanic, both of which I will go into more detail about below.

Any of the five abilities can be utilized in order to keep you from taking damage. This means that if you time them properly you can completely avoid Massive Damage and 1-Shot type mechanics. This is obviously easiest with Ancestral Flurry as it lasts around 3-4 seconds due to its nature. Ancestral Flurry can also be timed to absorb the entirety of a multi-tick conal attack, such as Falzitherins poison breath. And finally as another Emergency button, you can spam this if you're on the verge of death and you get stunned, praying you come out of the stun just in time and have this buy you a few seconds to react.

Now, for Windmill Kick, it is fairly obviously an Interrupt, which is a pretty strong ability within this game, especially if you have the full Friar's Set. The mastery over this ability comes from learning what spells that are high priority interrupts look like and what enemies they come from.

It is also worth mentioning that when fighting an Elite type of enemy you need to keep an eye on their buffs. If they get any of the damage absorption buffs you may want to hold off on dumping all of your spirit or any of your big cooldowns as their buffs will eat the damage right up, wasting a lot of your effectiveness. This goes for when you're under the effects of Globe of Darkness as well.

Conclusion

I feel that the Monk is a very powerful class, especially if you want a character that can make it to End Game fairly comfortably with self found gear and start farming for perhaps alts. The class does very strong damage, particularly with the right Boots, and our survivability toolkit is possibly one of the strongest in the game. The only real issue I see seems to be one that plagues most of the classes and that is that there are very clear winners as far as Talents are concerned. I especially think the Talent that buffs most classes main spam ability, usually a generator and Tiger Strike in this case, is particularly weak. Perhaps this is by design, but if not, I think a better option than a damage buff would be to buff the amount of various resources it gives you and then perhaps an extra buff or some other mechanic introduced once you get the Talent to rank 20. Other than that, I've had the most fun with my Monk so far, and I also have a 95 Necromancer and ~60ish SK currently.

At any rate, I hope the guide helps some people, and always remember to have fun. See you in Vandamor!



-Hentai




Lexicon

GCD - Global Cooldown, or when your bars go dark after a skill usage and the length of time they stay that way before you can utilize another ability.
DPS - Damage Per Second
Nuke - A large, hard hitting spell. Usually spammed.
1HB - 1-Hand Blunt
1HS - 1-Hand Slashing
H2H - Hand to Hand
Min-Max - Eking out every little bit of efficiency from a character as possible.
RP - Role Play
RNG - Random Number Generator. Luck, or the roll of the die deciding the outcome for you.

This guide is up to date as of patch 1-0-52. More updates to come with content patches and as I learn more.

Great read and very nice guide, thanks!!
Now I have to try a Monk, also because I happen to have the boots you're recommending and also another elite boots with higher armor ( +141,reviled march,plate) so I'd like to compare the two...

Nice. Thanks for spending the time to make a well done guide.

Only thing I disagree with is the boots, some plate boots will give you a slight penalty but the dps increase is worth it. For elite weapons, I feel like I've collected most of them, ebony mace seems to be the best.

Yeah, sorry if I wasn't clear there but the recommended pieces were mostly just intermediary for leveling. I 100% agree that eating the penalty on some plate boots is worth it. I actually have those SK boots too so I might try those specific ones out myself.

I also found this last night which seems to be a nice stepping stone from Fleshrender to that one you have.

Great guide, thanks for putting all that work in. I do have a couple comments from my seat in the peanut gallery.


Skill haste - 90% of our abilities are bottlenecked by cooldown timers or in the lower levels by spirit not the GCD. If you wear a ton of plate armor though you will notice an issue. This stat suffers from very serious dimished returns. I generally wear just enough to get me back up to neutral.

Bonus tip, plate armor with skill haste can practically negate the penality of wearing plate (we dont really cast much)


Str - Most important stat right now
Dex - second most import stat. stack until accuracy is 95%. slightly increases crit chance/crit damage.



Not enough good things can be said about fully skilled Inner peace/Intimidate. Though, fear only comes up a few times. I sometimes spec out of it when I know I wont be fighting a dragon/necromancer/last boss.


The 5% bonus damage from tiger strike 20, doesnt seem to show up in the tooltips anywhere and could be broken. 20 points in this skill seems to add about 10% to the overall damage of it (see below).



Sample damages from my level 68 monk, 159 str, 50 AC boots.

0 skill:
Tiger 125-261
crane 736-1063
Eagle 367-409
wind 2332-2914
chetah 318-409
dragon 123-154
flying 5934-7429

20 skill:
Tiger 137-285
crane 944-1366 x2
Eagle 488-554
wind 2706-3394 (435-512)
chetah 367-470- (614-1000x3)
dragon 293-366
flying 6797-8508 + (1000-1700)x3


So despite the scaling being awesome on dragon strike, if you are putting points on it, it should be for the resists, not the damage. Also this seems to be coded as a spell (You can't stun with it coming out of stealth).

Also of note, 5 str = 50 damage for flying kick. Removing the AC 50 boots dropped dragonkick damage to 3045-3818

Thanks for the input! Some of that is definitely confirmation of what I thought. I'll update the guide a bit with any of that I didn't have in there.

Added a section on Item Uprades as well as a larger selection of items to the recommended list.

Not too bad of progression here . I know some of you Grandmasters have way higher combos but I accidentally killed the last mob as I'd had a chain of around 20 Champs and then a random regular mob got 1shot by a fat Crane Kick crit lol. We seem to be able to keep up a little with Enchanters/Bards given the right amount of attention and TIME. Chaining seems super time intensive. This chain got me nearly 2 levels though, lol. The REAL limiting factor seems to be bag space though. I have it filtered to only grab Uniques right now just for this and I'm still randomly having to delete ones I don't want WHILE in combat. WTB more bag space pls.

Item space... actually not a bad idea...

Tabs, tabs and more tabs

And a 'sell all' button on the merchant would be nice too.

/signed

/signature number 2

Pretty sure I could keep this up for hours on end, but again my bags filled with loot I wanted to take a closer look at. This chain gained me 3 levels, lol. That Chain Machine life.

brb nerfing monks

But seriously... that's some serious monk deeps. Must be the badass bewts.

I'm still rocking Shadow Dancers as I haven't found anything better. On bosses where I go full burst I typically do between 12 and 22k DPS depending on how much I crit.

Lol.. not even about to post my dps for fear of the nerf bat.

I'm working my way through Hell right now to begin the arduous journey of grinding out all the fat ass Elite Uniques so I can put out the big boy deeps

I'm hoping to get Nevergrounds functional and add elite set items this week. ELITE SET ITEMS YEAHHHHHH

Yay more farming C:

It'll definitely establish set items as more desirable than uniques.

That's definitely good to hear. Some Set Items seem like they don't follow much rhyme or reason right now stat/armor type wise but I may be misunderstanding the classes they belong to in some cases. Look forward to seeing what the Elite sets look like.

2 down

Noice. How's the class?