Monk Farming Build

The Monk is a very physical yet magical class, doing mostly close quarter combat. However it does have the ability to use some powerful AoE abilities so it should be a suitable farming class after all. The goals with this farming build, as with the other farming builds I’ve come up with, revolve around massive AoE damage, speed enhancement and energy regeneration to reduce downtime. This is a base build which you might want to adjust depending on the difficulty of the content you are farming. If it’s too hard you may need to add more damage by sacrificing speed or spirit regeneration. This build should work good for content that is slightly easier than what you would normally been doing.

Here is my Monk Farming Build: http://us.battle.net/d3/en/calculator/monk#WegdfS!acd!abZaaa

Play Style

I imagine the play style going something like this. Dive into combat with Dashing Strike (if available). Use Crippling Wave until you have enough Spirit to suck in enemies with Cyclone Strike and then immediately use Serenity. After Serenity pops, use Wave of Light and Crippling Strike to finish everything off. Dashing Strike could also be used between combat jumping from enemies that you don’t actually intend to kill. Do all this while maintaining the Mantra of Retribution and I think you’ve got a really powerful Monk Farming Build.

Primary

Crippling Wave is the best AoE ability here. The Skill Rune: Mangle, increases the total damage this ability does. This is a perfect Spirit generating ability since it achieves our primary goal of AoE.

Secondary

Wave of Light is an important component to this build, it’s a frontal AoE with no cooldown. With the Skill Rune Empowered Wave it only costs 40 Spirit, so it can be used frequently to do large amounts of AoE damage.

Defensive

The defensive ability Serenity has a 20 second cool down and costs almost no spirit (10 to be exact). This will allow you to use it every time it pops to do extra damage, with the Reap What is Sown skill rune, to all enemies around you. This works good along with Cyclone Strike, which sucks enemies towards you. Use them together when entering a room with a lot of enemies.

Techniques

Dashing Strike is the least critical ability to this build. You could swap it out for something else depending on your play style. If you keep it, it will give you a way to move around quicker as long as there is an enemy to target where you want to go.

Focus

Cyclone Strike sucks all enemies in within 24 yards. This is best used in conjunction with Serenity. This brings them him, lets them hit you for 3 seconds and then spits the damage back out at them. Then you can continue with Crippling Wave and Wave of Light. I selected Eye of the Storm to reduce the spirit cost of this to 30 spirit so that it can be used in conjunction with Serenity more often.

Mantra

There are 4 different Mantras, they stick around for 3 minutes each and give you either dodge, damage reflection, healing and an AoE debuff to enemies. I choose damage reflection to increase overall AoE damage. I also selected the +dmg Skill Rune, Retaliation, to increase its effect.

Passives

There are a lot of good damage modifying passives available but I stuck true to the goal of this build (farming through mass aoe, spirit regen and movement speed) and selected Fleet Footed (to increase movement speed), Chant of Resonance (+2 Spirit per second with Mantra) and The Guardian’s Path (25% Spirit regeneration increase). I’m not sure if The Guardian’s Path is worth it, so that would be the first I’d take down if I felt like I needed something else.

The good and bad

This build has a cool play style, lots of AoE damage, some nice spirit regen and some speed enhancements to make dungeons go quicker. It should work great for farming. However it lacks single target damage abilities and might be weak when it comes to mitigating damage. This farming build is best used against lower level mods, otherwise it will need to be tweaked a bit.

Important: Many of the strategies and tips I share here were originally inspired by the people at the Diablo 3 Gold Secrets Forum. If you're serious about making the big bucks in Diablo 3, or just being the best players, you need to signup ASAP.

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