Nenfenthar

I've been playing a lot the last few weeks with the new compendium out and the International coming up later in the summer.  I feel like I'm not sucking as much this year.  I usually prefer all random, random draft, and single draft public games, but I still queue for all pick and least played too.

Welcome!

Welcome.

Welcome to the guild.

I really like Resolve passive, especially with Sweeping Wind, but without MoE, I feel that Guardian's Path is a good choice with a dual wield build. If I'm doing Act I, I usually run MoC too.

Is 100 fist spirit generation fast enough for you? I have almost almost defaulted back to FoT + Thunderclap because spirit generation seems more stable, especially with the IAS nerf.

Yeah, Serenity/Heal + Breath is plenty of healing for me too.

I find it a little sad that OwE and StI are almost defaulted for every monk build, due to the nature of Inferno.

If you don't have to constantly duck in and out of combat, spirit really isn't an issue. It's a very fine line between being spirit starved and spirit gorged. There really doesn't seem to be an in between really.

Act II did feel easier for the 15 minutes I played it last night. Maybe I'll get to Belial this weekend.

Crafting.

Some parts of Act III are more difficult than others for a monk. It was the outdoor/bridge part that really destroyed me, with all those pestilence mobs. Vortex + arcane on a pestilence champion pack....yeah. I think I just grouped up and forced it. I think this is where gear really starts to matter. And the difficulty isn't linear, especially as you go from act 4 to Inferno. With Huntyre's stats above, Act I Inferno should be relatively easy barring some of the nastier combos, while Act II feels at times impossible.

What's your armor at?

I'm pretty much where you're at as well with respect to Act II. I don't get owned by trash much (dodging the bugs if really the only way right now for me), but some of the champion combos destroy me. Even with both (armor and magic) at 65% reduction for me, I still get owned by many ability combinations. I've read that 900+ resists is almost necessary if you want to survive things like wall + poison + vortex + mortar. Also lots of Life-on-Hit seems to be the norm for melee as well. I've heard upwards of 800-1000 LoH is not uncommon for successful completions. I am far from there yet.

I've had better luck using MoE + Hard Target, than I have with either MoC or MoH. MoC kills things way faster, but I can definitely feel the reduced survivability. Changing skills removes NV, so doing so is pretty much taboo unless I'm just going for a boss kill, ignoring NV. I usually spend the night trying out something new and see how it goes, only switching after NV has dropped off because I've been dying to the same thing for 30 minutes. I had a Horde Fast Mortar Jailer combo last night that I ended up leaving alone.

A 20%+ chance to block shield is nice to have for harder combos. At least swapping gear doesn't make NV drop.

I've been using deadly reach + keen eye a lot lately for my spirit generator. I like crippling wave a lot, but being able to hit things standing in pools of poison (without standing in it myself), or behind walls is a nice bonus. I also use FoT with Thunderclap often for something different.

OwE and StI are pretty much the two passives that almost seem required with lower gear levels. I too swap out the 3rd, with no real magic ability yet.

I've soloed Maghda, but I think I only had 2 or 3 stacks of NV when I killed her. I'm in the gathering blood stage of the next quest.

Yes.

Congrats

I wish I could switch out mantras depending on what I'm fighting in Inferno, but losing any stacks of NV hurts too much.

Yeah, I used MoH in the beginning of Hell with the old bubble rune, but towards the end, it was entirely evident that I either needed to avoid damage altogether or kill the mobs faster than they can kill me. That means I'm either using Evasion or Conviction. Since the healing on MoH doesn't scale at all, I would only use it for the resist rune.

As a monk, if I am not in or close to (depending on my spirit generator) melee range I am not generating any spirit. In a dungeon, I can't just run back the way I came and regain spirit, because all the mobs are dead. The current +spirit regeneration items are rubbish (+0.5 spirit regeneration...yeah, okay). If the champion pack has invulnerable minions or shielding, I do not gain spirit when hitting them. After a death, I am set at half max spirit. Attack speed is the only way to noticeably increase spirit generation.

The curve from Act I to Act II is very steep right now. I go from being able to beat many champion pack combos to getting 1-shot by normal mobs. If the defensive gear I needed for Act II actually dropped in Act I, it would provide a way forward, but I have found that kind of gear is pretty elusive in Act I.

Yeah, I like Windowed Fullscreen too.

Yeah, my mistake has been looking for weapons 55-60.

The problem I'm having with Inferno is that the items that I saw drop in Hell would never adequately prepare me for Inferno. As a monk, I got to Inferno with ~6-7k dps, ~30k hp, 40-50% armor reduction, and about a 25% resists across all resists types (which I think might be broken anyway). I never saw a 1h weapon in Hell over 300 dps. Armor drops had at best 25-35 points for one resist type. Main stats like dex and vit were less than 100 points each. I bought my 350 dps weapons off the AH, no doubt from someone farming Act 1+ of Inferno, which is where I finally see these weapons drop. If I could actually get the items from Hell to help me in Inferno, I'd be fine with that. Right now, it does not really happen. I don't see myself spending upwards of 1mil even for a decent 650 dps weapon, never mind the 800-900 dps weapons which are currently going for multimillion gold.

I have tried a bit of act 1 in Inferno, but I can clearly tell I'm woefully under-geared for it. Heck I was under-geared for Act 4 of Hell, given some of the champion packs I faced. If the gear doesn't drop in Hell, but I cannot kill reliably in Inferno, the only choice is the currently expensive prices on the AH.

If you want (need) to stand in green puddles, molten floor, arcane beems, fiery chains, etc. to melee something, you need very high resist or a very large bubble, sometimes both! The rune provided a spammable (while you have spirit) bubble based on a percentage of maximum health. It was overpowered with high vitality levels.

There are not many ways to generate significant amounts of spirit without being in melee range.

The dodge mantra and the resist mantra are mutually exclusive.

It may be misinformation, but I've read in a few places that the champions in Inferno cannot be dodged. I haven't gotten there yet, so I have no first hand knowledge.

I will keep playing my monk, but I definitely won't be trying much solo. For me, even before the nerf some of the packs in hell are just not worth the time to kill them.

I saw this coming. Most monks used this until resist stats were high enough to make the resist rune worthwhile.

Chains + molten + fast, as a melee.

I guess D2 is too far out of memory for me. There was a desert?

The insects were annoying at first in Normal, but arcane + walls I think replaced that in Nightmare. I'm scared of Hell; just hit 50 last night.

An orange belt that I would actually use dropped for me in Act III NM yesterday. I almost dismissed it as trash. That dull orange is too close to the dull grey for my eyes.

Hurray! Yes I can change my battle tag.

Server was just taken down at 9:30.

I fell asleep in my desk chair at 2am, woke up at 2:30, shut everything down, and went to bed. For some reason I woke up at 7am and got to work by 8.

Depending on how much I get done today, I am seriously contemplating taking tomorrow off.

Does this mean that the beta client won't patch to retail? That's kind of lame if so.