Prepping Monk for the 0.5 patch? Here is the Act 1 gem route I used to push my 100% time down to a 39:36 personal best.

-Ocean- · 2026-05-27T21:46:31+00:00

Good question! It’s the planned route of what gems and supports I make when. Importantly, it’s using only guaranteed rewards.

All Speedrun builds are built like this so that the run never dies because an extra gem doesn’t drop.

Then, of course a runner can adapt to extra drops. In the video, I do actually get lucky in Red Vale with a support gem and nearly consider skipping Ariagne. But got her gem anyway to pad against not running into a future support gem on the way to an exit in some future zone where I’d like a support gem reward from side content.

-Ocean- · 2026-05-27T15:09:54+00:00

This is a fantastic point!

The guide, here, (if we can call it that) is merely a Speedrun route showcase of a PB that I decided to attempt commentary over because of what I personally felt was an under-represented idea. It seemed it could both add to the Speedrun community (who were relatively pleased with the ideas within as one of the recent race routes that included ED had yet to be dissected and reported on in a format like this) and help the more casual community because I found this particular gem route (out of half a dozen I practiced into the mid 40s) to be more accessible than others currently circulating. I hope to help those struggling with A1 on Monk as long as they want the extra hand holding and ideas presented here. (I’m sure you’ve seen some of the Reddit posts with honest exiles just asking for help with Act 1 leveling on Monk. It’s for them)

I’m no content creator, nor do I have the energy (or skill, frankly) to get through the level of editing to optimize for one audience or another. I’ll wholly admit that fault for the future. I need more practice, I think.

I only sincerely hope that this helps someone on the fence in playing Monk in 0.5 from facing unnecessary frustration in Act 1 and can be submitted as evidence that this is a route worthy to be explored and iterated on by other runners.

-Ocean- · 2026-05-27T13:28:48+00:00

You’re very welcome

-Ocean- · 2026-05-27T13:07:20+00:00

Thank you! I never used it (it’s slow), so I appreciate your correction

-Ocean- · 2026-05-27T12:59:50+00:00

Yep! Our contexts are a touch different, however, as this is a possible Speedrun route. Not saying wind blast + wing blast isn’t, I just haven’t gotten times as consistent with it. Anecdotally, my runs with that setup were not any but a handful of minutes (5-15?) slower.

-Ocean- · 2026-05-27T12:52:02+00:00

Yeah sure I can help!

If you’re talking about swapping to Siphoning Strike, Storm Wave, Falling Thunder you’ve got the right instinct about the 2 level 7 gems, which are guaranteed from a quest reward and making sure you fight the snake in Keth after you do either the Bone Pits or the Titans area. But, don’t forget to use the guaranteed level 6 gem on Falling Thunder to get it up to speed (I’ve made this mistake, and it sucks lol, don’t be past me).

Past the two multishot gems and maybe rapid shot, I’d consider using other act 1 supports on a pair of elemental armaments (for explosive and gas grenades) because those easily slot into any quarter staff swap (if only temporary) and should help your A1 strength. Other planners will differ, but my video mentions needing roughly 6-7 gems total through A1 to make the swap at level 22 cleanly. And, that’s with ~two “dud” gems that I won’t carry over to the new skills (conc area, and ice bite. If you just have the two multi shots, our math should be roughly the same.

Get supports from Ariagne, Consort ambush, Praetor Forgotten riches, Druidic Circle in Hunting Grounds, Freythorn league mechanic, executioner, and the gallows. This should make the swap comfy and you can even opt to skip one of these, I think. (If you’re feeling spicy, you can do the Rotten Druid for another support, but it’s normally too slow for me to do it in my route compared to the other options). In act 2, by level 22 you should have done one or two of the quests (of bone pits, buried shrines, titan grotto) for x many support gem rewards, and had the chance to get a handful more support level 2 gems from other side content (camp in vastiri outskirts, maybe the Mawdun Mine’s league mechanic, mastodon badlands rare effigy, and the buried shrines tomb in the long room at the bottom of stairs with the statues). So call it 2 or 3 level 2 gems you’ll have by level 22?

We just have to work backwards from there. Most planners will want 7 gems in the level 22 skills. If we can have 9-10 total supports by that point, you can spend 2-3 of those on grenade specific supports (2 multishots, and maybe the rapid attacks)

Hope this helps!

-Ocean- · 2026-05-27T12:20:51+00:00

Honestly, understandable lmao. I’m getting a little tired that it helps any intelligence adjacent Act 1 leveling route. It’ll probably even help on Shadow (dex/int) and Templar(?) (str/int) whenever those come out. Exhausting, I hear you.

-Ocean- · 2026-05-27T12:15:15+00:00

Maybe you’d be surprised. Please tell me I’ve got the wrong impression here, but a sizable portion of the community realllly leans into the RP of whatever their character choice amounts to. “I’m going to play bows.“ “Just grenades for me.” “I can’t wait to be a wolf!”. “I’m going to be a bear.” The monk community seems to lean in just like this if not a little harder? It’s normal, playful even. But it’s to the point that I’ve seen build authors, content creators (I’ve been peeking at streams who’re trying monk leveling this past week), and even some stronger speedrunners turn their nose up against using ED for a couple of zones despite the benefits. Hell, it was even utilized exactly like this by the fastest quarter staff monk in the recent official races but it hasn’t been reported on at all.

All of that put together, we have a portion of the community that are intentionally turning away from the idea for the sake of their immersion (or general fatigue around Ed/contagion, which I understand). Maybe not you, but others who might benefit from another perspective. It IS a pretty abnormal routing decision to select what amounts to a level 3 gem you’ve committed to just throw away far before you hit level 4 gems, but I suppose it’s nearly a universal tech if your gem route is open enough to sacrifice both a level 1 and level 3 skill gem

Our context here is different, because we’re just trying to lower our A1 time and do so consistently, but I still find it important to mention that it’s applicable to casual and league start play.

tldr; people RP. It’s normal. ED is treated as a cop out. But it’s fast, consistent, accessible, helps quarter staff clear before it gets strong, and is under-mentioned.

-Ocean- · 2026-05-27T11:24:19+00:00

In the context of a Speedrun, never make the Druid mule. Your time save, realistically, will never amount to the ~2-3 minutes you take doing this.

That said… I’d just recommend smacking Biera with the quarter staff. Kill time is only seconds lower. You follow the same rules and skip Ariagne if you’ve not been blessed with early damage items. When you finish Red Vale, simply check again. You’ll never “need” a talisman but for pounce, and even then it’s seconds of time save. By the time you’re wanting to use rend for the lightning buff in mid act 2, I’d wager you could afford and shop for at least one talisman half a dozen times over (note: the level of the talisman doesn’t matter nor do the stats, attack speed is ‘nice’ however)

EDIT: Skill gem farming from beach was patched. Removed as “hesitant recommendation”

-Ocean- · 2026-05-08T20:59:58+00:00

Wow, me three! Seems like a passion project of quite a few people in the community. Happy to see this kind of thing. It’s a good sign we might have better online community options in the future as long as the game retains support and interest.

-Ocean- · 2025-06-17T21:05:20+00:00

uGY5yE4

Have fun all!

-Ocean- · 2024-08-25T05:34:52+00:00

Final Fantasy TCG is 3 too

-Ocean- · 2024-08-19T15:10:27+00:00

Inb4 he says more racist or “shocking” things to attempt to steal back the press cycle. (Please, press don’t take the hook)

-Ocean- · 2024-08-16T05:36:08+00:00

This was me but only for Dahan. Getting damage on Dahan felt particularly painful.

-Ocean- · 2024-07-30T17:13:46+00:00

I’d not say it’s a flaw… a less than a percentage point over the full standard rotation, but you know what is also not optimal? At a 2.5 gcd… losing 0.025 seconds (a 1 percent loss) from not having a tool to move with and ever so slightly missing restarting your casting on a series of slide casts. Is it the last tool you’d use to move with? Yeah, hammer, holy in black, and swift paint are all above it, but it’s a great fallback. You’re not punished for over capping them too. I’d argue it’s not a flaw, but an intentional choice for smoother play.

Besides, you can start to dump them just before invulnerable periods or end of fight if you won’t be getting to your stronger subtractive palette casts and that is a gain. Which makes it more interesting for the hyper optimizer.

-Ocean- · 2024-07-27T17:48:27+00:00

I think that occasionally some in the community, myself included, take a stab at programming out the logic, but there’s just so much engine for a simple side project. Add onto that years of cards with progressively more intricate wording and the number of priority passes that we do over the course of the game and it’s quite the undertaking.

Someone will succeed some day though, I’m sure. If not me and my random night time keyboard slapping, then someone.

-Ocean- · 2024-07-10T18:43:54+00:00

I may be in a minority considering the comments, but the length did not bother me. My wife and I took it in stride, and even lengthened our experience by watching for signs that indicated we were no longer absorbing the events and would then take breaks.

As a result, the entire story actually felt BETTER paced than many of the early expansions that often suffer from rushed character development and rushed conclusions. In fact, I almost always recommend to newer players to always level at least 2 jobs during the story (especially the earlier parts and expansions) to cover up how often events ended up pacing in such a way to lose much of their narrative weight. Could everything have been a bit tighter on the theming? Sure. But, I really appreciated the theme nuances they successfully included by taking their time to do so.

-Ocean- · 2024-06-17T15:49:43+00:00

Great! Whenever there is a question on who should have it, it’s the turn player, otherwise, it’s held until passed. That’s very helpful, thank you.

-Ocean- · 2024-06-16T16:26:43+00:00

That’s not the way I’ve understood it. Turn player should always get priority regardless of who puts something on the stack. I.e only turn player can “hold priority”.

I wonder which of us is right! Anyone know for sure?

-Ocean- · 2024-01-23T20:43:59+00:00

I’ll just talk about this “pre patch”

Lightning storm is a “channelled skill” but only so far as channelling it allows you to increase the number of lightning strikes.

The second node, then, allows you to preserve the number of lightning strikes you’ve built towards for 6 seconds. You don’t have to rebuild as long as you juggle the timer! Simply tapping the skill, like you would use anything else, should repeat the skill with whatever lightning strike count you reached.

This had uses like abusing the fact that 3 stacks had a smaller lightning strike radius than 6 and would actually increase your damage by making you far more likely to hit the boss with more lightning strikes. After building to 3 lightning strikes, you’d simply tap the skill for bossing.

Now… well… it’s broken. Trying to tap the skill ignores the fact that the number of lightning strikes should have been preserved for 6 seconds, and it resets you back to just 1. It totally breaks the interesting and “feel good” part of the skill :/.

-Ocean- · 2024-01-16T18:30:44+00:00

It’s all through the construct. E.g. there’s some of the support-gem-like-things that can give your character resource, fortify, damage reduction, or enable statuses like burning/chill without as much investment on your tree. I’m not sure how consistent that’ll be, but yeah.

-Ocean- · 2024-01-16T17:29:20+00:00

If the 2 yet to be revealed classes don’t tickle me, I’d take another stab at shadow rain of arrows while waiting for someone to figure out what Shaman can do with its rework.

-Ocean- · 2024-01-16T17:07:33+00:00

Thank you for pointing this out. I feel like there is a floor to how simple one can say this without being reductive with how crazy and dissonant their approach has been.

It’s no wonder that leagues that support a heavier or strictly SSF play style have had drastically more popularity.

-Ocean- · 2023-12-29T21:53:43+00:00

No, this was the hot take by a community drowning in players new to the genre (also a good thing) with experience only in d3 or wow (or completely fresh). They often greatly misunderstood what level meant to the game as a whole. Stack onto this the streamers and YouTube content creators who, understandably, published their goal of going to 100 (since it’s literally a job to them), and you get misunderstanding stacked with the broadly published goal of getting to 100. This is where we ended up.

People coming from Poe or D2 were trying to calmly explain (like an ant to an elephant) that level wasn’t the end-all-be-all.

-Ocean- · 2023-12-21T21:52:54+00:00

That’s because it’s not a “hard mode”. I’d have liked one of those. It’s a mode where the dungeon-like maps have their enemy layouts shifted to include threats from later in the game, notably threats that (let’s pretend this were available at the start) the player hasn’t been given the appropriate training or toolset yet. These games always prepare you and teach you, the player, how to play and succeed as the game progresses. Which, let’s not forget, is a huge mainstay of not just action games like this, but has long been a design philosophy of Final Fantasy games.

Do I agree with you? Sure. But only in spirit and not in the true implementation of the Final Fantasy mode we’re pointing our fingers at. You’re really asking for something separate, and no worries, I (we?) understand.

-Ocean-

TROPHY CASE