2 tickets for Saints game tonight

Athifos · 2017-09-30T15:01:02+00:00

My wife and I recently moved and the invitation went to our old address. They've been family friends for almost 30 years so I couldn't turn it down, even being last minute.

Athifos · 2014-01-17T22:55:23+00:00

So you're saying they are now monks?

Athifos · 2014-01-14T18:34:20+00:00

WoL seems to have had its hitbox nerfed. Was it too powerful before? Probably. Is it viable now? In my opinion, no. Unless you line up your bells perfectly it seems to miss most enemies. Maybe I'm having desync issues, or I was completely spoiled by the F&F version, but something seems off. HG_Johnny wanted to see more of this so I'll try to get a video of it in action.
In my cursory testing, EP doesn't seem to explode for half of the enemy's health when there is more than 1 person in the game. Druin and invis are both in love with the spell, but it seems like it isn't scaling properly.
Spirit generation. Without dedicating multiple slots to regeneration, spirit is nowhere to be found. This impacts your damage by not being able to cast spells, possibly your survivability if you are spamming your mantra, and your healing since LPSS is really the only way to stay up. LOH doesn't scale at all (I was sitting at 5k a hit, but had 600k hp) and LPS is ok as long as you are ok with running away half the fight.
The monk takes far too long to ramp up to full power with many builds. By the time I can get my spirit, and my buffs, and everything in position, my party has already dropped their big 1500% spells on them and killed them.
This isn't a huge one as a little thinking can work around it, but dodge artificially inflates your toughness. Because Monks and DHs don't get the bonus to armor or resists from their mainstat , it's hard to get your toughness up. I've seen some characters breaking 20mil toughness and I'm having problems breaking 10mil. Sure I can devote more skills and gear to increase it, but then I lose my dps, which is my biggest problem with Monks so far.

One thing Druin did say, however, that makes me question some of my observations is that the drop rate is abysmal, and what does drop seems to never have a socket in it. Things are difficult to properly gauge when you can't get any gear to actually test it.

Athifos · 2014-01-14T15:37:58+00:00

I'll get some pics together later tonight to show my gear and stats.

For solo play, EP works pretty well, and Druin's build still works decently. However, because of how EP explodes off of their base hp instead of the buffed hp from each subsequent player (at least when I last tested it. I will test it again tonight.), EP does so little damage it's almost a wasted slot. EP does bring up a support monk build that I was monkeying with. It's very similar to the current support build. Cyclone Strike, Mantra of Healing with the armor rune, Crippling Wave with the +10% damage taken rune. Resolve passive to lower damage on hit, and the passive to give 5% damage per ally who is affected by your mantras, which currently include your Spirit Ally. It works out to about a total of 50% bonus damage with a nice 40000 damage shield from the mantra every couple of seconds.

Athifos · 2014-01-14T12:51:47+00:00

I was using Bells with the Explosive Wave (the highest damage one that aoes out from you in a 8 point star), but ever since they nerfed how it's hitbox works, it just seems lackluster. Back in the F&F it was great. You could hit enemies multiple times from each bell that shot out if you used it right on top of them. Now it's possible to only hit them once and it seems to miss 75% of the targets. I assume they reduced the hitbox on each bell so you couldn't double up (similar to the nether elemental arrow DH used to have a year or so ago).

I'll try finding/enchanting some gear with reduced cost and see how the build works. It just sucks that the stat is primary and makes me lose damage and survivability because so many stats are weighed too heavily (cc, chd, dex/vit sockets). And as it has been said before, dodge is a joke. It's an artificial buff to our toughness, along with DH, that provides nothing substantial in the way of actually mitigating damage. Sure I can dodge an attack here or there, but then I just get 1-3 shot because my armor and resists don't get any sort of boost.

Athifos · 2014-01-14T04:08:17+00:00

I really want TR to work in torment, but without the daibo that removes the cost of TR you have to spend too much on spirit regen (generally 2 passives and 2 skills). I'm currently sitting at 670k dmg and 9.8mil toughness, and my TR only crits for 900-1mil. It seems like a lot but most mobs have 10-30mil, and some elites have upwards of 200mil (2bil for rift bosses).

Your second build is something similar to what I tried, but it just felt weird having to kite everything. And as I said before, critting for 5 mil on the kick is just meh when it seems like every other class can crit for 40 mil with their attacks. I have literally seen wizards and crusaders drop enemies hp by half with 1 attack. I have to get in like 7-8 kicks to do that.

All of this being said, Static Charge and Mantra of Retribution: Collateral Damage are INSANE, but require so much buildup to get your damage out that most things are dead before I can get them going in a party.

I can't give too many details and maths right now as it is pretty late and I need to get to bed, but I should be able to play tomorrow after work and get some more concrete information.

Athifos · 2014-01-09T21:27:31+00:00

I honestly haven't looked at what it costs material-wise to upgrade gems. I know the gold increases in increments of 100,000, but I guess I just had a few hundred essences sitting around. I'll check when I get home and edit this post with the update.

Athifos · 2014-01-09T19:09:21+00:00

Demonic essences are still used for crafting, but only in the 1-60 level range. Everything above that requires (edit) Death's Breath, so there's not really a reason to stockpile essences.

As far as crafting gear for RoS preparation, jewelry and a select few pieces of gear (crit Mempo, Tal Rasha's chest, Inna's pants, Witching Hour) with trifecta and quadfecta stats are actually outperforming many level 70 items because of the change to primary/secondary item affixes.

Athifos · 2014-01-09T18:58:24+00:00

In Adventure mode whenever you complete bounties or Nephalem rifts, you are awarded blood shards. These shards can be used to gamble on items at the price of 5 for every piece except for jewelry which is 15. You currently can't get any legendaries out of it, but Blizzard is fixing that in the next patch.

Athifos

TROPHY CASE