*yawn* Nothing I've said contradicts that. Nobody's telling anyone here to stack mitigation here and ignore the rest.

Here, I'll even repost what I wrote like, 30 pages back:

MONK INFERNO 101 (MELEE ONLY)

This is how gearing/game progression works as a monk. You first get your survivability and mitigation stats up to par: this means having sufficient armor, resists, and HP to take more than just a hit or two. Then you focus on DPS, because all the LoH in the world isn't going to save you from an enrage timer. Last and finally least, you get LoH.

The only difference is in playstyle. Before you get your LoH to a ridiculously high amount, you do high burst DPS using your cooldowns, and kite while you wait for your cooldowns to go off. You can DPS while kiting if you use a crappy excuse of a ranged attack like Deadly Reach, but anything more than that is asking for trouble. Once your cooldowns go off, you go back in, pop them when you encounter the first sign of trouble, and then pull out again. Rinse and repeat til mobs are dead.

Once you've gotten rich and buy a ton of LoH gear ON TOP OF WHAT YOU HAVE, you can then change your playstyle. You can DPS mobs for much longer before you need to pop any cooldowns. You can even start popping cooldowns offensively, assuming you are a good judge of what kind of damage to expect.

Notice that in both of these pictures, if you don't have enough mitigation/life, YOU DIE. If you don't know how to properly manage your cooldowns, YOU DIE. If you don't know how to kite, YOU DIE.

LoH is not a be all, end all solution that makes monk a faceroll class. It simply makes you kill things faster.

This post was edited by irimi on Jun 14 2012 12:54pm

Look at it from this perspective.

You have 3 bars. Damage, Mitigation, and Regeneration

Damage
=========================

Mitigation
============

Regeneration
====

A build like this is unbalanced and will die more so than a build as follows:

Damage
===============

Mitigation
===============

Regeneration
===============

So yeah you could increase your damage, but at what expense of the other 2? If its too great, its pointless. If you increased mitigation at the expense of the other two, its pointless as well. The same for regeneration.

I'll bold it, because I've been speaking about it on these forums for some time. It's all about the Sweet Spot. If you get above it without sacrificing, good for you. But for those that are having problems, focus on making it to the sweet spot, and you'll see that life gets easier.

A lot of the builds on here have stacked 1 in lieu of the other. They said a DW is not viable in the later acts. I disagreed. I explained why, and hopefully that helps the ones who are struggling. I'm not trying to argue with you on it.

Most of the builds I see here have only one thing in common: they either stack too much mitigation and have no DPS, or they stack too much DPS (or sometimes, HP) and have no mitigation.

I've yet to see someone make the mistake of stacking too much LoH in favor of the other two, but that's pretty easily explained by the fact that LoH is expensive.

This post was edited by irimi on Jun 14 2012 12:56pm

double post

This post was edited by eatingcereal on Jun 14 2012 01:03pm

Looking for advice on how to invest my 2.1 million gold. I have a monk capable of soloing Act 1 Inferno who currently has these stats:

1452 Dexterity
593 Vitality

16.6K DPS
23.7k Life
5.2K Armor
260 Res All

My worst items are:
2 blue rings: 70 Dex/14 AS
My Belt: a lvl 45 6x Dex 1xx Vit belt
My Fist: 796 blue claw
My shield: lvl 54, 132 Dex, +23 Res All
My Hands: +233 Dex, +33 Physical Resist

Now should I focus on saving for a Blackthorne's Medal? String of Ears? Fist /w major life on hit (I have zero life on hit right now)?

I would like to make the most of the gold I have, even if it means keep saving and farming for awhile.

P.S. Anyone able to explain what mitigation is? I see the term thrown around a lot when discussing monks.

Frankly, I wouldn't buy any legendaries or set items when trying to gear up as a poor monk. Blackthornes in particular is incredibly overrated and overpriced - you can get a good IAS/600+LoH ammy for a fraction of the cost, and spend the gold to make up for the stats in other slots.

String of Ears - if you can find a good one for cheap, it's worthwhile... but again, not necessary. Until you get to very late Act 3 and early Act 4, melee reduction is kind of irrelevant - you'll have most trouble dealing with mobs that kill you from afar (i.e. Wasps and Casters in A2).

I'd say bump your vit up to ~30k hp, get a lot more resists (get gear that stacks 1 res+res all) -- to about 600, and then see if you can fit in some LoH/IAS into your build. Beware though: IAS is getting nerfed very soon (tomorrow), so prices may start adjusting around that.


http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/mitigation

This post was edited by irimi on Jun 14 2012 01:01pm

1) Get good gear
2) Acquire required skills/passives (OWE)
3) click a lot
4) maybe profit

I don't stack LOH in favor of the other 2. LOH is my primary regenerator. I have secondaries, with heals and potions, but my primary is LOH. I got lucky and found something cheap, and used it. Turned out, my build lacked sufficient regeneration to be viable in later acts. Once I corrected this, and I lost a little damage out of it, things got much much easier.



Your mitigation may be a little low. I would say balance them out slightly (resists higher, armor can fluctuate as long as they're equal).

Example:

50k hit coming in unmitigated. Damage reduction is at 50%, so that's 25k. Resistance at 500 (assuming 50% there) so its 12.5k. If you use a shield at 3k absorbed and you block it, that's 8.5k you take as actual damage.

Now the same hit with unbalanced mitigation.

50k hit unmitigated. 50% damage reduction makes it 25k. I don't know what your damage reduced at 260 is, but I'm guessing it's not 50%. Just by looking at that you take way more damage. As a result, you begin to rely more on damage / regeneration. The problem is that if the hit sustained is > than your HP pool, regeneration does no good. Just balance them out (try not to sacrifice more armor than you have to) and provide yourself with a form of good regeneration, and you're set.

This post was edited by Veranor2 on Jun 14 2012 01:07pm

Eh... I dont think 500 resists is 50%. I think its pretty close though. Someone have the actual value?