Items influence skill choices

[Treesh]

Since I'm too tired to play my HC girl, but keep thinking about her too much to really sleep I decided to post something that came up during our recording of the podcast. Unlike the other classes I've played (keeping in mind that they are all still little so this may change later on), my skill choices for the monk are primarily driven by what gear I have equipped mostly because of how spirit is gained and spent. There were a few times where one slow two hander was more damage and worked better than two quick one handers, but in order to really get good benefit out of the two hander, I had to change my skills around. If you've got gear with even just a couple of spirit gained per second, you don't need the quick generation of fists of thunder and can instead use one of the other primaries (crippling wave was certainly helpful for the HC girl when I wasn't paying that much attention and just ran her into larger groups of critters and Way of the hundred fists is really nice with the slower, harder hitting weapon for less defense minded specs). When I lost the spirit regen on my equipment, I was almost forced to go back to fists of thunder in order to have enough spirit to really get good use out of my spirit spenders. Now that I've finally unlocked exploding palm with the strong spirit rune, spirit isn't too much of an issue again and it's time to switch around some gear and skills again. I didn't notice having to do this on the demon hunter, who is about the same level as the HC monk, and the witch doctor and wizard have their base regen and free spells. I just change those skills around according to the situation required and/or just personal enjoyment of graphics and sounds of the skills. Maybe because of how much different items really change the feel of the monk is why I enjoy playing her so much. It's always new; it's theorycrafting on the fly for me. Some may argue that the monk is the weakest class in the game currently, but she's just too much fun for me to care if she is or isn't. =)

Edit: And for those curious, this is her current build since she just hit 25. I'm going to have to see how much spirit I can get generated out of exploding palm + strong spirit (should be a fair bit) so I can see about switching out fists of thunder + lightning flash with crippling wave + mangle.

Edit2: It's so much fun watching the spirit globe bounce all around. Her new current build is quite a lot of fun. Managed to get 21 monsters killed with one blow in Act 3. =)

[Slasher]

I'm not sure what the "normal" way to play the monk is, as I isolated myself from the game before release so it was all fresh, but from act 2 onward I've found the most comfortable setup for me has been two fast weapons, and this . Ive found that running around with the right mouse button held down works just as well as it did in D2, so thats my primary attack, with cyclone strike as a spirit dump (and interrupt for casters and big, slow swinging mobs), breath of heaven and mantra of evasion to keep myself from hitting that potion button, sweeping wind for good semi-passive damage, and tempest rush for when im impatient and just want to go through things, rather than fight, or need to get to a priority target asap. Also makes moving from one pack to the next nice and quick, as a full spirit ball is more than enough to travel with for a while.
I'd been running with deadly reach for the majority of act 1 and 2, but found that weapon speed makes a huge difference to spell attack speed (i know, who would have guessed...) and the aoe of crippling wave means i can be lazy and not have to constantly pick off stragglers attacking me from behind.

It wont be the best for later on, as i know ill need harder hitting attacks, but for the start of act 3, its plowing through them. 150 mob killing spree was fun