Introduction
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All the way back to Season 4, Shenlong's Spirit got reworked to massively buff the damage output of Generators, which allowed "Gen Monks" to become a strong META build. Meanwhile first iterations of Gen Monk were playing Mangle, some players eventually found out during the Season that Static Charge in combination with Fists of Fury was way stronger.
In groups, it turns out that any player in the party could proc Static Charges applied by the Gen Monk, as any damaging hit with a proc coefficient on a monster affected was able to proc a Lightning tick to all other monsters affected by Static Charge, this chance being affected by the proc coefficient (which is why Fists of Fury was used in solo). Say no more, with that crazy damage scaling, Static Monk dominated all the Season 4 leaderboards before getting hit hard by the nerf hammer in Season 5 to never be seen again.
Since then, Gen Monk has been used as a Rift Guardian Killer for a few Seasons, while being the top dog for solo Monk leaderboards. But it eventually fell out of relevance as other builds got buffed. Anyway, welcome to the Raiment of a Thousand Storms Generator Monk, a build that uses Dashing Strike to give our Spirit Generators a massive DPS boost. Simply put, this build is far behind every other Monk build and I would not recommend using it unless you're feeling frisky. But if competitive play and toughness aren't your thing, then let's find out how we can bring back its glory!
Very Fast ✔
Fun to Play ✔
Not Cooldown Dependent ✔
Most Furious Fists in the Game ✔
❌ Squishy
❌ Hard to Play Well
❌ Needs High Attack Speed
❌ Requires Strategic Play for Pushing
Core Setup
Items
- Raiment of a Thousand Storms (2) Bonus attack 25% faster with Spirit Generators as well as granting them 400% increased damage.
- Raiment of a Thousand Storms (4) Bonus makes Dashing Strike cost 25 Spirit but refunds a charge on use.
- Raiment of a Thousand Storms (6) Bonus gives our Dashing Strike 60,000% damage for 6 seconds after using a Spirit Generator, and every time we use Dashing Strike our Spirit Generators will do 14,000% more damage for 6 seconds as well.
- Shenlong's Spirit makes our Spirit Generators do 2% more damage per point of Spirit we have. It also drains our Spirit once it gets full and gives us a 350% damage increase until we run out completely.
- Flying Dragon doubles our Attack Speed most of the time.
- Depth Diggers gives 100% increased damage to our Spirit Generators.
- Spirit Guards reduce our damage taken by 60% after using a Spirit Generator.
- Convention of Elements for 200% damage during our Fire cycle.
Global Stat Priorities
Our offensive priorities are: Attack Speed > Area Damage > Fire Damage > Critical Hit Chance/Critical Hit Damage, along with as much Crippling Wave damage as possible. The vast majority of our damage comes from our Crippling Wave, our Dashing Strike is just used to get a further buff for it and mobility. With Attack Speed taken on every piece of gear in combination with our Attack Speed boosting skills and Flying Dragon, we should almost always be at the 5.0 Attack Speed breakpoint.
Assembling the Build
Item Stat Priorities
Gems
Skills
Passives
Paragon Points
Follower
Gameplay
Hardcore
Variants
Concept
In solo we have to pull everything, stay alive, and kill everything by ourselves but the style of play is the same as covered in the main gameplay section of this guide.
Gameplay
Make sure to use your Way of the Hundred Fists often to get that buff up on as many enemies as possible and use Dashing Strike at least every 6 seconds. Cyclone Strike is here to help stack enemies together before we start a Shenlong cycle. Make sure that you commit to gathering large packs of enemies before attacking, otherwise you will lose the opportunity to deal significant Area Damage. If any elites survive after the trash is dead, drag them forward to another giant pack before DPSing. When the Rift Guardian spawns just continuously attack to build Bane of the Stricken quickly.
Setups
At 3000+ Paragon you can drop Ring of Royal Grandeur for Convention of Elements, and then lose Cyclone Strike for Fists of Thunder. If you're struggling to survive you can drop The Witching Hour for String of Ears for more toughness.
At even higher Paragon (6,000+) you can go for full damage setup, dropping Unity, Lefebvre's Soliloquy and The Witching Hour for Convention of Elements and Captain Crimson's Trimmings.
Concept
Rift Guardian Killer's (RGK) job is to kill the Rift Guardian at the end of the rift. While this build is currently too weak to compete with top tier RGKs, its insane Attack Speed combined with Bane of the Stricken give it hope for the future.
Gameplay
Similar to the solo version, except we don't have to worry about grouping enemies together on our own. The rotation is similar to solo push in that we're just blasting the guardian as hard as we can. At the start of the fight use each of your generators once to get Combination Strike stacks. After that optimal damage rotation goes like this:
- Cold
- hold Way of the Hundred Fists
- Fire
- tap Fists of Thunder
- hold Crippling Wave
- Holy
- tap Deadly Reach
- hold Way of the Hundred Fists
- Lightning
- hold Fists of Thunder
- Physical
- tap Crippling Wave
- tap Deadly Reach
- hold Way of the Hundred Fists
Setups
You can switch your rolls to Lightning and use Fists of Thunder during Holy and Physical. This will give you about 2.5% more damage, but it will cost you around 25% damage if the boss has adds. For that reason, we usually go for the more consistent Cold setup.
Video Guide
Mechanics
Raiment of a Thousand Storms
Shenlong's Spirit
Flying Dragon
Combination Strike
Summary
- Obtain the Raiment of a Thousand Storms and Shenlong's Spirit sets in full before trying this build out.
- Group up enemies by running around and then using Dashing Strike and Cyclone Strike before unleashing with your Spirit Generators. Use your other cooldowns to maintain your Spirit as much as possible and to keep your toughness up, try to time things so that you spend as much time at full Spirit as you can!
- This build is quite squishy compared to a lot of others and can be difficult to play. It has quite a unique style but can be satisfying and fun with some practice.
- Or if you're looking for something more powerful put together Patterns of Justice Tempest Rush or Sunwuko Wave of Light and dominate everything!
Town Is Lava!
Credits
Written by Raxxanterax & Northwar. Introduction by Chewingnom.