LoD LTK Monk Skills and Runes

Active Skills
Crippling Wave Rising Tide Lashing Tail Kick Vulture Claw Kick 1 Cyclone Strike Implosion 2 Dashing Strike Radiance 3 Epiphany Desert Shroud 4 Mantra of Salvation Agility
Passive Skills
Determination Harmony Seize the Initiative Beacon of Ytar

The LoD Lashing Tail Kick (LTK) Monk revels in close combat, seeking fights constantly with Dashing Strike and drawing monsters in with Cyclone Strike. Once you have a sizable monster pack surrounding you, begin your Lashing Tail Kick onslaught. Your protection will come from a combination of the Lefebvre's Soliloquy damage reduction (triggered by Cyclone Strike every 5 seconds), the massive bulwark of Epiphany Desert Shroud, and popping the active of Mantra of Salvation Agility whenever you anticipate a burst of damage. When your Spirit runs low, you will use Crippling Wave as means of Spirit restoration, and you will enjoy the protective powers of Spirit Guards on top.

The primary damage dealer of the build is Lashing Tail Kick, amplified by the Legacy of Nightmares bonuses, Rivera Dancers and the Patch 2.4.2 rework Scarbringer. Due to its highest damage potential with the 3-second DoT factored in, Vulture Claw Kick is the recommended rune.

With its medium Spirit cost and scarcity of legendary-based resource cost reduction, you will have to devote a significant amount of your skills to the maintenance of Lashing Tail Kick spam.

To clump up enemies for the convenience of your Lashing Tail Kick onslaught and to trigger the bonuses of Lefebvre's Soliloquy, you will be using Cyclone Strike with one of the longest range pulls in the game — the 34-yard Implosion rune.

Crippling Wave will fulfill multiple roles in the build, including crowd control (Dazing enemies every third hit, an easy proc for Bane of the Trapped); keeping up the damage reduction of the worn Spirit Guards; and last but not least, 12 Spirit per hit resource generation with an extra 2.5 per enemy struck from the rune Rising Tide.

Epiphany rounds out the list of threefold value skills in this utility-packed build. It bolsters your mobility by allowing you to stick to your target, securing the kill. It increases your Spirit regeneration by 20 per second, ensuring your Lashing Tail Kick spam remains uninterrupted. Last but not least, it strengthens your defenses with powerful 50% damage reduction from the Desert Shroud rune while active. It will benefit immensely from Obsidian Ring of the Zodiac, which allows for zero downtime of this crucial self-buff.

Uncommon among the protective skills because of its spender nature, Mantra of Salvation passively increases all resistances by 20%, and adds 35% dodge chance through the Agility rune. Its active component further increases resistances for a brief duration, but should be used sparingly due to the already high resource costs of the build.

To solidify their mobility options, Monks have the most responsive and fluid movement tool in the game, Dashing Strike. A charge-based skill on a low cooldown, it will take you to cursor location without fail, as long as there is no closed door between the starting point and the destination. With two charges stored by default you can skip unfavorable fights, seek out the next pack, or simply boost your survivability through the Blinding Speed rune.

This concludes the overview of the Active Skills, now let us look through the Passives.

Beacon of Ytar is a solid foundation for high skill uptime, providing a 20% chunk to your Cooldown Reduction. The sizable 60-second cooldown of Epiphany alone is important enough to demand a high CDR goal.

A mainstay in the Monk arsenal of passives, Harmony fuels your All Resistance with 40% of the single elemental resistance per piece of gear (e.g. 100 Fire Resistance roll on the boots will add 100 to your sheet Fire Resistance and add 40 to your other resists). A well geared Monk will usually sport secondary resistances in all the gear slots that are able to roll them, adding significantly to his overall Toughness (see this build's gear page for more information).

Seize the Initiative is one of the best damage-oriented passives at the disposal of Monks, providing you with a temporary attack speed increase when engaging enemies over 75% health, translating into faster Lashing Tail Kick output for the LoN LTK Monk. As you get more comfortable with the build, you will learn to kite into and pull additional enemies or freshly spawned boss adds to effectively extend the benefits from Seize the Initiative.

Your last passive slot is a little more flexible. A general recommendation to improve your damage output is Determination, which takes advantage of the monster-drawing powers of the build to provide up to 20% additive damage increase. Alternatively, you could slot the Monk's cheat death passive — Near Death Experience — as failsafe. On the standard 60-second cooldown, it will prevent a lethal situation and restore you to 35% Life and Spirit instead. The 2-second immunity to damage and crowd control impairing effects is another bonus on top.