Support Monk Skills and Runes

Active Skills
Crippling Wave Tsunami Serenity Tranquility 1 Deadly Reach Piercing Trident 2 Inner Sanctuary Temple of Protection 3 Mantra of Healing Time of Need 4 Epiphany Soothing Mist
Passive Skills
Near Death Experience Beacon of Ytar Resolve Unity

The build assumes a protector position in Greater Rifts, opening fights for the DPS characters to clear in relative safety. While the support Barbarian is busy with drawing enemies in, you will be keeping your teammates alive — both through the protective circle of Inner Sanctuary, as well as the trinity of healing — Serenity Tranquility, Mantra of Healing and Epiphany Soothing Mist. You will also be reducing enemy damage through Crippling Wave Tsunami freezes, and increasing their damage taken through the interaction of Deadly Reach Piercing Trident and Strongarm Bracers.

The recommended generator skill for the build is Crippling Wave, coupled with the support-oriented Tsunami rune. This rune will reduce incoming group damage by stunning enemies for a second in a generous, 17-yard radius. As a Cold rune, it will also serve as a valuable proc for the Iceblink legendary gem, increasing the Critical Hit Chance against affected enemies for the entire party.

Inner Sanctuary is a key defensive skill in your arsenal, protecting and strengthening not only you, but nearby allies as well. On a reasonable 20-second base cooldown, this skill will serve as a protective circle when fighting within, and will render affected allies immune to crowd control from the Temple of Protection rune.

Epiphany is a staple in the Monk arsenal, allowing you to stick yourself — and as a consequence, your allies — on a target to ensure the kill. Epiphany also increases your Spirit regeneration by 20 per second, ensuring that even the most tenacious Mantra of Healing active use will remain uninterrupted. And most important of all, you will be adding the healing effect of Soothing Mist to your active abilities, dictating the use of high Attack Speed and Health Globe bonuses on gear. The scaled healing from Health Globe bonuses on gear is also the reason to take Serenity Tranquility, offering crowd control immunity and a solid shielding effect for your DPS allies.

Uncommon among the protective skills because of its spender nature, Mantra of Healing passively increases life regeneration (scaling with your Life per Second stats on gear), and adds a solid damage reduction bonus when below 50% life through the Time of Need rune. The Mantra's active component adds another Life per Second scaling absorption shield to the group, and can be spammed reasonably often due to the good resource maintenance of the build. If you are having more trouble with even damage intake rather than damage spikes, you can notably alternate this slot for Mantra of Salvation Agility.

Deadly Reach is taken strictly for the knockback properties of the Piercing Trident, which — unlike most sources of displacement in the game — is guaranteed to proc even on monsters that have reached the CC cap and are not moving, allowing for unparalleled uptime of Strongarm Bracers.

To counteract some of the damage spikes this frontline build is exposed to, we will be taking Near Death Experience — the cheat death passive available to Monks. 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 a nice bonus on top. If you are confident in your survivability, a notable alteration in this slot is Chant of Resonance for the assistance with Mantra active spam through resource cost reduction and passive Spirit restoration.

Beacon of Ytar is a solid foundation for high skill uptime, providing a 20% chunk to your Cooldown Reduction. Every second that you shave off Inner Sanctuary and Blinding Flash can be the difference of life or death of your DPS teammate.

Resolve is a key defensive passive reducing the damage of affected enemies on all auto attacks and most elemental affixes, making it a great fit for the current mitigation meta in Greater Rifts.

As a support, one of your main goals is to augment the damage of your DPS teammates — to that end, include the minor, but party-wide damage increase of Unity.