Support Monk Skills and Runes

Table of Contents

• +Introduction
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. Quick Reference
    • 2.1. Skill Setup
    • 2.2. Gear Setup
    • 2.3. Legendary Gems
    • 2.4. Kanai's Cube
  • 3. Role in the Current Meta
  • 4. Reading Further
  • 5. ChangeLog
• ×Skills and Runes
  • 1. Rotation
  • 2. Skills, Runes and Passives
• +Gear, Gems, and Paragon Points
  • 1. Best in Slot Gear and Alternatives
  • 2. Paragon Points
  • 3. Gems
  • 4. Kanai's Cube

General Information

Below, we explain how to choose and use your skills when playing Support Monk in Diablo 3. Updated for patch 2.6 and Season 11.

The other pages of our Support Monk guide can be accessed from the table of contents on the right.

Active Skills
Crippling Wave Tsunami Blinding Flash Crippling Light 1 Epiphany Soothing Mist 2 Cyclone Strike Implosion 3 Inner Sanctuary Temple of Protection 4 Mantra of Healing Time of Need
Passive Skills
Near Death Experience Beacon of Ytar Resolve Unity

1. Rotation

The build assumes a protector position in Greater Rifts, opening fights for the DPS characters to clear in relative safety. Begin combat by dropping an Inner Sanctuary circle beneath the DPS of the group, followed by drawing enemies in with your Cyclone Strike, and finishing the rotation with a debuffing from Blinding Flash. Where a support Barbarian will be responsible for long range enemy pulling, you will be responsible for much of the actual enemy stacking, as well as reducing enemy damage through Crippling Wave Tsunami stuns and Mantra of Healing Time of Need. You will be constantly healing your group through the effect of Epiphany Soothing Mist, which you should activate on cooldown.

2. Skills, Runes and Passives

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.

Cyclone Strike will be used to trigger multiple bonuses for the build. Its obvious crowd controlling function will be further strengthened by the Implosion rune, extending the vortex effect to the impressive 34 yards. It will additionally trigger the damage bonuses from Strongarm Bracers in speedruns, and the mitigation from Resolve.

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 Cyclone Strike and Mantra of Healing 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.

Blinding Flash extends over the 11-yard circular area of safety of Inner Sanctuary with a 20-yard crowd control from the blinding effect. This utility cooldown brings further value with the damage reduction of Crippling Light, knocking another 25% off the incoming hurt for 5 seconds after the Blind wears off. Note that there is a viable alteration of the build that uses the Uliana set and slots Exploding Palm The Flesh is Weak in the place of Blinding Flash. Check the gearing section for details.

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 30% damage reduction below half health through the Time of Need rune — helpful to survive bursty elite affixes. Its 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.

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

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.

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.

About the Author

This build is presented to you by Deadset, one of the very few professional Diablo 3 players. Deadset regularly publishes video guides on Youtube and streams on Twitch, where you can see how this and other builds play out in practice.