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Lasers PEW PEW PEW! INSANE DPS | Diablo 3 Monk Build | Act 1 Inferno Farming

Thought process behind this build

I created the “Lasers pew pew pew” build specifically to farm Act 1 Inferno so that I could still do good DPS and survive while wearing a decent amount of magic find gear.  I found that running my full DPS build in Act 1 while wearing magic find gear cut my survivability too low, and running a more tanky build in MF gear similarly cut my DPS too low.  So this is a compromise between the two and actually my new favorite DPS build!

Key skills

Way of the hundred fists with the Windforce Flurry rune.

This is your “laser beam” ability.  Has great DPS for a spirit generator and I was seeing upwards of 35k crits.

Sweeping Wind and Mystic Ally

These skills are great at generating consistent DPS without needing to dump spirit and are great for prolonged boss fights/elite pack fights.  You can play around with the runes, I like to use the increased damage rune on sweeping wind and the fire ally rune because they are the highest DPS runes.

Serenity and Breath of Heaven

Serenity I use the 4 second bubble, I just love it, but you have flexibility here.  Breath of heaven I use the rune that increases your attack damage by 15% for 45 seconds.  This is an AMAZING boost to your DPS and you should keep this buff up at all times.  The heal is just a nice bonus.

Mantra of healing

I use the resist rune to help increase my survivability.  Again this is another skill you can switch and swap and play around with.

Passives

Transcendence, seize the initiative, and one with everything.  These are just passives I prefer, but are not integral to the core build.  Feel free to change them around and experiment.

This build can literally cut the time it takes you to make it through an Act 1 farming run in half.  Link to the build at the diablo 3 skill calc here.

You can find more Diablo 3 Monk builds here.

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Diablo 3 Belial Walkthrough | Hell | Video Guide with Transcript

Belial is in my opinion the most difficult encounter in the whole game. Mainly because his attacks hit REALLY hard and it’s really easy to get one shot if you don’t move out of the way of an attack.

Here’s a video guide of the encounter if you don’t feel like reading.

Belial Phase 1:

Phase one is straightforward. Belial will just summon a whole bunch of small minions that you need to kill. Just don’t get surrounded and you should be fine.

After you kill his main wave of minions “mini Belial” will jump down.  This again is pretty simple.  He’ll run around the map and summon small adds.  Just focus on Belial an let the adds come to you.

Belial Phase 2:

Phase two is the difficult part of the encounter. Belial turns into his true form and brings you to his hellish realm.

He has three main attacks during phase 2:

  1. Combo #1, the “jab, hook, cross”
    • This ability does large damage and can take you down to 1/4th life very easily in one shot and kill you outright if it crits, so it’s critical to dodge.  You’ll know he’s about to use this attack when the green spinny globe appears on the ground.  When you see this STOP ATTACKING IMMEDIATELY and run away, preferably toward the center of the ledge and not the outsides so that you have more room to dodge his subsequent attacks.
    • I call this ability the “jab,hook, cross” because he will follow up his initial attack with another blow from his other arm, and follow that attack with an attack from both arms.  Once you see the first circle appear run away and keep moving.  Don’t even worry about DPS during this portion, your job is to avoid getting hit by the three attacks that are coming.
  2. Fire breath
    • After Combo #1 Belial will usually perform a fire breath that damages all players standing in a the middle of his platform. You can avoid this damage by running to the sides but I found I was able to tank it just fine and didn’t need to worry about dodging it.
  3. The “Good luck, you’re f*cked” ability
    • After a few rounds of combo #1 and fire breath Belial will dig both of his arms into the ground on the east and west side of the platform you’re standing on and proceed to rain green fire on your head.  This is by far the most difficult part of the encounter to survive.
    • I probably died a good half dozen times to this fire before I figured out that it wasn’t random.
    • The fire is not random.
    • The fire is not random.
    • One more time.  The fire is not random. The green globes indicating where the fire will land spawn at your feet and pulse and grow for about a second before the actual damaging portion of the attack will land.  So don’t panic and move methodically. If you panic and just run flat out around the map you’ll ensure that the entire map gets filled by fire and that you have no room to left to stand on.
    • However if you take small steps just barely outside the radius of where the fire will land you should have enough “fire-free” room left to stand in and survive through the barrage of fireballs.

 

Key abilities of the Monk to surviving this fight:

  • Serenity with the 4 second invulnerability rune.  Pop this when you can’t move fast enough to dodge one of his big attacks or when you get stuck in the middle of fire with nowhere to go.
  • Deadly reach with any rune you like.  The range of deadly reach is invaluable when you’re fighting Belial as you’ll be running around a lot and don’t want to have to run right up next to him in order to DPS.  This will also make it easier for you to dodge his attacks.
  • Other then those two skills the rest are up to you.  Find what works for you and try different things out!

Click to move

Click to move is a crucial keybind that you need to use in order to survive this fight. What the click to move button does(it’s under your gameplay keybinds) is that when you use this button it acts as a movement command for you to move wherever your mouse is. Normally you can move OR attack with the left click/right click buttons, and this is determined by whether your mouse is on an area of the screen without a monster or targeted on a monster.

Since Belial’s hitbox ix huge it is extremely easy to misclick when you’re trying to dodge his attacks and therefore rather than running away you’ll often end up standing and attacking him if you don’t use click to move.

I have click to move bound to my spacebar. Play around with it and see where you like it.

Belial is a challenging fight but very doable when you learn his patterns.

That’s all I have for this post, stay healthy, stay active and go get that legendary loot! You can find more Monk guides here. Click here to read my Act 2 Inferno Zoltun Kulle solo guide.

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Secret button to surviving Inferno | Diablo 3 Monk Inferno Solo Guide

I’ve discovered a wonderful wonderful secret that’s increased my survivability in Inferno tenfold(well, maybe it’s not such a secret, and maybe not tenfold.)

But it certainly helps.

You can watch my video guide here if you’d rather not read.

Stand and attack and why it’s invaluable to helping you survive in Inferno

Positioning is key to surviving in Inferno. You don’t want to run into the lava, poison, laser beams, frost orbs, or the myraid of other nasty champ abilities that you’ll see in Inferno.

When we kite it’s frustratingly(is that word?) easy to get out of position and get surrounded because of a misclick.

This is where stand and attack comes in.

Stand and attack(bound to your shift key by default) does exactly what the name implies. It forces your character to stand still and use whatever attack ability you’re clicking. Most ranged classes likely already use stand and attack but up until last night I haven’t been using it very much on my Monk.

What I do now while kiting elite packs is run away, hit my stand and attack button anytime I want to attack. This keeps me in great position and allows a much faster and easier getaway. 

Stand and attack keeps you from getting surrounded.

Too often when you click left click to attack your character just charges into the middle of the group of mobs and you end up surrounded, dead, and angry. This is what stand and attack avoids.

If you find shift too troublesome to use try binding stand and attack to spacebar.

I got this awesome tip from this great video talking about D3 keybinds.

There you have it, let me know how this works out for you. Check out this page for more General Diablo 3 guides and this page for Monk build guides.

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Guide to beating Zoltun Kulle in Act 2 Inferno – Diablo 3

Zoltun Kulle is a really fun fight and can be quite challenging, especially for squishier classes.  Here’s my video guide to beating Zoltun Kulle if you would prefer to watch rather than read.

 

Key abilities that Kulle uses:

Fireball

  • He shoots a big fireball that hurts a LOT.  I have 62% resist all and 73% armor mitigation in this video and it still takes away between 1/4 and 1/2 of my life.  There’s a very distinctive sound when he shoots the fireball and if you just move in ANY direction when you hear that sound you should avoid the fireball.

Time slow bubble

  • Zoltun will occasionally drop a time slow bubble that works much like the Wizard’s time slow bubble.  You want to avoid standing in there, as it makes your attacks slower and also you won’t be able to move out of the way of fireballs in time to avoid them.  These bubbles are very easy to avoid.  Popping serenity also makes you invulnerable to the time-slow effects(at least the part that slows your movement speed, I’m not sure if your attacks are still slowed).

Tornados

  • Zoltun will spawn tornadoes around him.  These move around the map randomly and hurt a LOT if you get hit.  Rule of thumb, if you THINK a tornado is coming at you, just move out of the way.  It may decide to veer off course but it’s worth losing a few seconds of DPS time in order to avoid a tornado, even if you’re not sure whether it’ll actually come at you or not.  Overall these are very easy to avoid provided that you’re alert.

Invisibility

  • From time to time Zoltun will disappear and laugh. I’m not sure what the point of this mechanic is. But it’s a great time to collect health orbs if you’re low on health and rez dead friends if you’re playing co-op.

Dropping the ceiling

  • Kulle will cast an animation and make another distinctive sound when he casts this ability.  It makes rubble fall from the ceiling onto your head and can be very painful if you get caught in the middle. The best strategy to avoid dying to this ability is to run 180 degrees away from whichever direction you were heading whenever you hear him cast this.

Zoltun Kulle phase one:

You start off by fighting Kulle and his two giant minions.  The minions don’t have very much HP but do hit like a truck so you want to dart in and out of combat.  Attack for .5-1 seconds, then run away, repeat.  Pop your serenity proactively to stay in there and do sustained damage.  The same goes for your blind.  Make sure the 15% increased damage buff from breath of heaven is up at all times.  Don’t be afraid to blow your cooldowns, they’re there to be used! I try to keep my CDs always on refresh, because that means I’ve got to use them more in a fight, and that equals out to more dps/more healing/more time invulnerable.

Zoltun Kulle phase two:

Phase two is really simple.  It’s just Kulle.  He’ll sometimes disappear and teleport around the map.  All you have to do is keep chasing him down, avoid his fireballs/tornadoes/avalanches.  Again use your cooldowns!

It’s not a difficult encounter once you get the hang of it. After dying to fireballs and tornadoes a few times you’ll be a pro at recognizing when they’re being cast and dodging them.

The build I used for this Kulle fight(I also got 4 stacks of Nephalem valor killing elite packs in the beginning of Act 1 before this fight using this same build).

Check out my different Diablo 3 Monk build guides here.

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Three reasons I’m very optimistic about Diablo 3.

The earlier post outlining a lot of the flaws I see in Diablo 3 was a bit pessimistic and was written after dying repeatedly to ridiculous combination of elite packs in Act 2 Inferno. Now that I’ve had time to step back and get perspective on the subject I think I can definitively say I am still VERY optimistic about the future of D3 despite any perceived faults in the game currently.

Here’s a video I made talking about the subject if you’d rather watch instead of read.

1) The game has only been out for ten days!

We as gamers tend to get tunnel vision when it comes to games and forget to see the big picture. D3 has only been out for ten days! Give it some time for the devs to really balance the game.

Remember how frustrating “error 37” was on launch day? And it felt like literally the end of the world? Well, ten days later, that’s all fixed, and thoughts of the frustrations of error 37 don’t even cross our minds anymore.

I think this will be the same with Inferno difficulty tuning. Once the dev team implements some tuning to the scaling difficulty between Acts in Inferno we won’t even think about the time when a pack of elite wasps would totally ruin your day.

Remember WoW at launch?  Here’s what I remember…

  • No battlegrounds or honor system.
  • Lag was horrendous and players were actually credited with several days of play time because of all the server outages.
  • Balance was kind of terrible in some cases.  My Rogue used the barman’s shanker and could 2-3 shot clothies.  I loved it.  I’m sure it wasn’t nearly as much fun for them. 
  • No looking for dungeon tool

I could go on and on.  So let’s not be too quick to judge Diablo 3 based on the first ten days of gameplay.

And we also have to consider that people don’t really know how to even play the game yet! I know I’m finding new builds everyday and new tactics for different mobs. Finding different gear to be much more helpful than I originally considered as well. So give it time, people will gear up, and learn to use more optimal builds and the difficulty curve should lower noticeably.

Bashiok, a community manager working for Blizzard posted these two comments on their forums in this thread

Bashiok wrote: We are actually looking at Revenge, but I was … attempting to be funny. I apologize. I realize it’s serious business, but I’m trying not to allow my soul to be crushed by exclamations that Legendary items and class balance are the end of the world and will never be fixed and the game is simply the worst thing ever excreted by humans. I humbly recommend a healthy dose of chillaxification, but I understand some people take that as an act of dismissal.

Quote by a forum user “The game is still very young, and it’s an amazing game (as most will agree.) But there does have to be some changes in the way classes play out. We were promised various viable builds for customization, but it seems like everyone is following 1 person’s build just so they can survive past Act 2 Inferno.”

Bashiok replied: Absolutely! That’s the problem exactly. These outlying OP skills need to be handled before we can pinpoint any content adjustments we need to make for the difficulty to feel a bit better, fight the need to kite everything which is killing melee’s souls, address items, like, we understand and are working on all of these things. We’re going to be working on and supporting this game for years to come, two weeks out, sure it’s probably going to need some sanding. Bear with us. We love you.

These posts give the impression that they are actively working on balancing the game especially for melee characters, and addressing itemization issues.

2) Humans focus on problems and ignore positives

This is an evolutionary development. In the caveman days if you didn’t pay attention to the dangers and problems in the world, you’d end up as dinner for the T-rex neighbor(cause let’s be serious, we all know man and dinosaurs lived together six thousand years ago, that’s just science).

 

This development of evolution carries over to us even in video games. If I really step back and look at the game as a whole I should see that

  1. I’ve been kept pretty damn entertained for over 100 hours and still feel compelled to play.
  2. There is a ton of content still to discover.
  3. Playing alts can make the game feel fresh and new again.

So let’s all step back, take a few deep breaths, and see D3 from the larger perspective.  That of a fun and compelling game with huge potential.

3) It’s in Blizzard’s financial interests to FIX the issues and LISTEN to their playerbase

You might think, “well Blizzard already has my $60, why do they care if they improve the game or not?”

I’ll tell you why!(Say this in your head with Mr. T’s voice)

  1. There’s hundreds of millions of dollars up for grabs with the Real Money Auction House. There’s been quite a bit of grumbling over Blizzard’s acquisition by Activision and what’s seen as a move away from quality gameplay and more toward a model of rake in as much cash as you possibly can. Well… in this instance, this negative might actually result in a positive. Namely Blizzard using their tremendous resources to fix and balance the game in a timely fashion.
    • So if Blizzard wants to keep people playing and keep them spending money in the RMAH, they will have to make the changes necessary to keep the game compelling and interesting for the large majority of the playerbase.
  2. From my quick calculations(I have my degree in Accounting, so these are AMAZING calculations) Blizzard stands to make $420,000,000 from an expansion if they can retain their current D3 playerbase.
    • Who wants to bet that Blizzard will be willing to invest a few million into fixing and balancing the game when the potential payoff is $420 million in future revenue from ONE expansion?

There you have it.  This is why I am still very optimistic about D3.

In the meantime if you’re just finding the game too frustrating/difficult here’s a few tips:

  1. Farm the highest level difficulty that you can easily farm to get gold and items to sell on the AH, then buy gear upgrades.
  2. Find good players to play with.  Co-op is IMO 3-4x easier to progress through than single player.
  3. Make alts! If you have 2-3 level 60’s when Blizzard tunes the game you’ll be in a great position to capitalize on the best builds and the best characters to dominate Inferno.
  4. Watch my youtube video guides at http://www.youtube.com/user/HappyJacksChannel and learn how to play better 🙂

I want to end this post by telling you that your thoughts dictate your reality. And your mind can only hold one thought at a time. If you get frustrated when you play D3 simple start thinking the thought “I’m happy and having fun”. It sounds really goofy but it works! You literally can’t hold two conflicting thoughts at the same time!

Stay healthy, stay active, reach your goals both in-game and in real life. Remember Diablo will still be here next month if you neglect it, but YOU may not be here next month if you neglect your health.

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