Diablo – How to heal the monk efficiently on higher difficulties

diablo-3diablo-3-monk

The monk has a dedicated healing Breath of Heaven, but that one has a 15 seconds cooldown and only heals me for around 20% of my current health on Nighmare difficulty now. I prefer to use Serenity with Peaceful Repose as an alternative, but it heals for around the same amount, and the 3 seconds immunity aren't enough in many cases.

There's also the mantra of healing, but that also doesn't heal for a lot on activation, and the passive regeneration is by far too weak to help in actual combat.

The healing spells the monk has access to don't seem to scale well, what alternatives are there to keep my monk healed on the higher difficulty levels?

Best Answer

One of my favorite ways to keep my Monk topped off is with the Transcendence passive. Every time you deal damage with one of your spirit spenders, you get a heal. The more attacks you make, the more spirit you can spend, the more you can heal. The best thing about this is that it's also an affix that can show up on Spirit Stones and monk weapons.

You should also look into items with +Life on Hit or +Life on Kill. The Vampiric line of affixes (gain % of damage done as life) is generally too small to be noticeable with low levels, but Life on Kill stacks pretty well, especially when wading into hordes of minions.

The alternative, of course, is to reduce the damage you take in the first place, so that you require less healing overall. The Monk, like the Barbarian, gets an innate 30% damage resistance for being melee, but there's no reason you can't add to that with a shield, the Resolve passive, or keeping up a Mantra of Evasion.

And of course, there's nothing stopping you from doing all of these together!

The problem with relying on the Monk's heals is that they scale with Level, and not with any other stats. So you should look into finding a way to heal that does scale with stats, as offered above.