Diablo – Should I be looking closely at vendor items at higher difficulties

Watch the auction house.

Right now, crafting materials are selling for substantially less gold than all but the worst low level blue items. You'll get far better results selling your blue items and buying Essences from the AH.

For example, current market value for normal mode mats is 20g for Subtle Essence and 45g for Fallen Teeth. So any item worth more than 25g, I sell. If its worth less than 25, I gamble for a shot at a tooth.

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.