Monk Season Start

So, this is less of a guide than other classes I’ve posted in previous seasons, because at the moment, I can’t consistently break the 90 minute mark. This is more about I’m looking for efficiency improvements. This is about SSF as well as Rivera Dancers. With a Torch, Balance, or WKL, I can consistently get under 75 minutes, but the odds of gambling one of them is just not worth it (for another reason after the leveling).

I’ve run the 1-70 process about 8 times so far, and compared to other classes though so far, it’s not that good.

Average leveling time:

Necro: 45m (HC: 1h)
Demon Hunter: 1h15m (HC: 1h50m)
Wizard: 1h20m (HC: Haven’t run this yet)
Monk: 1h34m (HC: 1h45m)

Final Active Skills:

Fists of Thunder: Quickening
Sweeping Wind: Inner Storm
Blinding Flash: Replenishing Light
Dashing Strike: Blinding Speed
Lashing Tail Kick: Sweeping Armada
Mantra of Healing: Circular Breathing

Final Passive Skills:

Exalted Soul
Chant of Resonance
Determination

For HC, lower the difficulty 1 level.

Start:

Torment 1 Difficulty.
Teleport to Act 1.
Set your pet (Press F1 to quickly get there).
Gamble Rivera Dancers.
Upgrade your Blacksmith & Enchantress to max level. The Jeweler only to Level 9.
Craft 2 Level 5 Axes.
Hire a Templar (this will be more important than the Scoundrel, as you’ll need healing throughout).
Buy your weapons from the vendor. It’s not worth spending time stealing your followers weapon, as you’ll only have them for a slight bit of time, and Act 1 weapons can range up to 9.1 dps, as well as have +XP on them. This will shave time down to Level 5, where you’re going to switch to the Axes.
Run Temple of the Firstborn until you hit Level 10.
Estimated Time: 5 minutes

At Level 10, buy +dmg jewelry (rings + amulet). Unlike other classes, +dmg is going to be necessary. +Dex just doesn’t cut it here. This will actually take a few minutes here. For the Act 1 Ring Vendor, teleport to Weeping Hollow for faster access.

Cube Run:

Set the difficulty to Hard.
Craft 2 Level 12 swords.
Run and grab the cube.
In Ruins of Sescheron, if you see the Last of the Barbarians quest, complete it, as the completion will spawn a follower who will help keep your kill streak alive in The Elder Sanctum.
In Elder Sanctum, if you see Cursed Bailey, skip it. In fact, from this point onwards, skip any cursed chest you see. They are time sinks and not worth the XP you get for wasting 2 minutes on them.
At Level 16, equip the Rivera Dancers. In HC, you’d want to cube them instead.
Estimated Time: 15 minutes.

Leveling until Weapon Reduce:

Set the difficulty to Torment 3.
Craft your Level Reduce Weapon. Any two hander. In the video, I use a 2 Handed Axe, but honestly, I prefer a 2 Handed Sword here, mainly because it’s faster.

The weapon MUST HAVE Life on Hit, or at bare minimum a socket you can put an amethyst into. You are going to be taking damage, so it’s about healing faster than you get hurt. And Life on Hit will mean you have fewer stats to reroll, so you’ll have better odds of getting Level Reduce. After that, vitality, followed by dex. And you’ll want a crowd control affix on it, so that you’ll only have 3 items you can reroll.

You’ll want to convert one set of blues and one set of whites to rares. This will leave you with roughly 20 craft attempts to get a good Level Reduce Weapon. This is one reason you DO NOT upgrade a daibo or fist at the beginning. That costs 65 yellows to craft and upgrade, which is 4/5 upgrade attempts or 13 enchant attempts. A 1/4 chance for a useful Daibo, or 1/14 chance for a useful fist weapon just isn’t worth it. Plus, it hurts you after you hit 70, and that’s more important here than the leveling process.

Run Temple of the Firstborn on T3 difficulty until you can use your Level Reduce Weapon. Around Level 42/43, you might have to drop to T2 difficulty.

Between every run, make sure to buy the best gear you can from vendors. I just check Act 5 only. Press ‘m’ to bring up the map, right click on the map, teleport to The Survivors’ Enclave.

The instant you reach Level Reduce, leave, unless you’re only a few kills away from the next kill streak.

Also, as previously mentioned, avoid the Cursed Chest event in Temple of the Firstborn, unless it’s a bounty. You can start it, but just move on. Every once in awhile, it will spawn right before the end of the first floor to Temple of the Firstborn. In that situation, come back and mop up the 20 or so mobs to collect. But it’s not worth spending 2 minutes to kill what will amount to 40 enemies.

By the hour mark, you want to aim to be at Level 50 or above.

Finish Leveling:

From the moment you have a Level Reduce weapon, your goal should be T6 until Level 57, at which point you drop it down to T5. When you hit Level 61 or above, make sure to craft any Level 61 gear you can with your remaining Veiled Crystals. Start with your lowest level items and work upwards. At Level 64, drop down to T4. Level 66, T3. Level 69, T2.

Total time should be somewhere between 1h30m and 1h45m, depending on the Level Reduce value you get.

Demonstration:

Post 70:

This is where things fall apart. The monk is the slowest class to GR70 due to the gearing. There are roughly about 100 people per server (Asia, EU, Americas, HC & SC) who reach GR75 by the 6 hour mark, so that’s 1800 people total over the past 6 seasons on all the servers (just an estimate, I didn’t add them up). The monk holds the fewest of these spots of any class.

So, this is where you upgrade your daibo. Kill Malthael for the Reaper’s Wraps recipe, and craft 1 piece of Sage Gear, and then rush two normal rifts and two Greater Rifts for the Legacy of Dreams. Worry about T1 & T4 later. You’ll start off GR11, so hopefully you’ll hit GR14 by the time you get Legacy of Dreams, and empower that GR if possible. Then you’ll be able to take T4 fairly easily. Take care of the rest of the Chapter 1-4 requirements then.

For extra speed, if you really want, kill Azmodan while leveling (can be any level), and Diablo and Siege Breaker on Hard Difficulty once you reach Level 60. Technically Malthael is also one of Chapter 1 requirements, but you’ll want to save him for 70 to get Reaper’s Wraps.

Now, the problem comes in that you’re going to be roughly 3 hours behind other classes on your way to being able to take GR70+, and I’m just at a loss right now as to how to speed this up without grouping and gear dumping to one monk, and moving from gearing monk 1 to monk 2 to monk 3, and finally monk 4. But if SSF, I have no idea at this moment.

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Good guide, but Ethereals that drop during leveling can throw a wrench into your outcome. If you get a particularly useful power and/or passive, you can boost your leveling time (of course the same goes for every class in the upcoming season).

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I always find it funny people wanting to rush the start. 99% of players don’t even play the whole season as they get burned out part way through. The levelling process is some of the most fun the game has to offer. You get meaningful upgrades on a regular basis.

Unlike getting fully kitted out and smashing GR100s for 2.5 months just to increase your paragon. Enjoy the ride. D3 is about the journey and not the destination for all but 0.001% of players.

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I’ve watched your YouTube vids on this BehindTimes as I’ll be playing HC Monk in S24.

Great guide…albeit sad to see Monks have a harder time than other classes in this journey.

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Honestly, I was sort of shocked when I saw this. I had never really paid attention to the GR70+ portion before. Monks were middle of the pack for grabbing Haedrig’s Gift, and yeah, they were kind of low in Divinity for Season 23, but it’s Raiment, and no one likes that set, so I thought it made sense.

I tend to keep stats at every 15-30 minute intervals of the season though of the leaderboards. 15 minutes for the first 2 hours, then snapshots of the GR leaderboards every half an hour afterwards after for about 6 hours into the season. I mainly started doing this, after seeing some slightly curious guesses people were suggesting on reddit of how fast people reach level 70 and clear GR70. Let’s just say the majority of people stating how long they thought it would take people to get to T16 is wildly off, to say the least.

The top 10 players tend to reach 70 within an hour, top 100 in 90 minutes, and top 1000 in roughly 3 hours. For GR75, top 10 in 4 hours, top 100-200 in 6 hours. (This varies by season. The set as well as the season theme probably plays a part here).

But then this season, as with you, I was going to go with HC monk, so I wanted to get an idea of what to aim for, to get a decent rank early in the season. And I noticed, regardless of the set, the monk was not represented in the early rankings. I had assumed it would have been the necromancer, which starts off strongly in leveling, but collapses post T6. But the monk was the dead last class to have GR70 completion, by a fairly substantial margin. Even classes like the witch doctor, who fairly few people play season start, was hitting GR70 on a much more consistent basis.

I’m not a fan of people using all their blood shards & DB they get from the challenge cache to begin with. I feel a lot of leveling guides you see here are misguided, in that people view it as a 1-70 race, when it reality it’s more like a 1 to Haedrig’s Gift race. And it’s roughly 2 hours on average people are taking to complete Haedrig’s Gift, and that’s after they’ve already hit level 70.

But when it comes to the monk, it seems to be more of a level 1 to you are completely geared race. And this means that blowing all of your blood shards and death breath for the leveling up process makes even less sense.

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Nice guide. I am personally torn between monk and Barb starting this season. I haven’t done monk start in about 10 seasons, so will likely lean that way.

I agree on not upgrading a lvl 70 rare. It’s a waste for Monk, too unlikely to get something useful.

I usually spend just enough blood shards to either get what I need. Which ofc depends on the class I’m maining.

Will have to spend some time trying out the Temple of the Firstborn method… Usually just go right for the Cube, then Rifts with my buddies after that.

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Starting with the cube comes down to micro-optimizations. It’s almost never faster to immediately go to the cube right off the bat.

Yes, you could race immediately to the cube at Level 1 avoiding all the enemies, and that would shave off about an average of one minute to 70 from the demonstration. At the same time though, when you hit Level 10, you could do the exact same thing and race straight to the cube avoiding all the enemies, and that would shave off on average 4 minutes to 70, as you’d have Fleet-footed and Dashing Strike.

Certainly, don’t do that if you’re playing HC, as there are multiple spots you could get trapped and killed in, even at Level 1.

If you’re after a speedy start, rifting is never the option. But with it being the season of ethereals, you might actually find one or two in my opinion, going with rifts. Typically, from previous seasons, I only average one legendary via massacre bonuses.

Start: run the Challenge Rift. Hope it is an easy one that you don’t need to repeat several times.

Otherwise, no gambling, training the artisans, etc. etc.

Minor, but incredibly important.