Obligatory 'months behind' post. Finally cleared inferno having got back to the UK, partly been putting it off due to latency issues from the US, partly just because I've been been farming my ass off to round out my gearset. Naturally my 5stack nv phat lewts from diablo were an ilvl 56 monk helm and an ilvl 60 dh cloak.
Anyhoo, tl;dr: final build:
http://eu.battle.net/d3/en/calculator/monk#aSgYdk!YXU!acYcba
Final gear: (both sages, amulet, helm & belt not found. I also have 5 different fists I've been switching between, but found that the life leech & loh combo made act4 v manageable)
http://eu.battle.net/d3/en/profile/Matranga-1478/hero/1817321
Some tricky packs can give me issues (fu invuln minions phase beast pack in level 2 of the tower of the damned), but alternating cooldowns & dashing about the place usually does the trick (sometimes I close my eyes and spam serenity & blind when they're coming off cooldown while my leech does the trick, or doesn't
). More DPS would make things a lot more comfortable, so I may slowly work on upgrading gems (80% crit is all I can craft myself) & also try to ween myself off transcendence/owe & onto some more agressive passives (resolve + guardians path).
Steam of consciousness wall of text:
Maybe it is useful to folks to hear about some of the benchmarks I went through in inferno:
Act1 -
Struggled with the butcher until I hit about 9k dps. I'd run most of act1 with massive life on hit fists with low dps I'd had during hell. I have been doing act1 farms (watchtower in northern highlands, leorics manor courtyard, festering woods + dungeons, cave of the moon clan, cemetery, weeping hollow + den of the fallen) with about 14k dps, 200mf, 19k hp & 450ish resists as my magic find gear is pretty ghetto and I don't gearswap. I found the skull grasp when drunkenly running the crypts under the cemetery & didn't believe it until I woke up annoyingly hungover the next morning.
Act2 -
Hahhaah wasps. Most of the act I sword & boarded with mantra of evasion + hard target (I only really used conviction when farming or once I hit act3 in earnest) to get up my armor & resists to levels that felt comfortable. Most packs were painful and annoyed the crap out of me since at this stage I had low damage but good survivability. I got to belial with around 12k dps & couldn't beat his enrage, I mixed up the build a ton and squeezed out dps here & there with a good dps rotation. Here's how it went down:
Dual weild, Breath of heaven + dps rune, blinding flash + dps rune, mantra of evasion+hard target with sweeping wind+bladestorm (not enough crit for cyclone at this stage). Strategy was to use every dps cooldown I had as soon as it came up and use mantra spam with transcendence to stand in most of the abilities except the 'hahaha now you die' phase. During that phase I ran about and ducked in for a hit or two to keep my sweeping wind stack up. Serenity was only popped if things looked really shitty or at the end of the explosion phase to get a couple of seconds of face tank dps. This was easily my favourite fight in the game.
Act3 -
Various frustrations due to fire effects making my laptop gfx fall over (and also being crap). The big breakthrough was hitting around 30k hp and 18k damage, this allowed me to sustain with decent enough damage and not get instagibbed whenever a blue pack appeared ont he screen. Sword & boarded a fair amount of the early act but started to dual weild again as I decided the best thing to do was stand in as much shit as possible with high attack speed and loh. Ghom went down second try: usual kite by moving when he shakes it like a polaroid picture, serenity saved for extremely bad situations, bit of patience waiting for him to waddle towards you then smack the crap out of him on the edge of his clouds so they overlap.
Outside areas dsghihiuhwieh the effects lag. At this stage my dps was still shoddy and I was trying to dash abuse as much as possible to dance around annoying packs that would ream me if I couldn't find a chokepoint. I farmed act1 forever to try to make things more bearable. This was when the west coast -> euro server latency hit me hard enough to say 'screw this' for 3 weeks and I sat around until I got back to the UK.
Got back last weekend, blasted seigebreaker and started looking into improving my damage while not losing life on hit. Picked up the amulet & sages nonsense to boost my crit having decided the skull grasp was a sign from ivgorod. At this point I was still using LOH weapons with no crit damage & phasebeasts happened. Screw. Phasebeasts.
After much annoyance, I eventually decided socketting my weapons with life on hit wasn't going to get me the dps I needed so switched to rolled loh + socket for emeralds. Ivgorod blessed me again on a run through the tower of the damned with the first emerald gem pattern (can craft if anyone wants them). I first killed azmodan in a 4 player game sword & board style with 3 dps. They all died at 25% health but I was able to cooldown dance down the rest to look like a total boss (everyone wants to be a monk). I then repeated later just to convince myself I wasn't being carried.
Act4 -
First quest is a cooldown spamming hit & hope fest at 30k life and 20k dps with 700loh & my above build. Probably nicer ways to do it.
I decided that although life leech carries penalties in inferno I wanted to try that too & picked up a weapon off the AH. Ran the whole of act4 with the above build & items and didn't have too much trouble (I probably got lucky with some pack combos, though I did see a fair amount of stuff that had killed me in previous acts at previous gear levels, including arcane + waller nonsense & desecrate/molten 'run away all the time' mobs). I think life leech probably comes good over loh around my current dps with crits, but I may well be gimping myself.
Some highlights:
Rakanoth never really exists for monks.
Hammer dudes, dash & blind to avoid, serenity as 'oh shit' button. Incinerators & succubi were divide & conquer jobs (bust cooldowns, dps one, reposition blabla). The oppressor's hilarious charge doesn't kill at my gear level
Izual's excessive ice spam is mostly just a dash fest as always.
Diablo is as usual, save blind for your shadow and move out of stuff.
You may sweat slightly, but the cake is worth it.
