The best Monk build in Path of Exile 2 does not exist, at least not until some stat-crunching savant divines how to snap the game over their knee. Until then, you must be like water, adaptable and ready to react to anything, ideally with a swift dodge-roll. Arguably the most technical of the melee classes at launch, playing the quarterstaff-swinging Monk is a reactive, aggressive game where you must draw power from your foes and turn it against them. You’re fragile but capable of incredible violence, if you know when and where to strike.
While every class in Path of Exile 2 has the means to grow in strange directions, borrowing active and passive skills from other classes, the Monk begins with a lot of very strong synergies and obvious skill combos. For a new player, getting the most out of these is going to be your ticket to survival through your initial adventures into this exceedingly cursed world. So here’s a run-down of some smart picks and usage tips to get you into this intimidatingly complex action RPG, if you’ve chosen to walk the demanding path of the Monk.
Here are a set of skills that I would recommend picking up early and learning to master, along with some ideal support gems to maximise their monster-mashing potential:
This is the first skill you’ll receive as the Monk, and a seemingly underwhelming one at that, with a high-commitment animation and a small cone of mediocre damage. If you struggled against the Bloated Miller, this skill is probably to blame, and you probably had to learn that you can cancel out of its lengthy attack animation by dodge-rolling. This is because it’s initially unpowered.
Once you’ve got a way to fuel it with Power Charges, it becomes one of the strongest attacks in your early arsenal, and potentially later, too, doing heavy damage and firing a fan of ground-crawling lightning bolts that grows in size based on how many charges you use. With three charges, it’s potentially a screen-clearing nuke. As for how to build those charges (and make them last longer with Perpetual Charge), your next skill should probably be…
This skill will run your Falling Thunder engine. Basic melee attacks (or uncharged Falling Thunders) will often fail to finish an enemy, but will leave them on low health, and handily highlighted with a glowing blue spark above their heads if you’ve got this skill equipped. Palm slam to quickly finish them off (even if they’re a miniboss or larger) and provide an orbiting blue Power Charge. Two, if you got lucky and have the Profusion gem. Killing Palm is pretty weak used as an attack by itself, but its ability to quickly finish a larger target and fuel your next AoE strike against a larger pack is not to be underestimated.
It’ll be a little while until you can unlock this one with a Level 3 skill gem, but Tempest Bell is probably the single most interesting skill in the Monk’s toolkit. Build up combo points by hitting stuff with your regular attacks (including your basic melee strikes), and you’ll quickly see the bell at the end of your staff glowing. Hit the skill button to detach it, grow it to massive size, and then whack it to deal AoE damage to every enemy nearby.
Hitting it with elemental effects will spread those as well, making it an easy synergy with almost everything the Monk has. With Ruthless and Magnified Effect, it becomes an easy and reliable way to do wide-scale AoE damage and really boost stun buildup. Smart positioning will also let you smack enemies and the bell simultaneously, doubling the damage done.
Another strangely technical skill, this one works a bit like Killing Palm, but highlights enemies that are close to having their stagger bar broken, shattering it immediately. As well as being a satisfying knockdown, this then temporarily upgrades your basic attacks into projectile moves for a few seconds, with Scattershot turning it into a room-cleaning spamfest—break one enemy, then mop up the remainder.
If you’re going for an all-physical melee build in the early game, Brutality makes this even deadlier.
The above skills can be further capitalized on by upgrading your basic melee attack. The Monk can gain a lot of utility from upgrading his basic Quarterstaff Strike.
Having a rapid melee attack that staggers enemies goes a long way in the early game. Plus, strikes with basic quarterstaff attacks build combo, which is used for activating Tempest Bell—the quicker, the better, and firing off projectiles from Staggering Palm. Plus, having a rapid basic melee attack lets you beat on that bell all the faster, dealing more damage at minimal resource cost. This is something you can switch up once you’ve got an elemental focus in mind and mana costs under control, but in the early game, going all-physical is good, reliable damage.
The Monk is a master of dishing out damage up close, but not so great at soaking it up. You’ll be dodge-rolling a lot, looking for opportunities to strike in your opponent’s attack patterns, which is why fast attacks are helpful. Lingering Illusion makes this a little bit easier—this buff skill (using up the 30 Spirit points that you’ll get for clearing the forest canopy boss) makes your dodge rolls leave behind an after-image that enemies will sometimes target instead of you.
Better still, if they hit and deal enough damage to destroy your echo (paradoxically easier the less max HP you have), you get a Power Charge, which you can then funnel into Falling Thunder for a big AoE hit even when you’re on the back-foot.
The Monk is a Dexterity/Intelligence hybrid class. This means that you’ll be hopefully no-selling some attacks through evasion, and the ones that do slip through will be soaked up by your energy shield. Still, that’s not to say you should skip on strength and life stats entirely, as being a melee fighter, you’ll still want to tank a few hits, and percentage-based life leech is important to maintain your inertia in combat.
That said, if you are using Flicker Strike to spread damage taken and help generate extra power charges, it can paradoxically be better to have lower overall health so your after-images are destroyed easier.
As a melee character with long, high-commitment attacks, you’re going to have to go all-in. A good energy shield stacked up from multiple pieces of gear will soak up most hurt, especially once you get some boosts to its recharge time. Evasion will mitigate the amount of hits that you take, too. But sometimes you’re just going to get dinged up a little, and won’t have a huge HP pool to compensate for that.
This is why having a few percentage points of Life Leech on Kill is useful. Against little swarmy enemies you’ll get a ton of recovery just from diving in, but if your health pool isn’t huge to begin with, a little healing from a boss reinforcement wave goes a long way, especially as it means you won’t have to rely quite so much on your potions.
Almost everything you’ve got early on as a Monk scales off your basic weapon stats. Anything that boosts that, including iron rings, is a good call. Lightning damage will give your Falling Thunder skill a bit more oomph but that too scales from your basic melee. Make sure you’re always rolling with the best staff you can get your hands on.
Having some cold and fire damage on your rings and weapons helps as well if you can get it, as those will be amplified and spread by your Tempest Bell.
The Monk has a lot of strong early options in their corner of the passive skill grid that’ll greatly increase your initial survivability, and also be easily respec-ed if you want to min-max more once you’ve got your engine properly running. Consider picking these ones with your first dozen or so levels:
Between those four and the nodes you’ll have to take between them, you’ll get a significant boost to both attack power, attack rate, and the ability to patch yourself up mid-fight without relying too much on chugging flasks.
Further down the skill tree, consider hitting a few notable passives in the star-shaped cluster directly out from your starting point, including:
Between those two clusters, you should be able to caveman your way through most initial problems, smacking stuff (and bells) with very large sticks. From there, elemental specialization is a good idea, especially once you’ve picked an Ascendancy class during Act 2, but getting your basic melee up to speed is recommended unless you’re feeling confident.
Early on, the Monk is going to be a little bit squishy no matter how you’re kitted out. A mixture of energy shield and evasion will get you through the worst of times, but your ability to react to incoming attacks with dodge-rolls and making sure that you’re on the safe side of big boss attacks (usually behind, so fight up close) is key.
Damage and attack speed are going to be your bread and butter, so look for Act 2 base weapon types like the Crescent Quarterstaff, which has solid base damage and slightly higher attack speed. While the Long Quarterstaff offers a bit more melee range, and being able to whack your bell a little bit faster makes all the difference.
What you will want to be doing is Disenchanting every unwanted magic or rare item that comes your way so that when you find a new base weapon type that catches your fancy (ideally one with a rune socket or two—the Iron rune’s 20% physical damage boost is great), you can slap a bunch of Whetstones on it, then boost it into a rare with as many buffs as possible. A little risky, but if you’ve been saving up, you should be able to try this a couple times.
Also if you’re lucky (or have the opportunity to trade for one), Crown of Thorns is a fun early-game unique Twig Circlet that synergises well with the Monk’s attacks while your attack rate is still relatively low. It gives you a hefty energy shield (very useful early on) and deals decent Thorns damage to enemies, but costs you 5 HP whenever you use a skill. If you’ve got a couple points of Life Leech On Kill, that’ll probably barely even register as a problem, but once you start to get into quick-fire attacks, you might want to consider upgrading to a hat that doesn’t try to murder you.
And lastly, a little pro tip, useful for all classes, but especially risky brawlers like the Monk: Go to the Options menu, hop over to the Interface tab and tick ‘Show mini life bar above you’. Now when death comes for you, you’ll at least have some advance warning. Good hunting.
