It is crucial to understand how each stat affects your monk and which ones you should be focusing on. This section of the guide will give you a detailed description of all the important monk stats.
Certain stats will only be available on particular item slots and thus will automatically become priority for that slot. In general though, this is your stat priority for a survival-focused Inferno build.
This is obviously a very simplified notion of stat stacking but it will serve as the template for 90% of all gear.
Below are detailed descriptions of each stat as they relate to the monk class.
Dexterity is your primary stat to look for when gearing your monk. Dexterity will not only increase your monk’s damage but also his chance to dodge.
Dexterity’s effect on dodge is a bit more complex. See the chart below for more details.
While both of these abilities appear to give the same ultimate benefit of returning life to your monk, there are key differences which should be noted.
Each hit you land on a target returns the total amount of Life as defined in your monk’s total Life on Hit stat. This is a very useful stat for monk’s, particularly if you choose to dual-wield and/or have a high rate of attack.
LoH does not proc from DoT’s (damage over time, such as bleeds) or damage auras, only direct damage abilities.
It’s important to note that Life on Hit is a scaling ability. That is to say, just because you have 1000 LoH, that doesn’t mean that you will always receive 1000 Life for every hit against every mob with every ability you use.
LoH diminishes when used against multiple mobs and with certain AOE abilities, although it still returns massive amounts of health.
The chart below provides a few of the key scaling percentages for some of the monk’s main abilities. Note that unless specified, the LoH refers to the life received from hitting only the first 1 or 2 mobs and can be expected to diminish with larger numbers of foes.
For the sake of our sanity, this chart is very simplified and refers to the scaling % prior to the effects of runes.
This stat returns a % of the damage you do to enemies as Life. Unfortunately, the higher difficulties of Diablo 3 provide diminishing returns on this stat.
Because of these diminishing returns, Life Steal remains inferior to LoH for the monk class and can be largely ignored in the game as it exists at this time.