Ultimate Monk Guide for Path of Exile 2

Path of Exile 2 has introduced six character classes for its Early Access launch, including the classic Ranger and the elemental Sorceress. Among these classes, the Monk stands out as an exceptional choice, offering a unique blend of speed and elemental power for creating skilled builds.

This melee-focused class excels by combining rapid attacks with elemental abilities to craft an impressive spellblade. With the Monk, you can generate devastating fissures in the ground using lightning, incapacitate foes with bone-chilling ice attacks, or let every melee strike resound with the force of a Tempest Bell. While mastering the Monk’s intricate mechanics can be daunting for newcomers, grasping the basics will lead you to create fantastic builds suitable for both leveling and endgame adventures.

Monk Class Overview

The Monk is a melee-focused class that utilizes multi-hit combos and elemental effects to dominate the battlefield. Among all the early access classes, the Monk is undoubtedly the most agile, featuring some of the quickest attacks available and an array of crowd control abilities. These include freezing attacks to immobilize foes and powerful knockback skills.

To maximize the Monk’s abilities, you’ll primarily require a quarterstaff, a two-handed weapon that strikes a balance between speed and damage output. The quarterstaff category includes several iconic skills, such as Glacial Cascade and Flicker Strike, which can be organized into three main categories:

• Physical: Focused on strong knockdown effects and large area-of-effect (AoE) attacks. Most builds incorporate Tempest Bell for its significant boost in single-target damage against bosses.
• Cold: These skills chill enemies and can eventually freeze them, allowing you to deal massive damage by shattering them. This playstyle often relies on chaining together attacks.
• Lightning: These fast-hitting attacks have a chance to shock foes, heightening their vulnerability to damage. Many skills that utilize Power Charges fall under this category.

Some of the Monk’s skills generate Power Charges, a special resource that can enhance your quarterstaff abilities. For instance, when executing Flicker Strike, if you have a Power Charge, it will strike an enemy three times instead of just once.

Your gameplay revolves around creating combos with skill gems. Utilize quick attacks to apply debuffs or generate Power Charges, then execute other skills to capitalize on those advantages. Freeze opponents for shattering, generate Power Charges for a strong lightning ability, or build combos with quick strikes to trigger a Tempest Bell. Quickly chaining your attacks in combat will reward you with impressive damage output and versatility.

Monk Ascendancies

In Early Access, the Monk can choose between two Ascendancy classes: the Invoker and the Acolyte of Chayula. An Ascendancy functions akin to a prestige class, opening up a secondary passive tree for skill point allocation. These nodes are particularly powerful and heavily influence your character’s build. Remember, once you select your Ascendancy, you cannot change it, so make your choice carefully.

Invoker

The Invoker is an Ascendancy focused on elemental abilities, significantly enhancing your elemental damage while providing solid survivability options to mitigate the risks of evasion mechanics. If you’re unsure which Ascendancy to choose, Invoker is always a strong choice. It’s versatile for various builds.

Skills like I am the Blizzard… and I am the Thunder… offer essential boosts to elemental damage, along with effects to generate chilled and shocked ground, respectively. The highlight of this Ascendancy is …And I Shall Rage, which grants you access to the Unbound Avatar skill. By inflicting status ailments, you fill a meter that allows you to activate Unbound Fury, boosting your elemental damage by 40% and enhancing debuff application speed by 80% for nine seconds. This powerful ability is incredibly effective if you can charge it quickly.

Critical hits are highly encouraged as Sunder My Enemies lets you completely ignore elemental resistances on critical attacks. The Monk is positioned near numerous critical chance nodes in the passive tree, making it easier to achieve consistent critical hits. Combine this with …And Scatter Them To The Winds to trigger elemental effects on critical hits, similar to the Elemental Hit skill in Path of Exile.

On the defensive front, Invoker greatly alleviates the typical issues associated with evasion. Lead Me Through Grace… provides ample Spirit, allowing you to use multiple meta gems or support skills in your build, which synergizes well with The Soul Springs Eternal. This frees up a damage node for …And Protect Me From Harm, which allows your evasion to contribute to physical damage reduction, effectively combining evasion with armor to mitigate damage.

Acolyte Of Chayula

The Acolyte of Chayula transforms your Monk into a follower of an ancient demon, granting access to potent chaos abilities. This chaos-themed Ascendancy is particularly suitable for Chaos Inoculation builds, trading all health points for immunity against chaos damage. This forces players to focus on energy shield to survive.

While that may seem specialized, many of the nodes available aren’t particularly beneficial for most Monk builds as of Early Access. Ravenous Doubts pairs effectively with Consuming Questions for instant energy shield recovery during combat, but this removes a key aspect of passive energy shield sustainability.

Reality Rending adds a chance for your attacks to inflict significant extra chaos damage, despite the relatively low chances of activation. Waking Dream lets players create a Breach around their character to spawn shards that can enhance health and mana leech or provide a stacking chaos damage boost. Taking Lucid Dreaming can further strengthen the effects of these shards.

If collecting shards isn’t appealing, Embrace the Darkness offers a different route. This ability replaces Spirit with a new Darkness mechanic that provides damage redirection away from your health and energy shield, effectively functioning as a mini energy shield. Your Darkness accumulates with each character level and is crucial for late-game damage mitigation. You can increase your damage with Grasp the Void, which allows you to scale your chaos damage.

Monk Builds

As we are still in the early stages of Path of Exile 2, we don’t yet have substantial Monk builds to share. We plan to update this section as the game evolves, providing you guidance for navigating Wraeclast and conquering the endgame Atlas.

Coming Soon