Is full-ice Monk even remotely close to Lightning based one?
So I'm playing an Invoker Monk and trying to figure out my own ice monk build. I've just finished act3 and while bell/ice strike performs okay-ish I can't help but notice that Lightning based quarterstaff skills just have much more potential. Even now, my strongest hits come from Falling Thunder with 3 power charges even though I don't have any extra lightning damage anywhere (not in my passive tree nor gear).
How is an ice-exclusive Monk meant to compete with a Lightning based one? No charged staff, no abilities that deal damage based on any type of charges, nothing really cold-specific in the passive tree that Lightning passives don't have... What am I missing here?
Either I'm not seeing something very obvious with ice monk and there is something that enables me to deal more cold-based dmg or Monk is pretty much forcing you to play mostly lightning based which to be honest I find pretty annoying.
Comments
I've been doing fine with the ice skills. For the bell you can pretty much just use the basic attack linked to as much atk speed as possible to proc it and ive been using frost bomb to help speed up freeze/ shatters.
One other thing of note, your ice crystals need +levels Or they are kinda weak since they don't use your atk stats but have their own like totems
ATM most asendency have a clear strongest skill. For bow is magnetic salvo or gas arrow, for crossbow it’s gass grenade, for quarter staff is lightning(charge consumption skills), for sorc it’s comet.
Tldr it is just weaker than lightning atm, but hopefully future patch will buff/being more power to the archetype.
Cold as an element is balanced around having inherent freeze and chill, which together are some of the strongest defensive layers in the game. Freeze also gives you insane uptime on unbound avatar while clearing if you use that ascendancy.
Once you get further into endgame the balance between come and lightning doesn't matter as much because you can get a good dual or even tri elemental weapon, and then you can easily mix and match which skills you use between the two elements while still feeling strong.
Idk about pure-ice but i have an Ice Strike build with charged staff atm and it's doing decent damage in cruel act 3. It's probably not as much damage as tempest flurry + charged staff, but you freeze bosses very quickly
Imo both lightning only and ice only suck ass. The option I came to is just go ham on general damage increase, attack damage increase, crit chance, crit damage and scale everything you can at once. I use ice strike, bell and lingering illusion to feed charged stuff for more lightning and shocks. Next thing is I saw that if you go for "crits ignore resists" then most of the single-element notables near monk are useless since they have most of their power in resist pen.
Cast on freeze ice wall is insane. I'm using frost bomb and hand of chayula with frostbite and the ice mark i'm forgetting the name of. Ice strikes with the bell and the setup mentioned deletes most bosses in around 10 seconds, during which they are unable to move.
Disgusting build, incredibly fast and safe.
Almost every class right now is forced into certain skills because the balance is just skewed
I’m full ice monk in t1 maps now
Ice strike is 99% of my skill use and dps. Shattering palm for quick port into trash packs. Glacial cascade to ranged kite.
Dps is fine and clear is perhaps a bit better than lightning with herald of ice. Single target dps is definitely less than lightning/tempest flurry