Monk Class Guide – Path Of Exile 2

Path of Exile 2’s Early Access launch has six classes to choose from, ranging from the classic Ranger to the elemental Sorceress. There are a wide range of build options to explore with each class, but none feel quite as satisfying as the Monk.

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This melee class blends fast attacks with elemental properties to create the ultimate spellblade. Create fissures in the earth with lightning, shatter your targets with unrelenting ice strikes, or reverberate each melee swing with a Tempest Bell. Coming to terms with the Monk’s complexity can prove challenging if you’re new, but once you understand the fundamentals of this class, you can start to make some truly excellent builds for leveling and the endgame.

Monk Class Overview

The Monk is a melee-centric class that uses multi-hit combos and elemental effects to control the battlefield. Out of every class in Early Access, the Monk is easily the most agile of the bunch, featuring some of the fastest attacks in the game and a wide range of crowd control tools, ranging from cold attacks that freeze targets to powerful knockdown effects.

Most of the Monk’s skills require a quarterstaff to use, a two-handed melee weapon that sacrifices raw damage output for speed. Some of Path of Exile’s most iconic skills are in the quarterstaff category, featuring the likes of Glacial Cascade and Flicker Strike. Most of these skills can be broken up into three categories:

• Physical: Focus on powerful knockdown effects and large AoE attacks. Most builds will run Tempest Bell for its immense boos to single-target DPS against bosses.
• Cold: Most skills will chill targets and eventually freeze them, letting you shatter their body for massive damage. Reliant on combo play.
• Lightning: Fast-hitting attacks with a chance to shock, increasing an enemy’s vulnerability to damage. Most skills that consume Power Charges are in this category.

A handful of the Monk’s skills will generate Power Charges, a unique resource that can be spent on other quarterstaff abilities to enhance their effects. For example, Flicker Strike will teleport you to an enemy and strike them with your weapon. If you have a Power Charge active when you cast the skill, your charge will be consumed and cause Flicker Strike to attack three times instead of once.

Your central gameplay loop is all about comboing skill gems. Use fast-hitting attacks to apply debuffs or generate Power Charges, then use your other skills to take advantage. Freeze enemies to trigger shatters, create Power Charges to unleash a devastating lightning skill, or build combo with a fast-hitting skill to call down a Tempest Bell. Weave multiple attacks during combat, and you’ll be handsomely rewarded with top-tier DPS and mobility.

Monk Ascendancies

Two Ascendancy classes are available to the Monk in Early Access: the Invoker and the Acolyte of Chayula. Your Ascendancy is effectively a prestige class that unlocks a second passive tree for you to allocate points in. These nodes are incredibly strong and help shape your build. You can’t change your Ascendancy, so choose wisely.

Invoker

The Invoker is an elemental-themed Ascendancy that greatly buffs your elemental damage and offers some strong survivability tools to counter the RNG nature of evasion. If you aren’t sure which Ascendancy to pick, choose Invoker. It is always a good choice, regardless of what build you end up playing.

I am the Blizzard… and I am the Thunder… are strong starter nodes that give you an elemental damage buff and the ability to create chilled and shocked ground, respectively. The real meat here is …and I Shall Rage, granting access to the Unbound Avatar skill. Inflicting status ailments will fill a meter that, once charged, allows you to activate Unbound Fury. For the next nine seconds, you deal 40% more elemental damage and inflict debuffs 80% faster. It’s a powerhouse of a skill if you can build charge quickly.

Critical hits are encouraged if you go this route, as Sunder my Enemies allows you to ignore elemental resistances entirely if your attacks are critical hits. The Monk is near quite a few critical chance nodes in the passive tree, so achieving consistent critical hits shouldn’t prove too difficult. If you manage that, you can also take and Shatter Them to the Winds to trigger elemental attacks with each critical hit, similar to how Elemental Hit worked in Path of Exile.

As for defensive options, Invoker more or less fixes the main issues with evasion. Lead me through Grace… gives you so much Spirit that you can afford to run multiple meta gems or buff skills in your build, which synergizes nicely with The Soul Springs Eternal. That allows you to drop a damage node for …and Protect me from Harm, which adds your evasion as a source of armor for calculating physical damage reduction. In essence, evasion now mitigates physical damage and allows you to avoid damage outright.

Acolyte Of Chayula

Acolyte of Chayula turns your Monk into a worshiper of an ancient Breach demon, granting you access to dark powers. In practice, the Acolyte of Chayula is a chaos-themed Ascendancy that’s tailored for Chaos Inoculation builds—a notable that trades all of your HP for chaos damage immunity, forcing you to spec for energy shield to stay alive.

If that sounds niche, that’s because it is. Most of the nodes offered here aren’t useful for the majority of Monk builds currently, at least for Early Access. Ravenous Doubts is only useful if you pair it with Consuming Questions for instant energy shield leech during combat, but this removes a crucial part of passive ES sustain.

Reality Rending gives your attacks a chance to deal a significant amount of bonus chaos damage, albeit with small proc chances. Waking Dream allows you to create a Breach around your character to spawn pickup shards. These can buff your HP leech, mana leech, or grant a stacking chaos damage buff. You can then run Lucid Dreaming to double the effect of these shards.

If you aren’t a fan of pickups, then the only thing left to consider is Embrace the Darkness, a node that replaces Spirit with a Darkness mechanic. Damage you take will be redirected to Darkness when possible, reserving it for ten seconds before it drops. Your Darkness scales with character level, so it’s meant as a late-game source of damage mitigation. You can scale your damage with Darkness through Grasp the Void, but it otherwise acts as a miniature energy shield.

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Monk Builds

It’s early into Path of Exile 2’s lifespan, so we don’t have any strong Monk builds to share today. Once we do, we’ll be adding them here to make your journey through Wraeclast and the endgame Atlas much easier.

Coming Soon

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