[0.5] MasterT's ICE ARTIST Monk (League Start To Endgame)

Intro:

Hellllo internet, welcome to the written guide for the Ice Cold Martial Artist, which is built around Ice Strike Shattering Palm Herald of Ice and Hollow Focus. These skills combined with Hollow Palm Technique giving massive attack speed and the qol of not having to waste currency on a Staff, makes this setup perfect to league start with 0 currency and scale it up as high as you want.

This guide will cover everything from the basics starting from Act 1 all the way into the endgame with as much min max as possible, so even if you are a completely new player you should be able to get this up and running very easily. If you need any help join my discord through the links below or comment on the youtube video guides and I'll get you sorted the best I can.

NOTES BUG:

Some of the gear notes are bugged on mobalytics and the notes for them disappear, if you have any questions about specific gear ask me in the comments or in my discord

My Links:

Discord: https://discord.com/invite/rNVCYuRVkt
Patreon for Early Access: https://www.patreon.com/c/_MasterT

Video Guides Will Be Up Soon, For both the build itself and crafting guides for all the gear pieces. There is still progression left on this character so stay tuned and favorite this guide! Thanks

Early Game Skill Rotations:

Clearing Rotation:

Whenever you see a pack of monsters, use Frozen Locus, Take 2 steps back away from the locus, and then press Glacial Cascade with your cursor on top of the Locus to detonate it. The End of the Spike created by the cascade is the part that does all the damage and blows up Locus Crystals. Dodge roll as soon as the ice spikes come out of you to cancel the rest of the animation wind-up.
This will almost always blow up the entire pack from the explosion of the locus, plus the herald of ice explosion.

In Act 4 when you get Shattering Palm you will stop using pounce and use this to dash into a back. If your evasion es gear is not good enough then you shouldnt use that skill, as it will put you right in the enemies face.

Boss Rotation:

Frost Bomb ---> Ice Strike until frozen. Place Tempest Bell, Do a full Ice Strike again ONCE. You do not want to let the freeze end ---> Frozen Locus, 2 steps back, Glacial Cascade to consume freeze and pop the locus, If boss not dead throw a few more cascades to finish.

Once you get Tempest Flurry and Hand of Chayula You will use those first as well before you start using Ice Strike. Both of these skills will be in weapon set 2 after you stop using pounce after act 3 to make use of the big shock from tempest flurry for bosses.

End of Campaign Skill Rotations:

At this point if you took note of the gearing section and me advising to stop here and use the currency you found in campaign to upgrade your gear, you should have decent evasion es gear and can fully swap into the melee brawler playstyle with Ice Strike and Shattering Palm

Clearing Rotation:

Shattering Palm to dash into a pack of monsters, Ice Strike to freeze and shatter them, triggering the Shattering Palm shards to explode, as well as triggering Herald of Ice explosions to pop everything infront of you. If there are other enemies slightly close, move your mouse over them and Ice Strike will auto dash into range to kill them too. You can either hold down Ice Strike and move your mouse around, or do what I do which is individually click where you want to dash to next. It feels cooler. Your Hollow Focus bells will also carry Shattering Palm crystals and explode them onto the nearby enemies.
Once everything on screen is dead, walk ahead and keep your cursor at the edge of your screen. As soon as you see a mob's name pop up at the top of the screen, press Shattering Palm to long dash into range, and repeat the same as above.
If you see any tanky rares, drop Tempest Bell on them. It has very good targetting so just pressing the bell with your cursor on the target will drop it in the best spot that you can hit the bell and the enemy at the same time. This bugs out a little bit on the really big bosses.

In later stages of progression you will be using Pounce to close the gap between you and the next pack of monsters before you dash into them with shattering palm. Wolf form also moves faster so its best to use it to move between areas where theres no monsters. Pounce is also socketed with Freezing Mark that gives you a %Gain as extra cold damage buff when you freeze a monster with it, this makes clearing MUCH smoother by making freezing easier so use this to engage every ~20 seconds to keep the buff up.

Boss Rotation:

Hand of Chayula to apply your mark and curse. This sometimes ends up targetting your Hollow Focus bells which is a little annoying, you have to get the hang of it.

Ice Strike full 3 strikes +1 from crescendo gives you the combo to place a bell. So the rotation goes Ice strike fully, Bell, Ice strike fully, Bell, then use shattering palm. This places the shatter shards onto the bells and the boss both, then continue ice striking the boss and bells together to pop all the shards and shotgun the boss.

After you get Martial Adept by dropping Way of the Mountain at mid yellow ish maps, you will be able to do this combo faster. You will ice strike hit 2 times, bell, this does Not stop the rotation of ice strike to reach it's big 3rd and 4th strike if you have enough attack speed, which this build does naturally. So you can easily 2 strike, Bell, 3rd strike 4th strike, Bell, 1 2 strike, Bell, Shattering Palm and then it will massively shotgun the boss down.

Later in progression you will no longer use curses or Hand of Chayula, and will instead engage bosses with Pounce linked with your mark skill and use the below mentioned buffs.

Buffs:

As you progress, you will have more than enough bossing damage but will need some buffs to help make clearing feel buttery smooth. This is where the weapon set 2 Talisman, with Rend and Devour come in to give you MASSIVE buffs.

You Devour your Hollow Focus bells, with Blazing Critical and Thrill of the Kill II socketed into Devour it gives you a ton of %Gain as Extra Damage. This also gives you power charges that you consume with Rend to get a massive %Gain as Lightning buff.
This is very quick, doing it takes 1-2 seconds and the buffs last ~30 seconds. You do not have to maintain them all the time, only do it if the map has alot of tanky mods on it, or for bosses.

In the later stages of progression you will automate the power charge generation with Ailith's Chimes and only use the Rend buff while mapping as that is Very quick to tap the button and keep going every 30 seconds, and the other buffs are only used for bosses or encounters where you have a moment to stop and do it, like Ritual or Expedition.

Mana Issues:

GGG Nerfed Leech overall this league, for both life and mana. So leeching mana is a little bit of a problem. Early on you will be using Mana Remnants, and once you get the bell on your back you will link it to Mana Leech to help with the leech situation. Later on once you get 1 leech mod on gear, plus a node on the passive tree, plus the leech support on the bell, then things do feel better mostly so you can drop Mana Remnants because it's a dead aura. There are still times when you have to use a mana flask. I am working on fixing this in further improvements to the build and am open to suggestions.

If you are having many issues and do not want to press flasks, consider adding Mana Leech support to your tempest bell for help with mana issues on single target, and path into Conservative Casting on your tree from the right to pick up all the mana cost efficiency. That should help quite a bit. And get a mana flask with %More Recovery On Low Mana, and increased charges.

F.A.Q:

The questions you all ask me the most will be added here.

How Do I Reserve my Auras? I dont have enough spirit:
Ghost Dance Quality gives Reservation Efficiency. The +2 melee gloves with way of the stonefist with even more gem quality, enough to get you to your max quality.

My gloves rolled low quality, what do I do? Do I need to divine it somehow?
No! Please dont waste divines. You can reroll the quality on the gloves by Altering The Item somehow. The only way to do this is by using the new FLUX items, if your gloves have a resistance mod on them you can reroll the resistances with Fluxes into different resistances, this also for some reason divines your melee skill quality so do that. You need 11% Quality on your gloves, 10% will make Ghost Dance not be able to reserve the right amount of mana. In the end game you can also just get 1 more spirit on your amulet. There is no way to check the quality without equipping the gloves.

Can I use a Staff?

This build will have SIGNIFICANTLY Higher damage if you use a staff, but it will be significantly slower. Hollow Palm's attack rate is unbeatable even if you have a t1 attack speed staff. The damage goes up alot if you equip a very good staff, but I like the speed more personally. You do not need to change anything, if you want to use a staff just equip a good strong one and use it.

The Build Plays Around a Few Different Mechanics, I will give a TLDR Here but they are best explained in the video guides.

The early progression stages are mentioned above in the skill rotation section, and how all the skills function so I will not be writing that again here.

LOW LIFE SETUP:

The build functions around using a Low Life Setup with Cat O' Nine Tails to get a massive amount of bonus damage. This bonus is utilized through things like Direstrike II and Killer Instinct giving a constant 130% increased attack damage bonus to everything, plus Execute III giving 30% more damage, and 30% more on top against enemies below 35% life, which sums to around 40% more damage average on all your skills. This more than doubles the build's damage. The only disadvantage of low life is not being able to go Chaos Inoculation, so you need to solve bleed and poison. I solve both by using a bleed and poison charm, notes for that are above in the gear section.

Hollow Palm Technique lacks ways to scale damage, it has very high attack speed and base crit, but crit doesnt matter if you dont have base damage that a big quarterstaff would give. Going low life gives a massive multiplier to our damage, which compensates for the lack of big base damage allowing us to maintain the amazing high attack speed feeling of Hollow Palm Technique, while not having to deal with the downside of not enough damage.

Martial Artist's Way of the Stone Fist also helps alot by giving an extra source of Gain as Extra Damage, as well as the Wyvern Form Buffs with Devour and Rend mentioned above. Way of the stonefist gloves also give a MASSIVE amount of evasion es, further scaling hollow palm to the point where in the level 94 Mid Endgame setup the build has 100% crit chance.

Martial Artists' Hollow Focus and Hollow Resonance give alot of QOL to the build, making Shattering Palm have better explosive coverage, give us perma blind source on our back, and the Physical damage bell makes it possible to break armour with the Armour Break III support gem, and generate endurance charges with it for Charge Regulation. The Hollow Focus bells are also free cull targets for Thrill of the Kill II, and free sources of power charges before you get Ailith's Chimes late game. It is just a ton of character power and qol that no other ascendancy can easily provide.

Hollow Palm Scaling:

If you do not understand it fully, this is a short summary:
Evasion on gear gives you attack speed. MORE attack speed, this is multiplicative with your other sources of INCREASED attack speed. Evasion on gear does NOT refer to %inc evasion on amulets, or flat evasion on rings. It only works with the evasion on your gloves helmet boots body armour.

Energy shield gives BASE CRIT to ALL attacks, including Herald of Ice. This is how we scale our crit to 100% on almost all our skills. This works same as evasion above, only scales with the ES on gear, not rings or amulets or the passive tree.

SKILL GEM LEVELS!!!!!!

The BEST AND MOST IMPORTANT damage scaler is your gem level. Hollow palm gives a base flat amount per level of the skill, similar to how spells scale. This replaces the damage you would get from a quarterstaff, but not nearly enough as i mentioned above. Thats why you need to get as many skill levels as you can on all sources, them being Gloves, Amulet, lvl 20 gem with +1 corrupt, etc etc. Every gem level on any skill is 10% MORE multiplicative damage.

Way Of The Stonefist Modifiers:

This ascendancy is epic. The glove mods on base gloves, or unique gloves, all transform into something specific, it is not RNG like a timeless jewel.

THE BASE TYPE DOES NOT MATTER. You can equip Any base type, any attribute requirement, the ascendancy will transform it into evasion es modifiers and evasion es base stats.

The modifiers are all very fun to play around with, but the ones for this build are the following:

- FLAT Defense Stats (Flat armor, flat ES, flat hybrid) you NEED this to be t1, otherwise you will miss out on ALOT of hollow palm scaling. This mod transforms into + flat evasion and es PER Level, the higher your character level the more you get.

- %Increased Defense stat (Not the hybrid one that comes with life, the big one that goes upto 100% at t1), this transforms into Global evasion and ES. This does not scale hollow palm as it does not make the number on your glove go up, but it is a massive tankiness boost.

- MELEE SKILL LEVELS. Do not get a glove without +2 melee, it will be a huge dps loss. +2 melee transforms into +1 melee and 10-12% quality.

- Flat damage to attacks. This is a very nice damage boost, cold damage is the best, other elements are second best, phys is the weakest.

The above 4 mods are what i would get ALWAYS, and these last 2 are flexible.

- Attack speed, this is amazing it converts to Onslaught On Hit, giving you movement speed and attack speed both on hit.

- Phys mana leech, if you do not have this on your ring then get it on the glove. This transforms into just a higher number of mana leech basically.

- Resistances, i would not recommend wasting your glove slot on this it only transforms into the same resistance with +1-2 max res of that resistance. Not worth it. I would go with attack speed and mana leech.