Diablo III- Skills Article CLXXX: Elective Mode and the Monk

As the Monk is a Generator class, you will want to have a Primary skill available on your mouse at all times.  The other skill stuck to your mouse should be whichever other skill you want to use most frequently.  With the large number of recharge and buff skills available to the Monk class, this other skill may have a very high Spirit cost, and that’s alright- even if you don’t use it constantly, as long as you use it more than your other skills you should be fine- the Monk’s Primary skills are strong enough that you should find yourself sometimes not even spending Spirit to back them up.

The Hotbar is where things really get interesting.  While you can only have one of the Monk’s Mantras active at a time, the Monk has plenty of other skills that you may well find yourself wanting to use everytime their cooldowns come up.  Certain forms of Monk may even want to stick additional Primary skills here as well.  The key to figuring out what you want to put in these slots is in understanding your habits as a player.  If you tend to be very active, keeping your character moving around doing all sorts of different things, you’re going to want a lot of utility skills on tap here, things to compound the effects of your mouse skills or make it easier to do what you want with them.  If you prefer a more passive method, then the hotbar should really be full of cooldown skills, things that you don’t use on targets but just trigger when you want them.  Some players will find that they prefer a more balanced method- maybe the only have three skills they use regularly, and so one of those can be in the Hotbar and the rest can be cooldown skills that help keep the Monk (and their party members) functioning at full.  Generally speaking, the Monk is going to use their hotbar skills more often than most other classes, since Monks function on a very tactical level despite a relatively low amount of battlefield manipulation.

Since so few of the Monk’s passive skills specify anything about their active skills, it’s no surprise that they possess only two passives that really stand to gain from Elective Mode.  Beacon of Ytar gets stronger because it becomes easier to pack cooldown skills onto the Monk skillset- which isn’t much of a big deal, given that there are cooldown skills in virtually every category of Monk skill.  Combination Strike is the real direction to look here, as it requires the use of a variety of Primary Skills, which is only really possible by way of Elective Mode.  Be careful using it, though- since the bonus only lasts three seconds, you should only be packing two or three different Primary Skills- otherwise not only will you be short on utility skills, but you’ll find yourself with too compex a cycle of attacks going off constantly, and you’ll never get to the second and third strike effects from the Primary skills, which are nearly all stronger than the base skill.