Diablo III- Skills Article XCI: The Monk, Passive Skills (5 of 5)

One with Everything:  All your resistances are equal to your highest resistance.

One with Everything is a good balancing skill- if you happen to have a bunch of gear that boosts only one or two of your element resistances, you want One with Everything to extend that protection.  Sadly, since the only way you’re going to get specific resistances is through your gear, it’s impossible to choose whether One with Everything is worthwhile or not based on your skills.  Keep an eye on your gear and if you find yourself equipping a lot of a particular resistance, go ahead and grab this.  Just make sure you have a decent alternative as well, for when you change your gear.

Combination Strike: Each different Spirit generator ability you use increases your damage by 8% for 3 seconds.

This initially seems like a terrible idea.  The key to using Combination Strike is that if you set Diablo III into Elective mode, you can put Primary skills into any skill slot you like- so you could have up to four different skills that generate Spirit.  While this does cost you a lot of your utility power, the way the buff works makes this viable in some ways.  Since each time you hit with a Spirit generator skill, the 3 seconds refreshes, and each time you use a Spirit generator ability you haven’t already got the buff from, you get another copy on the stack, you can get up to a 32% damage increase from the four Primary skills.  Whether or not this is worth it is very iffy- you can lose a lot of tactical capability by replacing three of your other skills with alternate Primary skills.  Since this effect only operates off of Primary Skills, as no other skill directly adds Spirit to your Spirit pool for being used, it’s hard to get much use out of the buff- unless you’re willing to drop other skills for more Primary Skills, this is really not worth it.

Near Death Experience: Once every 90 seconds, when you would die from damage, you instead are restored to 35% Life and 35% Spirit.

This quirky skill is most useful for Monks who draw all the enemy attention onto themselves, particularly when you reach the late game (Hell and Inferno mode) and can run across some pretty devastating groups of champions or rare monsters.  You shouldn’t find yourself using this to the limit- if you are, you need more defenses badly, or to kill things better instead.  This shouldn’t be a main pick for a passive skill, but if you want the security it makes an okay third slot skill.