Inna Mystic Ally Monk Speed Farming Variation

The Inna Mystic Ally Monk is a very capable speed Greater Rift farming and regular Rift farming build, handling all those tasks and more (e.g. bounties) with ease and minor alterations for each particular task.

Within the limited scope of difficulty of Greater Rift farming tiers and normal (Nephalem) rifts up to T16, the necessary damage and toughness to triumph over the enemy is significantly smaller. Thus, your best course of action is to improve utility and speed.

Active Skills
Way of the Hundred Fists Blazing Fists Cyclone Strike Implosion 1 Mystic Ally Water Ally 2 Dashing Strike Quicksilver 3 Epiphany Desert Shroud 4 Mantra of Conviction Annihilation
Passive Skills
Near Death Experience Seize the Initiative Beacon of Ytar Relentless Assault

When you are speed farming normal rifts and low tier Greater Rifts, your playstyle should at least partially reflect the circumstances by focusing on massive pulls, generic bonuses against enemies and chaining pylon effects.

With the cooldown reducing bonuses of In-geom at your disposal, you will be able to spam Epiphany for protection and Dashing Strike for incredibly rapid teleportation across the rift, further empowered with the movement bonuses of Mantra of Conviction Annihilation. Your generator skill, Way of the Hundred Fists, will largely be used to maintain the damage bonus of Focus and Restraint and the Flying Dragon buff. Your Mystic Ally usage will vary according to content; when you are clearing standard rifts, you can be trigger happy and pop it at will to replenish Spirit, but in speed Greater Rifts (especially as you approach your upper limits), you should be a lot more judicious with its use and only activate it once the "waves" portion of the animation is over and the Allies are back to humanoid form.

Parts of the skill and passive selection will overlap with the base Greater Rift progression build, but others will have to change according to the task at hand. Ability to cross over great distances faster and more efficiently take precedence.

• Mystic Ally is still your main damage dealer, but the timed burst of Earth Ally is ill-suited in the speedier content, where the consistent damage and reliable AoE of Water Ally performs a lot better. Staying on Earth Ally should only be considered in groups, since the Physical rune has superior overall damage, and the Freezing effects of the Water Allies might be considered undesirable.
• Way of the Hundred Fists remains in the build, since the damage buffing angle of the rune Assimilation retains usefulness in GR speeds, while the alteration to the rune Blazing Fists will net you decent extra movement speed in standard rifts and bounties.
• Cyclone Strike Implosion remains a vital skill in the build due to its unrivaled enemy grouping capabilities.
• While it is a decent damage increase for GR progression purposes, Blinding Flash Faith in the Light is overkill for any type of speed content and should be replaced by the generic usefulness of Epiphany, which delivers a utility Swiss knife of damage reduction, Spirit Regeneration and additional movement capabilities. Its massive cooldown will be reduced to a spammable state via the powers of In-geom. You can either use the defensive Desert Shroud rune, or the extra Spirit generation from Insight.
• Serenity Ascension should stay during speed Greater Rift farming for an extra layer of spammable safety, but in any form of lower tier content — i.e. normal rifts or bounties — should be replaced by Mantra of Conviction Annihilation for the extra movement speed.
• You will maintain the majority of your progression passive lineup — with Near Death Experience still safeguarding you against accidental burst, Seize the Initiative and Beacon of Ytar providing valuable attack speed and cooldown reduction bonuses respectively, and Relentless Assault bringing a smattering of extra damage.

Most of the gear from the Greater Rift progression build will still make sense for speed farming, but a few variations will be necessary in order to maximize your productivity and momentum during regular Rift clears.

The Inna's Mantra set is still worn almost in its entirety, and it is recommended that you use 2 pieces of the craftable Aughild's Authority set, in order to capitalize on your elite fighting prowess and snowball your performance throughout the rift; the loss of damage reduction items should be negligible during speed GR farming and standard rift clearing. Of course, this necessitates the use of Ring of Royal Grandeur in your jewelry Cube slot to complete the 6-piece Inna bonus.

During Greater and standard rift speed farming, the timing and positioning-reliant bonuses of the Endless Walk set are greatly diminished in usefulness. You can still use this jewelry split, but will be slower and only suitable when you explore the upper GR limits of your speed farming. In their place, we suggest wearing a combination of Squirt's Necklace and the Bastions of Will set, Focus and Restraint, instead. Squirt's Necklace is a glass cannon staple which doubles your damage with a separate multiplier, but has considerable drawbacks — requirement not to get hit and a penalty of increased damage taken if you do. You will offset these drawbacks with the shield of Molten Wildebeest's Gizzard lvl 25 bonus, and the combination of control you apply to the enemies plus your tremendous kill speed in GRs, or a combo of Boon of the Hoarder in one of your ring sockets plus a cubed Goldwrap in standard rifts. The Bastions of Will set, Focus and Restraint, bring the highest damage multiplier possible from jewelry at the mere cost of weaving generator and spender attacks — a trivial ask in an Inna Mystic Allies build, where you naturally interplay between Way of the Hundred Fists and Cyclone Strike usage.

In order to ensure very high uptime of Serenity and Epiphany during speed farming, you should drop the usual suspects for solo GR progression, the Shenlong set weapons, and use a combination of In-geom and Echoing Fury.

To help you with farming the gear you need for your builds, we have two very useful guides that you can access by clicking the links below: a Salvage Guide to help you quickly check whether or not you can safely salvage a piece of gear and a Legendary Farming Guide to help you efficiently farm legendaries and set items.

This Season comes with the theme of Angelic Crucibles — consumable items that empower Legendary items with perfected Ancient-level stats, as well as infuse them with one of three unique, powerful, class-specific abilities at random. For this build, we recommend aiming for the Way of the Hundred Fists Sanctification, which adds the following power to your build:

• Way of the Hundred Fists Sanctification: All Way of the Hundred Fists combo punches use the second stage combo punch. Consecutive hits from Way of the Hundred Fists increases its damage by 2%. Max 350 stacks.

Use Angelic Crucibles on an item that crosses over most (if not all) variants of a build, and is also an item that is relatively harder to perfect than other slots (since sanctifying an item maximizes its stats). In the case of this build, a good candidate for Sanctification are The Crudest Boots, since they are present in all variants of the build, or a jewelry piece such as the Convention of Elements.

You can read more on Angelic Crucibles and the sanctification process in our dedicated Angelic Crucible Mechanics guide.

The former Season 28 theme, the Altar of Rites, has been revised and re-added to Diablo 3 as a permanent character progression mechanic. — For virtually all builds and players of all skill levels — from casual to advanced — we recommend progressing through the Altar tree using the path outlined below. The suggested path is geared towards maximum quality of life first, then amplifying damage, and then mopping up the tree with defensive and edge case utility nodes.

Note that while they require reaching them with a Seal, Legendary Potion Powers are not part of the Seal cost system; Potions unlock with a separate resource called Primordial Ashes, obtained from salvaging Legendary or Set items of Primal (red bordered) quality. Upgrade them as soon as possible, and in the order shown below (courtesy of Caleko's Altar of Rites planner).

You can read more on the Altar of Rites, Seals and Legendary Potion Powers in our dedicated Altar of Rites Mechanics guide.

Both Enforcer and Bane of the Trapped remain universally desired damage amplification gems for the build.

When using Squirt's Necklace, you will have to introduce a shielding layer of protection in order to maximize its bonus. The most convenient way for most builds to do so, including this one, is to socket a Molten Wildebeest's Gizzard as a legendary gem. Its level 25 bonus provides a Life Regeneration-scaling absorption shield after not taking damage for 4 seconds, and is rather easy to keep up with the crowd control capabilities of this build. If you are playing normal rifts, you can achieve the same effect with even greater strength by using Boon of the Hoarder (and pairing it with a cubed Goldwrap).

For more information about gems, please refer to our guide on gems.

In speed Greater Rifts, you should still use Flying Dragon from the progression build, as it still provides a potent damage boon to this attack speed-dependent build. When doing standard rift farming, you can drop this proc for an additional source of cooldown reduction from a cubed Messerschmidt's Reaver — the trash enemy counterpart to In-geom's elite kill CDR bonuses.

In speed Greater Rifts, you will be using Bindings of the Lesser Gods in this slot for the valuable damage bonuses these bracers provide to your Mystic Allies. In T16, this damage will be overkill, so you could solidify your Squirt's Necklace uptime with a Goldwrap in this slot instead. Its powers will be skyrocketed via the gemmed Boon of the Hoarder in one of your rings, and this combo will render you practically invulnerable during regular Rift farming.

In order to maintain the 6-piece bonus of the Inna set and the 3-piece Aughild's Authority set bonuses, you will need to slot a Ring of Royal Grandeur in the jewelry Cube slot.

The Kanai's Cube can be used for much more than simply extracting Legendary powers from items. Please refer to our Kanai's Cube guide for more information.

The recommended follower for this build during T16 and speed Greater Rift farming is the Enchantress due to her utility-laden arsenal of skills, and especially her cooldown reduction bonus, which assists your significant CDR needs during farming. Her balance of increasing survivability while also improving damage makes her an excellent choice during speed farming of any kind.

For more information regarding followers, we advise you to read our Follower Guide, which contains detailed advice for choosing the skills and the gear of your follower.

Your recommended potion during speed farming is Bottomless Potion of the Leech, which complements the high attack speed focus of the build.