Monk related question from a new player

[On General Principle]

Hey, I'm new to the game and I just unlocked an invoker ascension, yet I play monk as a range class which is weird to me because I usually hear people refering to him as a melee class. If I ever come close to ads, they annihilate me so I have to keep distance and spam my aoe stuff and prioritize getting power charges to use the strongest ability to delete stuff on my screen. Am I playing him wrong or is it ok till a certain point?(Lightning monk that spams storm wave a lot)

[NEGAN]

recently monk got buffed but the game is still in general not friendly to melee in other words u are gonna be dying a lot and progressing slower if u play warrior or monk if u want fun time go with ranged classes but if u want to suffer then melee

[Greg]

You can play him however you like. If you want to be able to engage in melee with a bit of survivability, I would recommend an aura like ghost dance or wind dancer (I use both). Good gear really helps. Use your orbs wisely. Some of them can be very hard to come across throughout the game. If you're content on AOE I would recommend storm wave as soon as possible. Endgame builds built on AOE are quite effective (like Invoker crit wave etc.). Focus on damage and mana cost reduction/regen and you'll be blowing through things pretty quickly.

[DarkFenix]

Storm wave is a perfectly good build to run. It's not the highest damage monk build, but it's comparatively safe since it's essentially ranged.

Just be careful about using that as a crutch, you are going to need to build up your defences sooner or later. Fortunately Invoker has absolutely crazy strong defences, "...and Protect me from Harm" gives a 40% reduction to evasion, but lets evasion count as armour too. Mix that with Bestial Skin (+100% evasion from body armour) and a really high evasion body armour (1500+ is easy enough to get, if you spend a bit more you can get ~2000) and your defences go crazy, then grab Spectral Ward (+1 ES per 12 evasion on body armour) and you even get pretty decent ES.

[On General Principle]

Originally posted by Greg:

You can play him however you like. If you want to be able to engage in melee with a bit of survivability, I would recommend an aura like ghost dance or wind dancer (I use both). Good gear really helps. Use your orbs wisely. Some of them can be very hard to come across throughout the game. If you're content on AOE I would recommend storm wave as soon as possible. Endgame builds built on AOE are quite effective (like Invoker crit wave etc.). Focus on damage and mana cost reduction/regen and you'll be blowing through things pretty quickly.

thanks for clarifying, I appreciate that.

[On General Principle]

Originally posted by DarkFenix:

Storm wave is a perfectly good build to run. It's not the highest damage monk build, but it's comparatively safe since it's essentially ranged.

Just be careful about using that as a crutch, you are going to need to build up your defences sooner or later. Fortunately Invoker has absolutely crazy strong defences, "...and Protect me from Harm" gives a 40% reduction to evasion, but lets evasion count as armour too. Mix that with Bestial Skin (+100% evasion from body armour) and a really high evasion body armour (1500+ is easy enough to get, if you spend a bit more you can get ~2000) and your defences go crazy, then grab Spectral Ward (+1 ES per 12 evasion on body armour) and you even get pretty decent ES.

Yeah, I noticed that I'm a glasscannon basically. Thanks for the advices.