How do people kill like crazy?

Question

I know how damage works. I've tried my best (as far as I have found items so far) to maximize my damage but it looks like some people just kill like crazy, while I have to pause a moment or two for every white enemy.

For reference, this is the character I'm talking about, but I would appreciate a more general response. Furthermore, here's some info reported by the game:

Here's what I've done and I know they are kind of obligatory:

• Get a good weapon and insert a critical hit gem in it.
• Get a decent critical hit chance and damage and given a choice, increase the smaller one (CHD vs 10x CHC) (I know the math, but let's not get into that).
• All this is done with a decent toughness and given a chance, increase the smaller of resistance and armor (Armor vs 10x Resistance) (again, I know the math).
• (At least with monk), increase cooldown reduction (I know I can get 10 percent more with my helm, but that wouldn't make wonders suddenly).
• (At least with monk), use passive skills that increase my attack speed.

Here's what I've done with my own wits:

• Get a high lightning damage bonus (that kind of happened by chance and the set just worked in its favor)
• Use mostly lightning effect on my selected skills
• Have the damage bonus on the weapon be of lightning type (side question: does lightning bonus affect that?)
• Get bonus damage to skills I use (FoT and WoL in this case)

Here are a bit of details of what I know I can do better:

• Get that ring that makes every set look as if they had one more of it (set-bonus-wise)
• Get 2 Sunwuko's pieces to increase damage by 20%

Now here's where I'm stumped. If I go to Torment 4, I progress slowly through the enemies but more than a handful of the people I see just walk and every white enemy seem to just drop dead. I know I could do better damage-wise, but I cannot imagine anything about 50% more.

Furthermore, with for example Wreath of Lightning gem (currently rank 15), the lightning seems to barely have any effect on even whites and upgrading it further doesn't significantly raise its damage either. It seems strange for the gem to be that underpowered.

All that said, what I suspect is there is some important factor I'm not taking care of. My question is therefore, what is that important factor? In other words, how can people kill like crazy while a build like mine is considerably inferior?

Answer 1

I think what will help you the most will be to switch Wreath of lightning to either pain enhancer or gogok of switftness.

Best would be to use all 3, Tear, Gogok and PE. Attack speed is one of the very few things in D3 without a cap hit. Hitting faster will get you more crits, crits will activate PE and more hits will activate the tear more often. It's a win-win-win situation. I would suggest using Gogok till you get a slot for PE in your necklace.

I had Wreath of lightning before switching to the Tear on my necklace and I saw the difference even if my tear is rank 1 while my Wreath of lightning was like 10. It wasn't night and day but I didn't want to go back at all.

My sheet damage goes over 1.1 million (even higher but since I'm working on my memory after the holidays, I rather say something I'm sure of... but it did go over 1.1M) when at 15 stacks of Gogok, which, once you hit 6-7 stacks, shouldn't be hard to get.

After that, getting a higher Crit chance and crit damage will always help. I would have to be at home to see my crit chance and damage since it doesn't show in the profile.

Don't put too much importance on the sheet damage, there's a ton of things that will make you melt mobs that don't show there.

Answer 2

While I cannot say I can kill like crazy yet, I've certainly improved a lot, so I'm sharing what I gathered as the essentials (both from my experience and the comments/answers here).

The first and most important one:

• Ring of Royal Grandeur. This makes it possible to get many set bonuses at the same time that would otherwise be impossible. You may be interested in knowing that it only drops from bounty caches of Act 1.

With that in mind, here are my current stats:

While I've inevitably lost some minor elemental damage and attack speed, I've improved on the following (I'll try to keep it as generic as possible):

• Critical Hit Chance: This is particularly important since many effects trigger on critical hit
• Critical Hit Damage: Of course
• Higher skill damages
• From set bonuses:
  • Damage against elites
  • Damage reduction from elites
• Use Tear, Gogok and Pain Enhancer: See this other answer
• Get high life per hit: This is important for survival. Note that this effect (and life per second and others as well) scale if you trade life for armor/resistance (as you can see, my toughness is somewhat lower than before, and I have less health, but very quickly heal whatever damage I take).

Some monk-specific improvements:

• From set bonuses:
  • Cheap Sweeping Wind cast: It has basically become free, so I switched my Seven Sided Strike with this one.
  • Get effect of all mantras: +10% higher damage, more healing, damage when getting hit etc