Diablo Immortal monk players dominate the meta

[Jannick]

Immortal Monk of Diablo players now dominate the PvP metaplatform, resulting in the most spending whales in the game switching tiers in Blizzard's RPGs to gain an advantage over other players. While each class can be used for general play and is even viable in competitive pairings, the gaming community seems to agree that the best Diablo Immortal builds for raging in Battlefield multiplayer come from Monks.

Diablo Immortal's whales are the biggest consumers in the game. Many of them spend tens or thousands of dollars in real money transactions to outfit their characters with the best Diablo Immortal legendary gems. In the process, they also create a stat called "Resonance" that serves as a multiplier for your character's damage and health. This is often one of the key differences between a player and a player mode build (e.g. Battlefield).

If resonance is the most important thing, then what distinguishes the monk? The answer lies in a skill called "Zen Shield", commonly referred to as "Zen Shield" by players. This protective bubble absorbs damage, but more importantly, it "also prevents any effects that cause a character to lose control". You can use it on yourself or target an allied player to jump on them and use the shield on both of you.

One of the most famous Whale players, jtisallbusiness (who is notably temporarily unable to play PvP after spending over $100,000 on the game) is one of those who made the leap to Monk. A former barbarian, he's certainly one of the strongest forces in the game to be reckoned with, but he's still often taken down and killed by coordinated opponents. Thanks to the Zen Shield, he can now bail out with his teammates while also setting up a protective shield against any impending impact.

The impact is evident as jtisallbusiness topped the leaderboard with 30 kills and just 3 deaths in its first game on Battlegrounds and Monk on the first day of the year. Thanks to High Resonance, Zen Shield's cooldown is virtually nonexistent, allowing him to play against other High Resonance players with minimal risk.

In a post late last year, the first whales started changing their class to Battle Monk in Diablo: Immortals, with one commenter simply commenting, "If you have over 4,000 resonance, drop everything and switch to Battle Monk." A recent post said: "A few weeks ago, three of the top ten whales on our server became monks and are now unkillable. When they were mages or demon hunters, at least you could still KZ them, but now if they become monks they are practically invincible, they go 1v4 into the vault and kill everything like they don't matter.

Players point out that due to its ever-present immunity, the Zen Shield becomes increasingly powerful as more crowd control effects are introduced into the game, as all of these effects can be ignored for their duration or until the shield breaks instead to block only a certain number of instances. Time will tell if Blizzard will nerf Monks or if they'll balance other classes in the future as well.

The latest patch for Diablo Immortal adds a new limited-time event that follows the arrival of Terror's Tide, the second major update for Diablo Immortal. If you don't want to dive into the high-end PvP world, check out our Diablo Immortal class list for the best classes for general play. In the meantime, the Diablo 4 items release date is fast approaching - we'll keep you posted with all the news.