My experiences with monk so far (blind run)

Hello,

I am a new player to the EA and have just entered Act 2 with my Monk.
I have decided to end my playtest of the Monk after defeating the Balbala so I can experiment with the other classes.

Initially, I tried basing my build based on "breadcrumbs" I thought I noticed from the dev team.

First breadcrumb involved Falling Thunder, whose description mentioned that if I consume Power Charges with this skill I will be able to deal more damage. This motivated me to unlock Killing Palm as my 2nd gem, thinking I will have a serviceable leveling kit.

I was wrong....the combo of Killing Palm + Falling Lighting is a very slow combo, unfit for early game, simply because during early stages of Act 1 (before entering Red Vale) I was killing things too fast with melee weapon attacks, leaving me unable to make use of this combo against the next batch of enemies.

Staff Auto Attacks, simply outperformed the need for me to set up combos in preparation for exterminating larger batch of stronger enemies.

Around level 9, I ditched Killing Palm because I was able to acquire a Wand with the Power Siphon skill, which simply outperformed Killing Palm, for the purposes of helping me setup Falling Thunder combo to anihilate large patches of stronger enemies.

Power Siphon, outperforms Killing Palm by a godly margin. First off the aiming on Killing Palm is sloppy and you can find yourself teleporting to a full health target instead of your intended low health target, secondly, the damage is way to small in order to secure kills.

I was using a staff looted in the TUTORIAL AREA which was giving me +1 to my melee gems....the fact that I couldn't perform a Culling Strike vs a level 2 monster because it died too quickly from STAFF AUTO ATTACKS, while having the damage potential of a LEVEL 2 KILLING PALM Gem immediately after finishing the tutorial level was infuriating...it made me feel like I was playing a trap build and this served AS A HORRIBLE FIRST EXPERIENCE for me as a new player who wanted to try Monk First.

Although it was doable for me to finish Act 1 without phasing out Falling Thunder, I feel I could have finished even quicker, had I gone for a Elemental + Bow build instead of Staff + Elemental Ice Magic.

Killing Palm, I had to phase out from my first Monk, because it's inability to secure kills when compared to regular auto attacks was too much of a detriment to my build.

On my second Monk, where I play Bow + Staff, I encountered a new problem, my bow auto attacks were killing things so fast, I couldn't get to use Killing Palm to prepare the combo again. This reinforces my conception that Killing Palm + Falling Thunder is a bad combo to present to new players.

Since late Act 1, up until where I currently am in Act 2, I was able to get good milleage out of Power Siphon + Falling Thunder as a nuke vs large groups of enemies. This allowed me to pin point the fact that Killing Palm is in need of some form of rework in order to be viable in the early game play experience for new Monk Players.

My advice, put a Combo Requirement on it, so that New Players are exposed earlier to the combo sistem and have them decide, if they wish to keep Falling Thunder or ditch it for Glacial Cascade (which has been an amazing auto attack spamable replacement so far).

Also appologies for crap english - I am not a native speaker of this language.