How effective is Life Steal in D3?

After my double fatal encounter with the Skeleton King yesterday I wanted to do a fun run with a Monk. But not just any type of run I wanted to make a near invincible killing machine. How to you do that you might be thinking, well in my world you do it by making sure that any life lost is quickly recovered.

So I went over the gear my Wizard had collected, I spend her money leveling the Blacksmith and scouring the Auction house and I came up with these items:

I was super lucky to find the Resplendent Plate on the gold auction house and won them for 500 gold on a bid.

The idea of the set is to regen life constantly and to gain life when chopping monsters up.

First part of my run through with the Life Steal monk can be watched here:

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I must admit that I had a ton of fun, especially when I ran into a treasure gnome that lured me into a knockback Scavenger and a nightmare Grotesque along with all their minions and whichever other normal trash mobs I came across as I was hunting the gnome across the map.

I never got the treasure Gnome, but I did get to kill a huge group of monsters. Check out the carnage at 00:20:40

It is a bit hard to decide whether life steal is awesome based on the early parts of act 1 normal mode, but I will say this. I foresee it being very strong once you start to get some real damage going.

I aim to have the second part of the run through up by tomorrow evening.