Actually, vitality is kind of low on the list for monks. If you have a choice between lots of resists and armor or vit, you need to choose resists and armor. Why is that? Because all of our heals are number based rather than percentage based. The lower your health pool the more effective your heals are. You want to mitigate the damage and make sure what's coming in is a low number that you can take care of, along with of course dodging it altogether. You're not a barb. Vit is probably a less must have than most other classes. I now have a good chunk of life, but when I first got through Act 2, 3, and my first few times through 4 I had something like 28,000 life. I think that's probably the bottom limit, but you don't really NEED 40,000 at all. It's nice to have in Act 4 if you don't have to give anything else up to get it (what I've been doing now, and I finally got my life up to that), but it's kind of last on your list. Dodge is your first defense, so have good dodge. Because of some of those things you said, armor and resists should be your 2nd defense, and that should be HUGE. Next line of defense is good timing and spacing of your skills. We've got a ton of good ones. Use them wisely and use them when needed. Vit is last.
And if you set it up right for the most part you shouldn't be kiting. The thing is that Monk benefits almost more than any other class from Life on Hit. You need that in good numbers. And with life on hit if you're kiting you're not hitting which means you're not getting life. Your build should be based more on staying put so you can dodge and gain life. That's not to say you won't have to kite. You most definitely will, and you should find out which elites those are (things with fast, molten, and arcane for example and possibly all together are definitely things you need to kite). But for the most part you need to get your build to the point where you can stand in plague pools, and where you can stand in one layer of some molten for at least a good chunk of time. Not a ton of time, but some time.
Also, Frozen can be dodged. I dodge it all the time. Frozen should never be a problem for a monk. You should dodge it most of the time, and the times you don't dodge it you have serenity. And if those two things don't work, or you're on cool down with serenity you can do something like a flash from blinding faith in order to make sure nothing can hit you while you're incapacitated (if it's a hard hitting enemy that is... if it isn't, save it, since you're likely using the +damage part of it, too).
