Today marks the start of a new Season in Diablo 3, and that means a new 1-70 journey for players partaking in the event. If you want that journey to take as little time as possible – either because you’re sick of creating new characters, or because you enjoy the challenge of speed-leveling, then be sure to have checked out our initial guide we posted for Season 2.
…done? Okay. Now, let’s get a little more in-depth.
Best places to level
The easy Cursed Chest bounties in Acts 1 and 4 will send over 100 monsters for you to kill in a very short amount of time. Combine that with the quest completion XP, and these result in some of the fastest XP you can possibly acquire. The bounties are:
- A1: Cursed Bellows
- A1: Cursed Court
- A1: Cursed Chamber of Bone
- A1: Cursed Cellar
- A4: Cursed Chapel
What slows you down while doing these bounties, however, is the downtime spent remaking games or traveling to the chests. In order to cut down on the relative amount of downtime you’ll experience, you should combine Cursed Chest runs with Halls 3 runs.
Halls of Agony Level 3 in Act 1 combines very high monster density with relatively easy monsters, making it one of the most efficient ways to level up, right alongside Cursed Chest farming. However, when you combine Cursed Chest runs with Halls 3 runs, you’ll actually level up even faster than if you were to do only one of these methods separately.
When you load into game, start by teleporting to Halls of Agony Level 3, complete any bounties that may spawn in the area, and just kill monsters until you hit a dead end. Rather than waste 20 seconds backtracking, then check for any of the aforementioned Cursed Bounties that spawned, complete them, leave the game, and remake.
Rifts can also be a very fast way to level, but this depends on whether you get lucky or not with your rift layouts. Some rifts are very high density, and will be faster than Halls 3, but some rifts can be very sparse. Use at your own discretion – the fragments may be better spent at level 70.
Avoid Wasted “Thinking” Time
The amount of time you spend trying to decide what skills to take every level, or whether an item you found is an upgrade or not, really adds up throughout the 1-70 journey.
If you pre-plan all the skills you will take and every item you will craft, you will cut down on a great amount of time not spent killing monsters. The build you create should be optimized for the type of runs you’re doing – so if you’re following this guide, you want to focus on huge area of effect powers that can hit all the enemies coming at you in a Cursed Chest bounty. Here is a wizard guide I wrote up, which includes every skill and every crafted item I plan to take at every level. Other members of community created versions for monks, barbarians, and demon hunters.
Also, learn to evaluate whether an item is an upgrade or not within a second of mousing over it. You can follow the table in my linked guide for the mental checklist I go through.
Play Smart
Apart from optimizing your overall strategy, you also need to optimize your gameplay – how you fight monsters. You want to get the most out of every second of play, every ounce of mana you spend, and every single attack.
An area of effect attack deals a certain amount of damage to every monster it hits. If you want to maximize your effectiveness, that means you want to maximize the number of enemies you’re hitting at once. 100 damage dealt to two enemies is 200 total damage – but dealt to 10 enemies, it’s 1,000 damage.
Don’t stop to kill one or two enemies – that’s a waste of time, because you can instead be moving on to kill a group of enemies. Learn to use “pulling” tactics to get enemies to follow you to the next group. For instance, if you run into a champion pack, rather than stop to kill it – which will take some time – instead let it follow you to the next group of enemies, and then make your area-of-effect power strike both the new group and the champion pack you’re pulling. Now you’re maximizing your damage!
Of course, don’t feel like you need to rush from 1-70. If you prefer to smell the roses, then by all means, do so! The objective of a game is to have fun, not to be efficient. Some of us just have more fun by being efficient.
CJ Miozzi is a Senior Editor at The Escapist and is also known as Rhykker on Youtube. You can follow his livestreams on Twitch and Tweet to him @Rhykker.
