Guild Wars 2 - Leveling Guide by Wolfian

Guild Wars 2 Leveling Guide - How To Level Faster! & How i Hit 80 In 10 Hours

Welcome to my Guild Wars 2 Leveling Guide! Some people show you builds to level with me personally i have alot of different tips and tricks that have allowed me to level characters extremely fast i believe i capped my Ranger in 8 hours or so these tips consist of Preparation before leveling and what i like to grab, How bonus XP can give you extreme amount of XP when you find the right maps aswell as a website that will allow you to craft your way up to 400 for Chef and Jewelcrafting for a total of about 15 gold this will net you around 12-15+ levels each here is the website http://gw2crafts.net/cooking_fast.html You can look forward to more build guides & gameplays along with gold farms and whatever else i can think of :P Ingame ID - Eroth.3096 Discord - https://discordapp.com/invite/fYeen6K

-

Diablo 3 - 2.4.2 Leveling Guide | HC WD Solo 1-70 in 1h51m (massacre bonus) | Season 7 preparation by Desolacer

Hey guys, this video demonstrates a full level 1-70 run in less than 2 hours as Witch Doctor, which is one of my projects to prepare for a leveling race in Season 7. Btw. Season 7 will start at 5th August 2016.
Rules: (pretty much the same as a new season start): No paragon, no crafting and never spend more gold than you find.
The trick is to stack up the massacre bonus in Fields of Misery on master difficulty.

Sometimes your items will be too weak, so the best way to upgrade your items is, killing one of the bounty bosses: Maghda, Zoltun Kulle or Butcher.
There are also some Resplendent Chests in Fields of Misery where you can find a lot of rare items.
Using the vendor can also help to upgrade your current items.

Witch Doctor is by far the most powerful class to level with this strategy.
I tried it as Demon Hunter recently, but couldn't reach level 70 in less than 3 hours.
As Barbarian I did it in 2,5 hours.

Songs used:
Diablo 15th Anniversary Soundtrack (Full) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S5MnL...
Diablo III - Soundtrack (OST) All in One https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hkrA5...
Diablo III - A New Dawn https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-TChJ...


► Twitter : https://twitter.com/desolacer
► Twitch: http://www.twitch.tv/desolacer

Black Desert Online - Short and Quick 1-50 Leveling Guide by rndbdoplayer

This is my personal route I took to get characters as quick as possible (<15 hours) to 50 so I could play and test them. I used "safe levels" in the guide so it should be fine for anyone to follow, but if you have good gear (i used +9 Grunil/Yuria set) you can possibly leave each zone 1 level early. It is also important to read a guide on your class so you know which good PvE skills to take. I've found there's usually 2-3 must have skills per class for PvE to make it easy. Hope it helps you.

1-16 Follow quests until you complete the Inventory expansion quest given by Eileen in Velia. If you aren't 16 just go grind some white/pink/red mobs, whatever works for you. It shouldn't take long too long.

16-32 http://i.imgur.com/qVrLDj5.png
32-50 http://i.imgur.com/uUVYq7Z.jpg

SOURCE

Black Desert Online - Leveling Guide: 1-50 in 15 Hours by Hakurai

I don't know what's wrong with me, or why I misnumbered the steps so badly. Just ignore that part.

As requested, here is the text based guide: http://tinyurl.com/h7ltuve (I'll add map links when I am finished work today)


---Other Black Desert Online Guides---
Leveling, Progression, Combat: https://youtu.be/-uIGLc3vF2g
Workers, Housing, Nodes: https://youtu.be/f9scrIgSWLk
Socketing, Enchanting, Upgrading Gear: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RGTLu...
Horse Taming and Breeding: https://youtu.be/I3c94Kll1V4
Commerce, Trading, Crafting: https://youtu.be/uSaXunpISUE
Guilds, PvP, World Bosses: https://youtu.be/3WpeAiwZx58
Inventory Slot Quests: https://youtu.be/R_SqXpdwbtI
1 to 50 in 15 Hours: You Are Here
Endgame Guide (NA/EU Launch): https://youtu.be/P18PKCQX4I4

---Class Guides---
Ranger: https://youtu.be/12Lb5YkMYAY
Tamer: https://youtu.be/fGT9ee0hlns
Blader/Plum: https://youtu.be/UkLjSv9u3sE
Wizard/Witch: https://youtu.be/3j7XkFpojb8
Valkyrie: https://youtu.be/ejO2bkleoAA
Ninja/Kunoichi: https://youtu.be/f0D-Y0NrEFY
Berserker(Giant): https://youtu.be/Wfxk8EeDd1o
Sorcerer: https://youtu.be/vKPHxNjQqEQ
Warrior: https://youtu.be/taFIzCQtWEc

---Other Links---
Stream: www.twitch.tv/hakurai

Blade and Soul - Leveling Guide 1-20 by Jaesung

Thank you for Subscribe :)
Also if you like this video, click "Like" button so i know viewer's favor

구독해주셔서 감사합니다!
영상이 마음에 든다면 "좋아요" 부탁드려요 !


Twitch Live stream : http://www.twitch.tv/lsjjws3/
(생방송 채널)

Diablo 3 Video - Barbarian 1-70 9:50 minutes solo, pre-farm gear [Fame Monster]

FameMonster Diablo 3: RoS [1-70 - 9:50] pre-farm gear, T6 speedleveing

Game: Diablo III
Author: FameMonster
http://plays.tv/u/FameMonster

uploaded via http://plays.tv/

Updated 2.3 & Season 4 fastest leveling guide. Full of top tips, video guides and post 70 gear farming tips [by HerpDerpenberg]

TL:DR: Still level up on hard, cherry picking efficient quests, high dense zones, and select cursed chests. At level 42 crafting level 60 1h weapon with up to 18 reduced levels on it, bump the difficulty into the torments and taper off back to expert/hard as you approach 60. At level 70 craft a 2h Mace/XBow for a big DPS boost. At level 70, immediately farm standard rifts and open greater rifts whenever you get a key since they drop on any difficulty now. Slowly work on acquiring gems and upgrading them as you complete rifts. You should be able to do T2 once you get your legendary gems and T3/4+ in a few hours after you get 2 or 4 pieces of your sets. Most classes can be doing T6 and beyond on day one if you like pooping in a sock! Good luck!

• quick guide in one picture for you
• Video guide for leveling

Foreword

Patch 2.3 is around the corner. With a new patch, we have a new season and the age old question, “What is the best way to level up to 70 and gear up?” Well, I'm here to help you out.
The patch itself brings many changes to the leveling process and early gear acquisition once you do reach level 70. In this guide, I’ll go into detail about the best methods to level up a fresh seasonal character using adventure mode: * Patch 2.3 changes that affect the leveling process we’ve grown accustomed to. * What difficulty to level on. * What gear choices to make, when to craft, and what levels to upgrade artisans. * What new gem tiers to expect leveling up.

Leveling up, Patch 2.3 changes and crafting gear

There are many changes in 2.3 that will streamline the leveling process for everybody.

• Gems tiers while leveling have been simplified and you should get better gems than you normally would. The new tiers are standard up to level 30, flawless up to 40, square up to 50 and flawless square up to 60 with marquise dropping at 61. This will be a big boost when socketing a ruby into your weapon and helm.
• Crafting materials have also been simplified: There is only one tier of materials now, so salvage everything and save it as you level. You also get salvage all from the get go. Rare weapon and armor tiers upgrade every 5 levels and level 60 rares come with 6 properties so you'll craft better items each time. With the new goblins and even bandit shrines, you shouldn't have any problems with gold or materials while you're leveling up.
• Crafting low level legendary sets requires the same materials as rares, just slightly more. So if you find a Cain’s or Born’s set, you can craft them sooner to help boost XP while leveling.
• You can still craft a level 60 weapon with reduced levels. Unfortunately, they have removed 2-Handed weapons from the pool of level 60 crafted weapons. This time around you’ll need to craft 1-handeded weapons this time around and a second if you dual wield or a mojo/source/quiver if you’re a Wizard/Witch Doctor/Demon Hunter. Bad news with quivers is that they are level 59, but not the end of the world, the main damage comes from your weapon. You’ll want to craft a 1-H mace and Demon Hunters craft Bows. The slow attack speed on a mace make your abilities hit the hardest they can, and you're just stuck with bows because nothing else is level 60 for a DH. Off-hand weapons will likely be your second best craft, so always hang onto them if you dual wield.
• Rifts (standard and greater) and legendary gem upgrades have been changed. I’ll go into more detail on my “post 70” section, but the “slow roll” grifting is gone and gems are simpler to level up now.
• New adventure mode cache rewards are more aimed at level 70+, but adding in a boss chest reward and better full act clear cache rewards makes doing full act clears more beneficial to a leveling player. Act caches now contain bonus gold as well as legendary patterns which can help you leveling. You can also gain act crafting materials for cube recipes later.
• The patch added Kanai’s cube, which is very powerful tool post 70. There’s not much benefit using it when you are leveling, but if there is a bounty in the Ruins of Sescheron, you should probably take a slight detour to do the bounty and then grab the cube after you finish it so you have it when you do hit 70.

For leveling basics... First and foremost, you’ll want to make sure you create a seasonal character and then level up in adventure mode. There is no longer a requirement to unlock adventure mode, so anyone can start with it. The biggest thing to remember while killing is to KEEP MOVING. Learn to kill on the move and have skills that benefit killing groups and killing them with 1-2 hits. You should aim to be go 1-70 in 5-6 hours but you can go under 5 easily. I wouldn’t be so heart struck on getting 70 as quick as possible, because ultimately saving an hour when you’re likely going to spend hundreds of hours on a character isn’t really saving much time in the long run. But do what you want and I list all the best ways at your disposal below.
Some quick tips while leveling:

• Immediately steal the weapons off your follower at the start of the game. The Enchantress and Templar have 1h weapons, the Scoundrel has a Bow. If you're running solo, the templar. Even without a weapon his support is the best for spot heals and defensive boosts.
• At level 6 start making stops to the fences to look for rings with min/max damage on them. At level 10 amulets will start popping up as well. These are huge bonuses to your damage in the early game and really help out. You don't need to remake games to find them, you'll eventually find a vendor that sells some in a few levels time. Around your 30's, pure stat rings begin to phase out these rings, so don't go out of your way to look for them at that point.
• Only upgrade your blacksmith, jeweler, mystic when you need it. It helps preserve the gold you have while leveling for crafting and enchanting that level 60 weapon.
• Upgrade your rubies, put your best one in your weapon and next best in your helm.
• Unless you're playing hardcore, prioritize damage over survivability with gear stats. You can make up for a lack of survivability by using diamonds in your socketed armor pieces, except for the ruby in your helm.
• Salvage all your materials and never pay to de-gem an item. Salvaging it removes the gems for free.
• When you're 42, upgrade your Blacksmith to rank 10, so you can craft level 60 weapons. Look for a weapon with freeze/stun/fear or other crowd control and roll off the OTHER secondary stat as this reduces possible affixes by a great amount. You might even have better luck straight crafting one with up to 18 reduced levels on it.
• When you're level 61, craft a level 70 2 handed Mace or Xbow the same as a level 60 weapon for a good DPS boost on your way to 70.

Difficulty Selection

If you want the details, check out my old leveling guide where I go into detail on it. Basically, you want to go on HARD difficulty up to level 42-45. When you equip your level 60 weapon with reduced levels, bump the difficulty up to the torments until you're 1-2 shotting things and slowly start knocking it back down to hard or expert once you get close to 60. I find that the power creep of level 61 items let’s you run expert pretty good and you can carry it to 70, but don’t be afraid to drop down to hard if you need to.

You should never run normal difficulty unless you find yourself getting killed constantly and unable to do things like kill elite packs or goblins.

Three Leveling Strategies

There are three methods of leveling that I’m going to go over.

• The fastest is going to be Cursed Bounties and Halls of Agony farming
• The next fastest is doing select bounties or completing all act 1 bounties or chain completing the bonus acts
• Finally, still quick by any means is running pure rifts.

While I order these, there is still a level of RNG involved. You can run cursed chests and halls of agony and never run into a cursed chest. On the other hand, rifts might be all being zombies and skeletons. Rifts might have a slight shift late leveling as you gain more skills and have better AoE clearing, but early on the randomness of rifts and the varied monsters and density hurt consistency and make them more difficult to tackle.

The whole point is to be aware of these three methods and pick what works and has you spending more time killing instead of running empty space or loading menus. Full completing acts or doing rifts are your fall back when you have a game that throws nothing good at you for the best bounties.

Halls of Agony and Cursed Chest farming method.

This method has proven for the past seasons to be the fastest leveling method, although very monotonous to do it for several hours. The density is always stunning on Halls of Agony 3 (you can go to levels 1 and 2 as well) and has a chance to spawn the swarm type cursed chest which awards the best XP of the cursed chest types. Monsters are mostly melee, skeletons and cultists. Before you run Halls of Agony 3, check around act 1 for the cursed bounties on the map and do those first, you’ll always end your run with Halls 3 and then start over when you dead end or reach the Butcher. Never re-create games fishing for bounties, you're just wasting your time in menus. I would avoid doing the Butcher all together, even if you get the quest, 2.3 added a bonus chest to give you some good loot for the bounty. If you are struggling for crafting mats or just have bad items, you could do a boss run. But I warn you, you’re giving up a lot of experience per hour to get the kill and should probably bump the difficulty down a notch just to clear it faster. Make sure you re-create your game to bump back up the difficulty to hard.

• Cursed Chest bounties to look for: The Cursed Chest events to look for are the ones that require 100 kills for the bonus chest. These reward more XP on completion and more XP per monster kill than the wave type. You're only looking for acts 1 and 4 for these. A1: Cursed Bellows (Halls of Agony), Cursed Cellar (Old Ruins), The Cursed Court (Cathedral Level 2), The Cursed Grove (Fields of Misery) and The Cursed Hatchery (Spider Cave). A4 you are looking for The Cursed Chapel (The Silver Spire Level 2). There are others, but these are the easiest to get to and have easy mobs to kill.

Personally, I like to add looking for “Clear the Hell Rift” in act 4, the entire Festering woods (static perimeter, dense zone) has very easy bounties to snag. I also like killing in Weeping Hollow and doing any quests, but I ignore clearing the Den of the Fallen quest.
I’ve even made a fancy map you can open up on a second monitor to remind you of the areas I like the most here.

Select bounties and other high density zones with the full act option if you want a chance at Cain’s set pattern method.

In this method, stick with the Cursed Bounties and Halls of Agony farming, but look bounties that have decent density and good time vs. reward investment. This method adds variety to keep you from going insane grinding all those cultists in the Halls.

• Zone clear bounties: these bounties give the most XP than any other and are simply finding a dungeon and killing all monsters on a given floor. The easiest ones are those that have easy to find entrances: A1 - Khazra Den, Scavenger's Den, Den of the Fallen, Cave of the Moon Clan. A3: Icefall Caves. A4: Hell Rift. there are other zone clears but these are the easiest to find in their respective zones and have easy layouts to navigate.
• Heavily dense zones: These are zones with easy monsters (i.e. heavily melee based) and relatively simple/linear map layouts to minimize backtracking. You will want to complete any bounty in these zones but SKIP boss kills as they take too long for the XP rewards. A1: Halls of Agony Level 3, Weeping Hollow, Cathedral Level 2. Fields of Misery is an honorable mention. If you're on higher difficulties, the ranged guys can really rip into you. But playing on Hard shouldn't be that difficult. A3: Keep Depths Level 2 a bit dangerous for HC, so I suggest only going here for SC.

If you notice you have a few more bounties to do a full act, you can choose to do so. Patch 2.3 brought bonus cache in the bonus act. These result in better cache rewards while leveling and you can get some legendary patterns out of them. You might even get a Cain’s set, which will significantly boost your leveling experience. If you plan to clear the bonus acts, start at the bonus act and then rotate to the new one.
I'd skip over act 5 if possible... fuck that act and fuck those mobs.

Rifting

The last method is pure rifting. Rift fragments are no longer required to created rifts in 2.3, so you can start running them right at level 1. There’s not much to the method here except running rifts over and over. You’ll get some blood shards, but save them until you get 70 or cannot carry any more. In rifts, you'll get the benefit of double legendary drop rates. However, I would still suggest getting your first 15-20 or so levels in the methods I listed above. The earlier levels will go quicker due to easier mobs. Once you get your movement and AoE abilities, you can move to rifts.

What to do once I reach level 70?

Now that you’ve hit level 70, the real game starts. Here, some time saving methods on gear acquisition can trickle down to saving you hours on progression. The sooner you can get a good baseline of gear, the sooner you can acquire set items which boost your efficiency farming your end game set of gear. Your top priority for gear farming once you hit 70 will be as follows:

• If you haven't unlocked your Kanai's Cube, do the quest right now. Without the act specific crafting items, you can still; turn rares to legendaries, convert set items, swap crafting materials and gems and open a portal to the Vault with a puzzle ring. If you do run the vault, make sure you do it on Torment 1 and above for a chance to get your class set items. Don't worry about bounties. You'll only need the act crafting materials to make level 70 legendary items and extract legendary affixes to the cube. The recipes that benefit a fresh 70 (rare to legendary conversion, gem/material conversion, set item swaps) do not require these cache materials.
• Immediately start rifting on a difficulty you feel most comfortable on to get double legendary drop rates. Remember, in softcore you can always start high and drop the difficulty down. In hardcore, start on hard and use greater rifts to gauge your difficulty. Greater rift keys drop at any difficulty now, up to 100% on T6 and then a chance for an increasing double drop on Torment 7 through Torment 10.
• Use greater rift keys as soon as you acquire them and complete them as fast as possible. With patch 2.3 you can pick what +1 on your highest completed greater rift level. The menu is also a gauge for when you can start doing T2 bounties. Gone are the days of “slow roll” rifts, because one greater rift token opens only one rift, so do them on the highest level you are comfortable at completing.
• Since slow rolls are gone, legendary gem acquisition is slowed down a bit but at the benefit of more efficient upgrading of your gems. Take note to do the highest rift you can complete so you can upgrade your gem at the end. Try your best to +12 the rift relative to the gem so you can 100% each upgrade. Remember, failing a rift means no gem upgrade chance.
• Start doing bounties once you can clear level 13+ rifts and are hunting for a 4 or 6 piece set bonus. You'll want to start them on Torment 2 and beyond as cache rewards are a 50% drop rate of items, up to 100% on Torment 6.

And that's about it. The rest is grinding rifts to get gear and bounties for act crafting materials that you need. I hope this guide has helped you improve both your leveling and early game gearing. I'll see you in Sanctuary!

SOURCE

Diablo 3 - Season 3 Leveling Guide by Sunny Decree

ALL TIPS BELLOW

1. Difficulty: hard
2. Play in a group of 4 cause of "strength in numbers" buff
3. Lvl 1 get follower weapons
4. Lvl 8 get rings with dmg range @ act1/act3 merchant: Fence
5. Lvl 45 craft 60 weapon with level requirement reduction
6. Lvl 60 craft 70 weapon with level requirement reduction
7. Search for "Cursed Chest" events
8. Skip Bossfights
9. Ruby in helmet for bonus % exp

Diablo 3 - Solo leveling guide Season 2 by goingtodie

As season 2 approachs everyone is clearly interested in getting to 70 as fast as possible. Aside from some exploits, for those of use that want to do it in a more legitimate fashion, cherry picking bounties seems to be a good method for fast EXP especially for those of us that play solo.

A while back /u/xMikeh posted about completing all season achievements which included 10,000 bounties. As a result, he learned quite a bit about which bounties were quick and efficient to clear. I asked for a guide and he gave me a great one that I still use today. I cleaned it up a bit and I'm reposting it here:

Cursed Chest: always do them and do them first! You can start it, then run back to them after doing a bounty or two so it's really fast.  
Cursed Shrines: start them and walk away. Let the timer count down and go back and finish em.

Act 1
Always do:
- Festering Woods
- Cathedral Level 1
- Cathedral Level 2
- Royal Crypts
- Halls of Agony 1
- Halls of Agony 2
- Old Ruins
- Cemetery of the Forsaken
If you're willing to take the time to check them:
- Fields of Misery: Carrion, Farm Besieged, Cursed Mill
- Southern Highlands: "Help", Cursed Camp
- Weeping Hollow: Any of the kill a unique
- Halls of Agony Level 3: Any of the kill a unique

Act 2
Always do:
- Road to Alcarnus
- Archives of Kulle: Kill Kulle
- Stinging Winds: Guardian Spirits, Restless Sands, and Rygnar Idol. (For stinging winds, you can go north on Road to Alcarnus for a quick check for the events, cuts a lot of time. For Rygnar idol, once you're in the dungeon, the event spawns in the same location every time.)
- Howling Plateau: Cursed Battlement (shrine); Cursed Outpost (Chest)

Act 3
Always do:
- Tower of the Damned Level 1
- Core of Arreat.
Check for:
- The Battlefields: Triage, Tide of Battle
- Keep Depths Level 3: Any Kill Unique
- Keep Depths Level 1: Forged in Battle (start this first, go to keep depths 2 and go backwards, treat this like a cursed chest.)
- Tower of the Cursed Level 2: Any Kill Uniques

Act 4
Always do:
- Hell Rift Level 1
Check for:
- Gardens of Hope 1: Kill Torchlighter, Cursed Dias, Kill Rakanoth
- The Silver Spire Level 1: Kill Pyres
- The Silver Spire Level 2: Cursed Chapel

Skip Act 5.
Yes! That does mean skip out on getting caches. It slows you down. xP

Original thread: http://www.reddit.com/r/Diablo/comments/2iu65x/i_finished_season_achievements_tonight/

Source

Diablo 3 - 1 to 70 in 6-7 Hour Leveling Guide & What To Do When You Hit 70 by HerpDerpenberg

TL:DR: Level up on hard or expert difficulty cherry picking efficient quests, high dense zones, and select cursed chests. At level 70, "slow roll" your greater rifts to maximize legendary gem acquisition while side farming T2 caches in act 1. You'll be able to do T2 and maybe T3/4 in 5-6 hours play time as a conservative estimate. Your mileage may vary based on drops and how much you prayed to RNGesus. Good luck!
 

Foreword With all the talks on exploitive "no kill" leveling for seasons, there still is an interest in legit leveling methods.  I'm here to give a LEGIT way to level 1-70 in a timely manner for season 2.  The recent Alaric "no kill" exploit is known, you can find that out if you want. You'll get to 70 in about 4 hours that way.

Using this guide you can expect to be 70 in 6-7 hours, a little bit slower in hardcore as you'll still want to take it easy maybe a bit faster in softcore since you can take more risks.

This method was done by myself and a lot of my hardcore clan mates in Season 1. We were were able to get 1-70 in around 7 hours of gameplay.  It's by no means blistering, but it helps nevertheless and isn't much longer than those "no kill" exploits.

This guide is for those that don't want to death rush for hours on end or hardcore players who cannot afford to die.  You'll gain an advantage of already farming keystone fragments for rifts once you hit 70. I was going to make a YouTube of this (I still might), but honestly it was going to be too long, I'd have to divide it into sub sections, and I feel it is best represented in a wall of text.

In this guide, I'll present two methods of play, and go into tips for group or solo play. It doesn't mean you have to do either specifically in group or solo, both work interchangeably but group play gives you a better advantage over solo play for faster killing speeds.

Difficulty setting

The biggest question is what difficulty do you farm on? Most would say that going on Torments are best, but this isn't the case leveling up. While leveling, you want to be doing damage as often as possible. If you are in too high of a difficulty, monsters and champ packs take too long or you take too much damage and need to back out of combat to regen, or worse you die. You cannot kill monsters or gain XP while dead so you need to stay alive and in combat as much as possible.

To start an evaluation we need a baseline. I went and recorded myself running a bounty on normal difficulty. I went back and analyzed the time I was traveling vs time I was in combat. No matter what difficulty, your travel time will always be the same but your combat time will increase. I found for a 6 minute bounty, it was roughly a 50:50 split on travel:combat. We now have our baseline. I can then multiply each combat time by the increase in monster HP and get a scaled time for how long that bounty would take in a higher difficulty. So to keep it easy, here are the results below. **The reason XP bonus and XP total are different. Normal has zero% XP bonus, hard gets 75%. But your baseline has to be 100%, hard gives you 175% XP. I am simply adding 100% to all values. I will get back to formating it in a table later if this is jacked up (doing this on a tablet for now).

Difficulty	Monster HP	XP Bonus	Travel MIN	Combat Min	Total MIN	Time Longer Than Normal	XP Total
Normal	100	0	3	3	6	1	1
Hard	200	75	3	6	9	1.5	1.75
Expert	320	100	3	9.6	12.6	2.1	2
Master	512	200	3	15.4	18.4	3.06	3
Torment I	819	300	3	24.6	27.6	4.6	4
Torment II	1311	400	3	39.3	42.3	7	5

Now,what does all this mean? Look at the last two columns. Hard difficulty, takes 1.5 times as long (9 total minutes vs 6) but rewards 1.75x XP (175% vs 100%). So Hard is more efficient than normal and at a positive ratio. Moving up the list, we find expert takes 2.1 times longer than normal but gives 2.0 times the XP. It's around an equal ratio to normal so not really much of a gain. As you move up you see the ratio is still about 1:1 until you get to Torment I and Torment II. Torment II takes 7x as long to kill stuff but you only get 5x the XP so its not worth it. It only gets worse the higher up you are. You're also taking a lot of damage at that point and it becomes more difficult to stay alive.

Overall, HARD is the most constantly efficient difficulty to level on.

The only exception to this is when you get something like a sick upgrade and are slightly above the curve killing things. The biggest time this happens is in the transition from 60-61 as you move to RoS items/gems. Here, you can bump up a difficulty or two but you should drop back down to Hard as you approach 70.

Furthermore, going higher isn't always a good option for Hardcore players and you're just taking a greater risk for death and a restart in HC or no XP gain and buff loss in SC.

Leveling Tips

• Top tip from /u/snowhawk04 is to go to adventure mode immediately and steal a weapon from a follower as these weapons are free and better than your starting weapons. The Templar has a spear and the Enchantress has a dagger. Scoundrel has an Xbow.
• Another tip, when you're level 45ish get your blacksmith to the point where he can create level 60 weapons and roll level reduction on it, so You can farm way easier until then. (Credit /u/xShuusui) Look for a weapon with freeze/stun/fear or other crowd control and roll off the OTHER secondary stat as this reduces possible affixes by a great amount. (/u/Aenoch_EUW)
• Buy rings/amulets with min-max damage from the fence as soon as possible. Even town vendors have weapons early on that give decent boosts. While leveling though, you'll find 2h are the highest DPS increases due to the recent 2h buffs.

Focus zone/bounty farming

The first method is to cherry pick zone clear bounties, cursed chest events and tie in heavily dense zones. You can check out http://www.diablowiki.net/bounty for a complete list of bounties. Not all XP tables are updated (and are for level 70) the bounties you want are ones with high XP reward and ease to complete.

• Zone clear bounties: these bounties give the most XP than any other and are simply finding a dungeon and killing all monsters on a given floor. The easiest ones are those that have easy to find entrances: A1 - Khazra Den, Scavenger's Den, Den of the Fallen, Cave of the Moon Clan. A3: Icefall Caves. A4: Hell Rift. there are other zone clears but these are the easiest to find in their respective zones and have easy layouts to navigate.
• Cursed Chest bounties: The Cursed Chest events to look for are the ones that require 100 kills for the bonus chest. These reward more XP on completion and more XP per monster kill than the wave type. You're really only looking for acts 1 and 4 for these. A1: Cursed Bellows (Halls of Agony), Cursed Cellar (Old Ruins), The Cursed Court (Cathedral Level 2), The Cursed Grove (Fields of Misery) and The Cursed Hatchery (Spider Cave). A4 you are looking for The Cursed Chapel (The Silver Spire Level 2).
• Heavily dense zones. These are zones with easy monsters (i.e. heavily melee based) and relatively simple/linear map layouts to minimize backtracking. You will want to complete any bounty in these zones but SKIP boss kills as they take too long for the XP rewards. A1: Halls of Agony Level 3, Weeping Hollow, Cathedral Level 2. Fields of Misery is an honorable mention. If you're on higher difficulties, the ranged guys can really rip into you. But playing on Hard shouldn't be that difficult. A3: Keep Depths Level 2 a bit dangerous for HC, so I suggest only going here for SC.

You can clear all bounties in an act to make things easier, but I would suggest running 4 and skipping boss fights. Again, the fights take too long for such little XP gains and are not worth it in the long run. If you do this method, stick to Act 1 only as the mobs and bounties are a joke.

Group Play VS Solo Play

The best way to level is to have a group of 4 to get the free group XP buff.  Each player gives a 10% XP buff when in range of each other, and each additional player gives monsters a 50% increase in HP.  Four players putting out the same damage means 400% damage output but only 250% monster HP. This further increases your efficiency. You can either split farm zones/bounties on a lower difficulty or stick together (with 30% bonus) and kill in a higher difficulty.
For solo play, you want to maximize killing speed, so I suggest Hard all the way to 61, then bump up to Expert or Master for a few levels and drop back down to hard. Your mileage may vary, but remember, fast killing is good. You don't want to be struggling to kill monsters. 1-2 shots are ideal and even better are DoT abilities like "rend and run" where you leave monsters to die behind you while you move on.

What do you do once you hit 70?

The benefits of leveling legit, you gain rift keystone fragments from bounties. This way, you can jump straight into rifts at level 70 for double legendary drop rates and not have to farm bounties on a low difficulty. With the new bounty changes, you want to save bounty farming for T2+ to get that 50%+ chance at cache rewards. To get quickly into torments, you need legendary gems. The fastest way to get your base gems is by "slow rolling" your greater rifts.

To get a greater rift trial, you need to be in Torment I+. You will do your first rifts in normal, because there is no benefit running hard-master in rifts for legendary drop rates. This gets you baseline rare gear and a few single legendary items. Do not enchant these starter legendary items!!! You are better off saving your souls for better items and crafting sets and weapons to try for ancient items.

This will be your Softcore post 70 strategy this will be slowed down for HC players as you cannot jump difficulties as fast. Instead of the normal -> torment jump, go up each single difficulty as you feel comfortable.

• Ding 70
• Do normal rifts to get a new baseline of level 70 gear. Enchanting rates is OK and cheap, but don't go overboard. I try one enchant and select the best.
• Move up to Torment 1 once you have all 70 gear, max sockets in chest and legs with diamonds for defense, amethyst in helm, emeralds in weapons.
• Run T1 rifts until you get a greater rift trial.
• Run the trial but TP out and fail it on purpose to get a level 1 greater rift. This level 1 greater rift is equal to normal difficulty but you can still get torment level drops in it AND you'll be getting legendary gems.
• Bump the game to T2 and go in your level 1 greater rift
• "Slow roll" the rift by killing it as fast as you can, but just before (or after) you spawn the guardian, take note of the remaining time left and TP to town.
• Go start a bounty in act1 to farm for your RoRG. You'll likely get one bounty done as you'll be under geared (groups greatly help) for T2. WHEN YOU FINISH THE BOUNTY USE YOUR MAP TO PORTAL TO TOWN. DO NOT TP AS YOU ARE PRESERVING YOUR GREATER RIFT TOWN PORTAL!
• Say you had 8 minutes left, you want to kill the RG with less than 4:30 left to get +1 greater rift and maximize your runs off one trial key. You get 100% drop chance of legendary gems until you have all of them. After you complete the bounty, click your greater rift TP that is still there and kill the RG with less than 4:30 remaining.
• Rinse/repeat this for the rest of the act bounties and keep +1 your greater rift keystone. As you progress in greater rifts, you'll get legendary gems and socket those into rare (cheaper to do) jewelry and you'll notice bounties getting easier and easier and same with greater rifts.

You should be able to get into the teens of greater rifts and have a few 50% drop chance act 1 caches as well from one trial stone. By this point, the combination of your gear and gems means you'll likely be able to bump up to T2-T3 and maybe T4 farming if you got some lucky drops. At this point, you do not need to "slow roll" greater rifts and you can farm normally, level up your gems, find/gamble for your respective class set pieces on your way to T6 and beyond farming.
 

I'm also going to stream on Friday once season 2 starts if you want to watch how I'll be leveling myself. You can check it out at http://www.twitch.tv/rankil Thanks for reading if you got here. Keep on keepin' on and may RNGesus bless you well!

SOURCE