Hello, i took pleasure levelling in Grim Dawnuntil i reached about level 40. After this, levelling started being much slower. I know you are supposed to level up slower when you reach high levels, but this feels extreme. I am level 52 in elite and levelling its t&aking ages and feels unrewarding ; i have played many hack and slash(diablo games, titan quest, nox,torchlight series and van helsing, but grim dawnis by far the gae where levelling is the slower at this point of the progression.I know xp is supposed to come mainly from quests, but the thing is currently i am progressing very slowly in elite(the nightmare mode of grim dawn). My pet build is killing mobs at an average rate(i have about 209% dmg bonus for pets so far) but what is really frustrationg is killing tons of monsters and watch teh xp bar stay desperately frozen or barely moving.
I feel like you haven’t played titan quest if you think the leveling in GD is slower. The amount of players who have reached max level in TQIT are probably a tiny tiny tiny fraction of the amount of players who have ever played TQIT.
GD? Tons of high level maxed chars in every single build posted.
Titan Quest is much, much, much slower than Grim Dawn when it comes to leveling. Not a single character in level 75 in Titan Quest, while in Grim Dawn i have 7 level 85 characters and another 2 about to reach it.
Quests are pretty much going to be the thing that levels you up, specially in Ultimate. So do as many quests as you can.
This, my levelling hardly slowed down (from level 52 at the beginning of it, to level 60 at the beginning of the second act, where I am right now…)
Do you die a lot ?
What you are saying is weird, as i played through the whole act and had to replay some areas various times to go from level 48 to 50.
that is odd, I assume you are on the current version (1.0.0.5 or higher) and not using mods (which could change the levelling curve).
Apart from dying, the only thing I could think of that would explain this (not sure if true) would be that pet kills do not count towards your XP.
You must be losing out on XP somehow, our experience does not match at all 
I cleared all areas once and did all quests (except for Hargate’s lab, which I have not done yet), no farming.
I just recently took a guy thru Elite from level 55 on to Fort Ikon where I had reached 70.
Leveling does slow a little in Elite but I went thru the game about the same speed as Norm/Vet no problem.
And as the others already said… Guess you haven’t actually played TQ.
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I leveled a pure pet build to 80, and %200 is low at that level. make it %350 around, Rovers faction rewards are really good for pure pet lovers. Choose order for faction also.
I think leveling really depends on your build/ play style.
Awhile back i had a grenado (Sorcerer) reach Ultimate by lvl 55 :eek: I rushed her like crazy and then decided to give up in Ult because i didn’t feel like farming for ages to catch up to the curve. Plus my resists were crap 
My most recent toon is a Witch Hunter DW Poison based in Act 2 Ult at level 66. A few deaths but, not enough exp lost to make any real difference.
I wouldn’t really worry about leveling as long as you’re clearing content and not getting your ass handed to you constantly, I’d just push on if you can, if not just farm a bit. Bounties can help out too if you need.
I do agree that the pacing in Elite is off. I level up faster in Ultimate than I do in Elite. I really feel like levels 50-60 take forever to get through while 65-85 go by very fast. Part of this is due to equipment and power curves. Another part of this are monster levels. In Elite the monsters tend to be about the same level that you are so the amount of XP you get per kill is a bit lower.
When you combine not having super high level gear, not being at your prime yet, and monsters being around the same level as you, you level up slower.
Those level 58 items are leaps and bounds stronger than the level 50 items. The level 75 legendaries also make Ultimate a cake walk.
the same is true for Normal for the most part, I also play self-found (so far from the best possible items) and did not notice the slowdown that much
Certainly did not expect Ultimate to speed up again, I guess we will see (would not mind that)
I managed to climb up to 530% pet damage and i attached aoe devotion skills to pets directly, it helps as the aoe c&anbe triggg"ered automatically without me having to be near mobs. Levelling is a bit faster now.
And yes i did finish Titan Quest ages ago in three difficulty modes, back then i was using a ritualist build and i was relying on the skill that can reflect up to 60% damage to kill enemies(the skill afected pets to).
Since i was on a laptop back then i didnt play it a lot more because my nvidia 6200 was struggling , especially in the expansion dlc , in hell.Now with this computer i could easyly rerun it with the improved edition on Steam though.
I don’t think you can compare trying lvl 75 in Titan Quest with max level in GD. A realistic final build was lvl 62-65. It was/is very hard to reach level 75 even with mods like XMAS which i used. My max level was 69 and I played TQ a lot for many years.
Edit@Fireflame. It’s good to be lvl 50 or so before moving on to Elite otherwise all mobs will be “purple” and you will do reduced damage to them
This isn’t addressing the game issue at all but to me from level 1-50 in veteran, the game is often so easy with many builds that I think you’ll have a much quicker time if you’re skewed on damage output and AoE than defense and survivality.
Like get tons of damage and AoE and do some runs through Steps of Torment or Bastion of Chaos – easily two level-ups per run at that range. Even SoT run ending at Zarthuzellan and not going past the gate (not requiring skeletal key) gives you plenty of higher-level undead to plow through and get a very healthy amount of experience. Then dial it down for elite and especially ultimate where you start bringing your defense/survivability up to speed, maybe even involving some respeccing. That’s for people with minimal patience to grind early on like me (I don’t mind grinding endlessly in ultimate).
I do agree with you though that there are certainly sections of the game where leveling feels really slow, and 40s-50s is one of them. It’s usually towards the end of a difficulty when you’ve run out of lots of quests to do, maybe just a bounty here and there, but don’t want to proceed to the next difficulty just yet. When you get to elite and start getting a whole new set of quests, generally it picks up.
And the funniest thing is that in ultimate, I feel like I leveled up too fast. It was way, way too quick for me to go from ultimate act 1 with like a level 70 character to level 85 not that long after I beat Log. I was surprised to see how massive of a chunk of experience I was getting from trivial side quests even in the 80s, so my complaint is actually kind of opposite of yours towards endgame (but same for around level 40s). I feel like we get experience way too fast towards the very end, and especially from quests.
At least I was kind of depressed when I got to 85 so fast when, say, in Diablo 2, getting even to the 90s required playing the same character and doing runs over and over sometimes for a whole month. I actually don’t like reaching the level cap. It’s kind of an accomplishment at first but quickly followed by a sad feeling that there’s no longer any point to me killing anything besides loot.
(I only read the title, sorry if this is redundant)
Elite is the worst for leveling.
Normal and Ultimate are both fast.
For me at least ultimate really, really picked up as KoalaeiO said (veteran and ultimate being quite fast, elite range being quite slow – though I’d throw in that towards the very end of veteran in the 40s, it’s also quite slow for most of my builds).
I was actually really surprised how fast I leveled up in ultimate with my witchblade. I didn’t keep accurate track of time so this might be off by an hour or two, but I could swear that I jumped from level 70 to level 80 in just 2 hours (I started at level 70 in ultimate act 1 and was around 80s already by act 3 and I was rushing and not even doing every single side quest). It was too fast and I almost want to complain about it – like I wish I had to work a bit harder for it.
For me, and it might be kind of build dependent and also how much you explore each map and do side quests (after so many repeated playthroughs, I never explore the full maps, have remembered all the quest/spawn locations, and don’t bother to do some that are too tedious and not on the way), the most grindy kind of level ranges are 40-50 and 60-70. If I attempt to analyze for my case:
1-10 (total joke)
11-20 (got to 20 before I even realized it)
21-30 (ever-so-slightly grindy)
30-40 (tends to pass relatively well, maybe because we’re swarmed in quests that don’t involve too much wandering around)
40-50 (getting very grindy)
50-60 (kind of grindy)
60-70 (very grindy)
70-80 (wow, I’m 80 already?!)
80-85 (slightly grindy)
I actually got from around 80 to 83 just doing just 20 treasure trove runs in mountain depths while picking up BL ikrix/sicrix bounties on the way (I know since I had exactly 20 pieces of dynamite and used them all) and was 83 before I even completed ultimate while skipping lots of side quests.
The speed of endgame leveling is kind of sad to me. I wouldn’t mind if it took like 1000 SoT runs to get from level 84 to 85. Reaching the level cap is kind of a sad accomplishment for me always in a game. To me it’s kind of like reaching the real ending of the game since I don’t play these games for their story. If there’s anything remotely resembling an actual ending for me where it really feels like there’s much less to do from then onwards, it’s reaching level cap.
I am glad it does not, when the max level is too far away (think TQ), I do not even bother with it and it just gets removed fom the list of goals altogether. In TQ I never got past level 67 or so because of that.
Too much is maybe too bad but I always liked the level cap to seem like a distant dot on the horizon that I could work towards every single day for a good while. It just gives me something to work for when I have nothing else left besides collecting loot (which is a constant throughout the game). It’s slightly depressing to me when I climb over a small hill and realize I’m already there.
If I try to get all philosophical it’s like the pursuit of dreams is what gives us things to do in life. Accomplishing them all would only be followed by emptiness, until we make new ones.
I’m really glad that leveling in Ultimate is actually rather fast. Titan Quest was atrociously slow, i never got a single character to level 75 and only managed to get one to level 64.
Ultimate is pretty much the difficulty to farm for items and level devotions. Levels almost become pointless, specially the last 5 levels. By level 80 i already got most of my skills on the levels i want, the last 10 points is just to distribute between some skills that slightly increase my stats.
One thing that disappoints me is that when I’m farming with my 85 witchblade, I’m not getting any experience. I like when getting close to the level cap already gives you a character which is already powerful enough and the extra few levels is just a small little sweet bonus.
In Diablo 2 I played off and on for a decade and I never got a character to 99 (think that was the cap). The highest I had was a 95 sorceress and she took months and months of active play to get that far… she was already hell-viable in the 80s, but when I was farming with her, I could at least see the experience bar moving ever-so-slightly each time, and that gave me a little more incentive (just a little teeny wincy bit) to farm than just loot when I was killing mephisto or doing cow runs or baal runs for like the 1000th time.
It also continued to give me incentive not to die even without playing hardcore since the loss of exp was huge at that point if I did.
I don’t like it when getting to the level cap feels like a necessity for a truly effective character, but kinda like it when reaching the very final stages towards the level cap is going to require an epic grind for the simple reason that it keeps farming and doing runs over and over just a little more fresh when, even if you collected junk or just duplicate items, you at least got a small, small chunk of exp from it.