"So the reason I’m opening up this guy today, notice he’s on normal difficulty, nothing substantial, he’s level 2, got a mastery to select, there’s Oathkeeper, got 3 skill points, I’ve already spent his attribute points, but oh look. In my inventory are two new items we’re going to be introducing with the Forgotten Gods expansion. What are these items you might ask? They are Merits, similar to the Crucible, you now get to use these items in the main campaign. What they do is allow you to unlock higher difficulties on your new characters. So I’ve got a Champion’s Merit that unlocks Elite and I’ve got the Saviour’s Merit that unlocks Ultimate. And that means you immediately get access to new difficulties, you immediately get all of the attribute and skill point rewards that any quest on lower difficulties would have given you which means you don’t have to go back to Normal, you don’t have to go back to Elite, if you want to start on Ultimate you will immediately get those points. You will immediately get all of the inventory bags which you would have unlocked and you immediately get all of the riftgates on the lower difficulties. Boom! 4 more attribute points, 7 skill points. Just like that. Now if I go to the main menu and click this little thing here, oh look I’m level 2 going into Ultimate difficulty!
Thewordbearer : will we need to go to lower difficulties to get devo shrines?
And that is the other thing that comes with these tokens. In Forgotten Gods we are not only enabling every single shrine that is in the world on every difficulty in the game, we’re going to be adding new shrines to the world in places you haven’t before had shrines. And that means, if you go straight to Ultimate difficulty you will be able to get all 55 devotion points in one single playthrough. On top of that, with the upcoming patch we will be buffing the bonuses from Warrants, from Mandates and Writs so you can get your reputations up faster on your alts than ever before.
anathema2741 : how is the level scaling on ultimate at level 2?
Well, let’s take a look. Now I will warn you that anyone who’s going to play like this? It’s going to be hard. I would describe this as almost playing on players 8 in Diablo 2 back in the old days, but you’ll notice these enemies are actually scaled to my level. We’ve gone ahead and through Elite and Ultimate difficulties and updated these guys so they scale from one all the way up to max level. And yes, they hurt. They give a lot more XP, but they hurt. You’re going to get all the attribute and skill points like I said and you’re going to need them because this stuff is way harder than what you’re used to. I will point out, if you look at my resistances, they are in fact altered by the difficulty scaling.
Now where do you get these tokens you might ask next. And the answer to that is in the Forgotten Gods new quest hub. As soon as you unlock the new quest content in the upcoming expansion you’ll be to go right over to a vendor and buy as many of these as you want for every single one of your characters that you’re going to roll."
http://www.grimdawn.com/forums/showthread.php?t=77182