have a lot of free time on my hands at the moment and I started wondering about how you more experienced guys make leveling quicker and easier? I was reading another post on this forum and one of the guys claimed he can get a character from level 1 to level 85 in 20 hours. I mean sure he has a lot of experience with the game and that makes a big difference but what do you do to make your leveling experience faster and more fun?
Example: I was trying to level a warder at one point because I wanted a character who would be tanky and easy to play and he was the slowest, plodding character and he had to chug health potions to survive, a tank he was not. I picked up a blank level 60 character and tried a build I was interested in playing utilising some legendaries I have in my stash. Ran into some guy in Cronley’s guarding a weird blue glowing chest. The enemy couldn’t kill me but the fight took like 20 minutes because the enemy had a close ranged heal mechanic and because I was a tank I was not really putting out enough damage to get through his healing ability.
That was a bit off topic but as the title says what are your tips for faster, smoother, more interesting leveling? Especially on characters who don’t get any kind of early movement speed boost? I found making my way through normal quite tedious at times, especially with slower characters. I’ve also found that the game doesn’t really get more interesting until you hit elite and then some really fun items start to drop and the fights get more interesting.
As you say, experience with the game is a big factor - Cairn is a fairly large world, but once you get to know the layout well it’s pretty easy to just take the most efficient route between quest objectives and shrines while simply ignoring everything else.
Movement speed is pretty easy to bump up since you can take the Sailor’s Guide or Eel devotions early on, and once you hit Level 20 you can equip the Explorer’s Cover and Explorer’s Footpads with a Mark of the Traveler on the latter - they give you an extra ~27% movement speed alone, which should bring you to the cap.
Explorer’s Cover, Gazer Man, Hermit’s Legguards, Bounty Hunter’s Girdle, Wretched Necessity and some Medals give XP bonuses, which make up for the fact that you’re rushing through most of the content. Weapons with the “Officer’s” prefix also grant an XP bonus, but only use them if they don’t lower your killing speed. Take and complete bounties that can be completed en route to your next destination as well, if you can.
Once I hit Elite I usually replace most of my armour with Level 50 Legendaries, since the defense they provide is easily enough to carry me through until Ultimate. Once you’re in Ultimate, most XP is gained from handing in quests so killing random mobs is even less important. Bastion of Chaos is a good place to grind out the last couple of levels if you’re still a bit short on XP.
So yeah, 1-85 in around 20 hours is definitely doable, but it requires a fair bit of knowledge and specific gear.
Thanks for the reply. I have all those items and have been wearing them but I am not seeing much of an xp increase when wearing them and not wearing them. Do you take the movement speed constellations and then respec later to match your end game build?
Yup. Though they aren’t bad constellations in themselves, so sometimes I end up keeping them anyway.
As for the XP gear… I’ve always wondered if it makes that much of a difference myself. Sure, you level up faster at first, but then that probably means you end up overleveling which in turn reduces the amount of XP you get from enemies and quests. I imagine it more or less balances out in the end, so you probably won’t squeeze more than a couple of extra levels out of wearing it. I usually just equip it anyway since Normal difficulty is easy enough to let me get away with terrible defenses. :rolleyes:
Don’t pick up whites and yellows for the purpose of hauling back to town for sale. Absolutely unnecessary. That right there will free you up lots of time and help ensure you keep moving forward.
In my experience starting with 2H ranged or 2H melee is faster for leveling. And rushing for a specific skill should help. For instance, Blade Arc from Soldier or Explosive Strike from Demo. Also Normal difficulty should be faster than Veteran.
Normally I start a new char, I get level 2, choose a mastery and go to crucible to get 5 devotions points. For more details check this guide.
Then I come back to Cairn. I follow main quest until Log. Then I do all side quest from Kymon, Order, Outcast, etc.
Usually I end Normal with level 50+. Then I start Elite and repeat.
Whites I agree with but after hearing Jager talk about the topic of loot he makes a great point. If you don’t pick up the yellows and sell them with all the crafting one has to do you will soon find yourself out of money and having to grind for money. If you don’t pick up and sell yellows how do you have enough money to pay for crafting?
You don’t have to worry about doing serious crafting until much, much later.
I use my method… clear the map and only pick up Greens+ for sale. From the very beginning. By the time I get to Homestead I usually already have around 100k. By end of Normal, usually over 200k. Hell, by the time you get to mid-to-late Normal you can easily craft a stack of Dynamite and start blowing every Trove you find, gaining a nice chunk of change and sometimes you even get your dynamite back. Mid-Elite easily around 500k. By the end of Normal, sometimes I even stop picking up Greens as I begin picking them up almost as frequently as I would yellows if I picked up yellows. They actually begin to become a nuisance and a deterrent.
If you are picking up yellows you are wasting time. That money you made dropping off a load of yellows? You could have moved on to the next group of baddies instead and made more than what those yellows netted you from their iron drops alone + breakables et cetera.
What’s this equal? It equals you having to worry about one less thing, thus spending more time actually playing the game, more time moving forward, less time playing inventory tetris, thus making for a smoother (as you say) leveling experience.
I used to waste time doing this stuff when I first started GD. After one month of that I realized I didn’t ever need to do that and have been yellow free for over 3 years now. I glance quickly at yellows until around 30-40 (for gear upgrades) and then after that I rarely ever pay them anymore attention.
I usually start crafting in elite (other than relics) to fill any glaring resistance problems and I switch the loot filter to rare somewhat around Burrwitch village (in normal). So far I have not have had any iron problems.
I’m more or less the same except I actually put it to rare right at the very beginning and use a keybind I set to instead view yellows quickly at the press of a button. Let go of button, goodbye mess. Out of sight, out of mind.
Imo, you underestimate the amount of Iron Bits invested by newer players or even experienced players into crafting or reskilling characters, at least if they want to reach level 85 and experiment around.
I have characters, which I have reskilled completely 8+ times. That’s a lot of cash and you will end up farming currency, which is a pain.
By picking up yellows and selling them, you will have more than enough Iron Bits for crafting, buying stuff and some reskilling at the end of Ultimate. Their lesser selling price is compensated by the margin of their drop rates.
And if you don’t even have the patience to port back and sell yellows, which takes about 15 secons, well, that’s up to you.
In my experience, picking up yellows speeds up your time to amass Iron Bits by about 40 to 50%.
But if you guys can roll with rares only up from normal, or even less, all kudos to you.
Maybe we are following different goals. I want to craft and maybe reskill when I around lvl 80-85. By then, maybe with one run to SoT you get same iron bits amount than all yellow items sold on Normal.
So, are you picking up every single yellow? You have seen, I take it, how many yellows you begin receiving from Burrwitch onward?
Inventory full: port to DC: sell: port back: reload: port to DC: port back: reload: port to DC: reload etc. And that scenario can occur from just “1” decent battle.
I don’t lvl fast in main lvl i lvl fast in reputation even before veteran is done im max aetherial and devil’s crossing edit: you wil die fighting the warden in elite if nemesis spawn with him and it can already encountered it 8x on main character
You don’t start crafting gear and relics before level 70? That would take me a lot more time to finish the game.
But yeah, you might not want to pick up yellows at Act I Normal, that’s true. Never tried it though.
As I said, might be better to not pick up all the yellows at the beginning of Normal, because of inventory size and outcome. Nevertheless, I do it and it never bothered me. Plus, it doesn’t increase the time invested into the game by a really meaningful amount.
Just as example, I recently experimented a lot with one of my BMs. He had about 5 Mio. Iron Bits. When I was finished, 2 Mio. were left. And I know what I am doing.
I’d say that it does increase it by a meaningful amount, especially if you are fastidious about it in an OCD kind of way. Sure the port back is moments. But then there is the clickclickclickclickclickclickclickclickclick as you sell. Switch between bags, repeat clickfest. Go back and mop up your leftovers (yup you guessed it, more clicking), return to town for more click-mania. yawnchecks watch mebbe someday I can move on to the next mob and repeat this process. The excitement is mounting here. Are we feeling smooth yet?
I used to do all this stuff in various mmo’s and games back in the day before GD and in most those games you actually needed to do this nonsense. Then I realized it was a huge waste of time and only slows you down and wrecks the flow of the game and you can still amass a huge pile just by killing things and selling the good stuff you don’t need instead. And it is an Action rpg, afterall.
Forget all that noise. Click the bad guys instead, drive over their iron drops and be amazed as you autopickitup, and pick up items that are actually worth picking up and keep on moving.
