by David Piner on Mar 18, 2014
Leveling in Diablo III can be daunting, but there is a simple and easy way to gain those levels (both regular and paragon) and it all starts and ends with cathedral 4. It’s not hard to level crazy easily in D3 and there is just one place to do it the most efficiently right now, however, there are a lot of tips to take with you in your journey to level sixty, seventy, and beyond.
This guide is rather simple since it honestly begins with spamming your attacks forever and ever, but we're going to include some tips to help with making leveling a bit more tolerable and sane.
The best leveling spot is usually cathedral level 4. Pick any quest after the Reign of the Black King, then take the Royal Crypts waypoint. Right there will be the door to level four and where your journey will be.
In a crazy zany “no duh” moment, make sure you have a red gem in your helmet. It’s another 30%+ depending on which gem you can slot in and that makes the world of difference.
Part of leveling quickly is killing quickly and a good strong AOE build is critical. How you make your AOE build is completely up to you, but skills that pierce and explode are better than skills that hit a single foe, unless you use those skills to power up your AOE.
Considering that the procedurally generated dungeons aren’t necessarily as random as they once could be, it’s important to remember where to go and how the different tiles fit together and how that plays with your build. For instance, skeleton summoners will almost always summon the skeletons even if you kill them. So you might want to use a single target attack on them and then follow it with an AOE to kill the summoned skeletons. There is a lot of variation of mob types that you’ll come to learn as you grind through cathedral 4 over and over again and it improves your efficiency to remember how to take on different packs of enemies.
The hardest difficulty you can do is the worst for leveling since deaths add to the time it takes to fight more enemies. Not only are deaths very slow and tedious to deal with, but you kill a lot slower. On an easier difficulty you might have to remake the game more often, but you’re also chewing through enemies faster.
That isn’t to say it isn’t a great and glorious idea to tag some friends along and fight a higher difficulty as a group. This can and will usually lead to not only faster map completion, but more XP.
Speaking of grouping, cathedral 4 can be less XP than other areas. The reason cathedral 4 is so attractive is because it’s the easiest zone with the weakest monsters that come in giant groups of enemies.
Oh man, this is so tough because there is always tons of research with people making spreadsheets of their XP/hour in specific zones. Any dungeon like zone will usually have monsters grouped together to have them killed more efficiently while other people like to just go through an entire act over and and over again since it’s less tedious.
Where you level doesn’t matter as long as you’re killing enemies over and over again. The same as in Diablo II.
Good music, maybe some snacks, and a lot of patience and you too can can be a D3 leveling all star.