Diablo III – Power Leveling [Guide]

Jump to Content

• Runs
• Massacre/Mighty Blow
• Co-op
• Conclusion

Getting from level 1 to 60 in Diablo III is not easy at all. It requires a lot of patience and hard work in order to grind all that XP out, especially since Blizzard does not believe in letting players get things they want easily. In terms of power leveling, you’ll need ways to get around what developers are trying to avoid in the first place, so here are some tips on getting that XP.

Runs

A run is basically playing through a particular part of the game where there is an abundance of enemies that give the most amount of XP in the shortest amount of time possible. After completing a run, you may then exit and go back to the start of the run to do it again and gain more XP. Here are some of the best places to do XP runs in the game.

Act 1: “The Rummy Run”

The unusual name is due to how the run starts, which is at the start of the game after talking to Captain Rumford for the first time. Each run should last for 4-5 minutes each time. You can do the Wretched Queen quest, including the bonus objective of killing three Wretched Mothers, over and over again, yielding a decent amount of XP at that point in the game.

Once you finish that and get to the Old Ruins waypoint, go back to town to talk to Captain Rumford for more XP and gold. You can also explore the wells that you may find near the wretched mothers for more gold that are scattered around these areas. Once you’re done, exit and get back to the start of the game and run through it again.

Act 2: Soulstone Chamber

Make sure that you’re at level 25 to 35 on Normal difficulty before going though this run. On Nightmare, you should be at level 35 to 49. This should yield around 36,000+ XP received and nearly 2,000 gold for most players. On Normal, that should be about 300,000 XP per hour, and 900,000 XP per hour in Nightmare.

Act 3: Kill Azmodan

Perhaps the best part of the game to make runs is in Act 3, wherein there are places where enemies are abundant and even some champion packs along the way.

The last waypoint that leads you to Azmodan is best since it leads to a static map, so you won’t be wasting time to explore. If you just want to kill Azmodan, you can just skip the mobs and go straight there. If you want to farm, then you’ll find it good that there are 2-4 champion packs there to farm.

In your first run, you can get at least 44,000 XP, and it scales up with the difficulty level. You also get 25,000 for killing the first boss in Act 4. Together that’s around 150,000 XP to power level through. Azmodan’s XP yield has been fixed by patch though, so you can’t keep going to

Act 4: (all of it)

The monsters in act 4 are supposedly the hardest in the game, as well as the uniques. They yield a decent amount of XP and the act itself isn’t that long, so you can count it as a run on its own. If you can beat Izual and Diablo relatively easily, then you can give this a try. You should be able to get around a million XP per hour in Act 4, and 1.5 million XP per hour in Nightmare.

Massacre/Mighty Blow

Getting Massacre and Mighty Blow bonuses is perhaps the bread-and-butter way to gain XP in Diablo III. There are particular areas that let you get at least 50+ kill massacre like Jar of Souls in Act 1. There are a lot of mobs in Act 3, so you can level up fast there.

Generally, you want to go with an AoE build for most of the game, switching to a different build once you’re about to encounter bosses. Remember that you have to keep hitting an enemy to continue the Massacre combo, so use skills that help you get from one point to another quickly like Teleport or Leap to reach enemies quickly and keep the streak going. You should be able to gain a lot of additional XP this way.

Co-op

Generally, playing in co-op lets you level up really fast by doing different things like running through different parts of a level at once by splitting up and defeating mobs and bosses together. You can gain more XP as a team, especially since XP yield and difficulty scales up with the number players in a game.

A good way to power level in the past with a low level character in co-op is to have friends with stronger characters running through boss runs in different sessions. You can then jump from session to session just as they’re about to kill or have killed the boss. Once they receive the quest XP and gold reward, you get some as well. Once you’re done with one, you then jump to another game and do the same thing. You should then level up really quickly. Unfortunately, much of this particular method has since been nerfed, but you may still get to do something similar with other quests and runs in the game.

Conclusion

These are merely general tips on how to gain levels quickly in Diablo III. Take note that the methods do change in time due to Blizzard’s efforts to patch and balance the game. The existence of the Real Money Auction House is such that players will not really be allowed to have the luxury of having a place for farming and XP hoarding for an extended period of time.

There are also community forums and Youtube channels that keep an eye on these things, so you can tune into those and get the latest tips on how to get from level 1 to 60 fast.