Why I love leveling in Diablo 4: Vessel of Hatred

Thirteen months ago, I wrote this post on leveling in Diablo 4. In it, I argue that the leveling from 1 to 100 in D4 felt grueling. I often felt like D4, despite being in many ways a superior game to its predecessor, imposed a grind that went into the realms of a chore. And I don’t know anyone who actually wants an Action Role Playing Chore instead of an ARPG. I still liked the game, mind you, and I leveled two characters to 100 before the recent changes to the game that accompanied Vessel of Hatred.

Since then I’ve leveled both entirely new Season characters and my old favorites on the Eternal Realm, and I have to say that the Diablo 4 dev team definitely heard what people like me were saying about leveling.

Leveling from 50 to 60 in Vessel of Hatred was actively delightful.

I didn’t have to do anything to get from 50 to 60 on my formerly 100 Eternal Realm Barbarian outside of the story campaign. Just getting all the mercenaries unlocked and following the story got me to 60 with several fights to go before the end of the campaign. I still have many quests left to do in Nahantu as well as the various Endgame options like the Invasions, the Pit, Realmwalkers… there’s a lot to do in Diablo 4, but you can legitimately level without having to worry too much about any of it and that’s fantastic.

At no point did it feel like a grind. Considering the state the game’s leveling was in when I first played through the story campaign last year, being able to say that seems unlikely. But it’s what happened. I think at least part of that is due to the fact that Paragon no longer feels like it’s something you have to reach max on. Instead of 50 levels of talents and then 50 levels of Paragon tiles, you now have 60 levels of talents and then, nearly endless Paragon to accrue and spend without a benchmark in mind. You don’t have to worry about it — you’ll just get more as you play. Paragon no longer informs or controls when your character is truly max level, instead acting as a capstone system to provide you with some incentive to keep going.

The only leveling advice you need is Play The Game

I have two characters I’m currently working on. One just hit 50 in the original Story Campaign going after Lilith, while the other went straight into Nahantu and is level 43 as of about 2/3rds of the way through. What can I conclude from how fast leveling feels on these characters?

The first thing is that playing on or as close to Penitent as you can get is very helpful in terms of leveling speed. As long as you can survive on the highest possible difficulty, it’s always better to level that way, and I regret playing it safe on my Spiritborn chasing down Elias and Lilith. I’m pretty sure I could have squeezed several more levels out of the Fractured Peaks, and doing Scosglen and the Dry Steppes I skipped most of the side quests in my haste to catch up to the end of the campaign. It’s definitely possible to get to 60 without even touching expansion content.

Also, so far I don’t think I’ve even remembered to turn on the Seasonal Blessings for XP. I haven’t made (and honestly can’t remember if they even still work) Elixirs or anything like that. Why? Because I don’t need to. I never feel like playing Diablo 4 is the gaming equivalent of punching a clock and trying to hit a quota on how many dead demons I can make before the lunch whistle. Instead, I play the game. It honestly feels like I made a wish on a monkey’s paw and got everything I wanted except the ability to replay the Campaign, and if that’s the tradeoff I need to make for all of the positive changes? I can live without being able to farm the campaign.

It’s not like I can’t go kill Lilith again, anyway. There’s a whole means to do so already in place in the game.

So yeah, I can honestly say that Diablo 4 is in the best shape of its life, and leveling has never been faster, more fluid, or more dang fun than it is right now.