Lot of old power leveling runs are now being “discovered” again as the next big place to run for Paragon experience. For example, the latest one is the Royal Audience quest. That one is nothing new though since it was an area used quite often for leveling on hardcore. Again, any mob heavy density area, can be farmed for a whole ton of experience (more so with the changes in patch 2.0.x).
One of my favorite hardcore leveling runs before the experience was nerfed in patch 1.0.8 on the Shade Stalkers, was the Realm of Shadow. Up to patch 1.0.7, I could quickly power level myself there on Normal/Nightmare MP10 (just had to get out of dodge quickly if an elite pack showed up). They came in bunches and were pretty easy to zap out. I could usually gain 1.5-2 levels each run (avoiding elites) and did this until my character level finally reached the mobs level. Even now, just zapping a large spawn of Shade Stalkers on T6 can yield some decent experience.
The recent hotfixes left repeated quest rewards nerfed (from 9.5 million XP to 3 million on T6). While that extra quest reward is gravy, the massive amounts of experience is from killing the trash mobs prior to completing those quests. So here’s a little video I did where I basically run Crypt of the Ancients first, and then teleport to Old Ruins waypoint, and take out the trash mobs leading to Adria’s Hut. On T6, these runs take my not T6-equipped legacy geared wizard, around 3-4 minutes to do (I’m not being exactly efficient either since I really do not care about maximizing the speed – I did this to illustrate how any part of the game, can be easily farmed for experience).
Average experience earned at the end of these runs is around 47 million (this is of course with the current 50% community event buff). At my current Paragon level (120’s), it takes around 18 minutes to level (3 times an hour). That’s pretty decent. Characters that are better geared and do significantly more eDPS than my character, will obviously clear a lot faster. My point again is that there is very little the D3 developers can do to prevent players from finding areas in the game to farm repeatedly, without nerfing mob experience and density in many of these areas. All that will accomplish is making most of campaign mode, unrewarding/unfun. And this will all be moot in a few weeks for those who do upgrade to the expansion.
The following is just the first and final runs (I also left the crypt before completely taking out the elite pack since I came out of archon mode; they would have taken me out first).
