The power leveling method has widely been the quickest and most efficient way of rapidly leveling up Diablo 4 characters, even if it’s not considered the most sporting or genuine—that is, until a big change included in Patch 1.1.
Under the gameplay section of the massive Patch 1.1 notes posted today, the Diablo 4 developers included a note that says they’ve observed too many instances of stronger players clearing out a dungeon while their lower-level pal sits at the entrance and collects all of the experience. Here’s the full explanation:
“We have observed that the experience bonus rewarded for killing higher level monsters escalates too fast when compared to the relative challenge involved,” Blizzard said. “We still want to reward players for taking on this challenge by encouraging them to participate in power leveling together instead of one player killing enemies while another member of their Party waits at the dungeon’s entrance.”
With that, Patch 1.1 has significantly nerfed the amount of bonus experience earned for killing monsters that are a higher level than the player, while also capping the amount of earned experience from killing higher-level monsters specifically in World Tier Three and Four. The most efficient power leveling mode prior to today was to join a party in a World Tier Four Nightmare Dungeon and collect XP while sitting at the entrance, but not anymore.
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Prior to Patch 1.1 and the launch of Season of the Malignant, players could get anywhere from 15 to 25 percent bonus experience by killing monsters that were at a higher level. Now, though, players only earn 1.5 percent bonus XP from enemies one level higher and an additional 1.5 percent bonus XP for each level higher, but only up to a maximum of 10 levels, or 15 percent bonus XP.
As for the World Tier level offsets, World Tier Two stays at up to +3, while World Tier Three drops from up to +10 to up to +6, and World Tier Four drops from up to +100 to up to +10. What that all effectively means is that if you’re a level one character and a level 100 enemy is killed by a player in your group, it won’t count as a level 100 enemy’s worth of XP, but rather a level seven enemy in World Tier Three or a level 11 enemy in World Tier Four.
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With these two changes to higher-level enemy bonus experience and World Tier level offsets combined, players will no longer be able to rapidly level up level one characters by dragging them to a high-tier dungeon while the party goes ahead and clears it out—at least not at the same rate.
