Season 1 for Diablo 4 has dropped. The first hurdle and the big objective for season 1 is going to be leveling a new character as quickly as possible. In our Diablo 4 season 1 leveling guide after patch 1.1, let's dive into the best way to level 70!

Diablo 4 Season 1 Leveling Guide - Best Malignant Tunnels, Dungeons & Tips to Level Up Early

Since season one is actually out, we know all the changes, we've had a bit of experience, we're looking at tunnels to see how they compare to other things and we've done our testing. Mostly with the goal of reaching world tier 4 as that is really where the game opens up. It's when your legendary, unique, malignant hearts all can actually properly drop so you can actually craft the build that you want to work with at that point. Read this D4 season 1 early game leveling guide, we have the 12 best steps to get you all the way past level 70, very little travel, and not an extensive amount of thought is required.

Best & Fastest Way to Level Up Early In Diablo 4

First things first, if you want to play on world tier 2, at least try world tier 2. With the fact that we start this season with five bonus skill points and a whole lack of bonus stats on our characters. We are simply stronger in the early game than we were in the base game of Diablo 4 and that makes a 20% bonus XP of world tier 2 actually approachable. If you find yourself struggling or progressing slowly in World tier 2 swap back to tier 1. It's not worth it if that's happening, it's not a massive deal, but it is just faster in tier 2 if you can push yourself.

1. Season Questline

The best D4 season 1 leveling method that we’re going to recommend is completing as much of the seasonal questline as you can before it walls your progress. It starts from right where you spawn in Kyova Shot.  When you skip the campaign and it doesn't take too long to do the first bits with which unlocked the whole malignant heart system. After that, you don't really need to focus on doing this speedily for a while as the actual rewards from the questline are locked behind the season journey which is partially locked behind the character level as well. So you really want to focus level until you at least get to around 45, at which point you can think about the questline again if you want to, but you don't need to. Yet either do any events that you passed while doing the questline itself of course events in the open world are really good XP if you don't have to do any waiting. Aside from that, there are three main activities that you will be doing to level up in Diablo IV season 1 depending on what stage of the journey you're at and what your immediate goals are.

2. Malignant Tunnels

The fastest way to level up in a single way is actually malignant tunnels. One specific one in particular, they created the layout of these malignant tunnels with all the feedback that they got from us around the original beta dungeons because these were all made after that. So they purposely made them relatively short, with minimal backtracking, and relatively good mob density as well. All of which happens to make a pretty efficient XP farm when you add in the guaranteed elite spawn because of the type of activity that it is. Then you want to ignore the extra rooms and pathways with the invoker event if you are after pure speed just get to the point where tunnel complete pops up above you, exit the dungeon, and use the map to reset dungeons and walk back in.

3. Dindai Hollow

Dindai Hollow is number one by far the best Diablo 4 patch 1.1 leveling method. This place has a slay enemies objective which is solid and has a decent elite spawn rate. When you complete the slay enemies objective, it actually spawns the end objective elite boss right on top of your head. So there is zero travel time required to a boss room of any kind and that is just absolutely perfect for farming efficiency. If you want an exclusive experience, then you should ignore malignant heart elite respawning as well as the spawn timer after clicking on the heart is obnoxiously long and it slows you down overall. But as a long-term investment, we heavily recommend doing all of them anyways. Picking up hearts means being able to salvage hearts, which means getting a ton of crafting materials. The icker, as you level up that you can use for later game, builds, it's all important stuff and so slowing yourself down a little bit early on in the early game to double up and get a lot of these materials you will want later on is more than worth it if you are already doing the activity anyways. Dindai Hollow is giving us 57000 experience for a 4-minute completion time, which is a whopping 855000 experience per hour this is an extremely good early game better than any normal dungeon.

4. Ravening Pit

You can get 45000 experience in 3 minutes and 48 seconds as an average completion time which is 710000 experience per hour. Still extremely good, it's not quite the best though.

5. Bedeviled Grotto

48000 experience in 4 minutes and 5 Seconds on average for a total of 705000 experience per hour, just slightly behind the Ravening Pit. Then past that, it gets much worse with the other three, so those are the three best malignant tunnels to level up in Diablo 4 after patch 1.1.

6. Boiling Wound

Boiling Wound in Fractured Peaks averaged about 574000 experience per hour.

7. Den of the Blighted

Den of the Blighted in Hawezar averaged 5200 XP in 6 minutes ut 534000 experience per hour.

9. Fissure of Malice

Fissure of Malice averaged out at about 520000 per hour. Not bad numbers by any means. Those are still pretty decent but compared to the 855000 of Dindei Hollow, it is pretty incomparable when it comes to which of them is the best D4 Malignant Tunnels.

10. Whispers of the Dead

Another really solid Diablo 4 season 1 leveling method is to just follow around dungeons that are marked by the Tree of Whispers. Complete them. Then hand it in at the tray itself. This is slower than farming the best XP dungeon over and over which in itself is still slower than farming the best malignant tunnel. But it also gets you crafting materials, it can get you entire elixirs, it gets you renowned as you're bouncing around the map completing new dungeons back to back and it gets you bonus gear from the tree hand in as well. All of that is genuinely valuable. It is slower for pure leveling speed but if you want those things in particular, it is still a super solid leveling method. It’s about 20% slower than just spamming the top malignant tunnel which isn't crazy worse given the other benefits that it has.

11. Stronghold

Stronghold resetting is a big useful trick, the fastest XP gain per hour in very specific scenarios. Finally didn't Dindai Hollow malignant tunnel until you reach a point capable of completing the first capstone dungeon to unlock World tier 3. At this point, you gain access to world tier 3 itself but every single one on the world enemy is scaled to level 55 at minimum which is incredibly tricky to actually kill if you get here too early and that is slower than farming on world tier 2. Even though World Tier 3 has a massive innate 100% experience game bonus, said strongholds are the key here. Strongholds for whatever reason ignore overworld level scaling because they are their own little microclimate of enemies. 

If you do a stronghold in world tier 3 and you are level 40, the enemies will be level 42 maximum which is 13 levels lower than anything else in world tier 3 at that point. The big deal here though is that they still give the 100% bonus XP because you are still completing the activity on world tier 3. Even though the enemies inside are essentially the exact same difficulty as they would be on world tier 2. On top of this, you can farm strongholds on repeat. If you just don't complete the final objective, log back out, log back in, and then it is fully reset to the beginning of that stronghold. The best one realistically for this is actually Onyx Watchtower. 

Doing that at around level 40 on world tier 3 gave you consistently around 78.5K XP in a 3-minute and 50-second completion time. That averages out at about 1.23 million experiences per hour. 50% higher than doing Dindai Hollow on world tier 2 at the exact same level with the exact same build. That is a stupidly large increase. On top of that, Onyx Watchtower has a really good item drop rate compared to other strongholds. Once you are able to have a sacred drop for you, you can start piling those up too by killing enemies that are under your level 55. This is what puts them on par with other enemies in the world tier, so you can get them easier than anywhere else in this world tier.

Otherwise, another option is just completing various strongholds that are around the map. This also doubles up as a renowned farm as you'll need to farm down at some point either way. This gets you some variety as well. It will wind up being anywhere from 15% to 20% slower experience in the strongholds themselves, but also there will be a ton of travel time to slow it down further, going from one stronghold to the next but it lets you double up activities. So consider your goals and make that choice for yourself.

12. Nightmare Dungeons

Either way, once you get the capstone done. If you get it done early, the ideal way forward is to just do strongholds in some manner, until you hit a powerpoint capable of starting in nightmare dungeons. At that point, nightmare dungeons are just the king. Always do nightmare dungeons when you are arming XP if you are strong enough to do them as far as that goes and also gear is really good in them too. Especially now because they buffed the gear that drops within nightmare dungeons in the recent patch. 

The same thing with these strongholds applies to world tier 4 as well, it's worth mentioning you can unlock world tier 4 at level 60 or even lower if you have a really good build going. Then you can just do the exact same thing. Sit in world tier 4 for the massive experience bonus, and go to a stronghold for reasonably easy enemies compared to the level 75 overworld while still getting the experience bonus. Profit from this massive experience gain and then sigils will also start dropping in these eventually too.