This needs to be fixed. If not, well, at least Echoing Nightmares are now viable in Hardcore for super easy experience.
The monster health and XP are based on a fixed level. But the loot and monster damage are based on the game’s level.
What this means, is that if the game is created by a Level 1 player, no appreciable loot will drop, but the monsters will do almost zero damage to a level 70 character. But upon opening the chest, you’ll still get the same amount of XP.
Demonstration Video:
I started hardcore. No paragon used and all yellow gear. And I stood in the middle of monsters and explosions. I made it to Tier 57 to get roughly 6.5 billion XP. With a 6 piece, Tier 100 is possible, and with a basic build, Tier 150+ is possible with near zero chance of dying.
1 Like
Confirmed that it works that way. Had a level 1 hardcore create a normal game, I joined, and they left, leaving the game at level 1. You can then run multiple echoing nightmares as the game will always stay level 1. I then proceeded to run an echoing nightmare. Monster health scaled with tier, but damage dealt did not. Around level 100 is when the meteors start falling. They are the only thing that do any real damage.
Blizzard will fix this I have no doubt.
This is the type of thing that makes them crazy to fix.
I actually doubt it. They didn’t fix it when we used the bug to get the Ethereal skins. They have never fixed the T16 bug to boost below lvl 70 players.
This is a lvl 1 game bug and not one of the tricks people use every season.
Any Diablo dev reading about the lvl 1 XP bug will realize they forgot that one piece of code to change.
Using a lvl 1 has almost no great benefits otherwise.
The only one I ever use is to get a HC lvl 1 the Malthael quest kill to do Adventure mode in a new region.
1 Like
That really wasn’t a bug though. You didn’t get Level 70 Ethereals. In the end, you still got low level ethereals. That fell in line with more of clever use of game mechanics.
This though is clearly unintended. Otherwise the health and damage would scale similarly, rather than health being fixed scaling with damage being level scaling.
1 Like
We shall see what happens, if they do squash it and don’t include some other form of survivability in its place then HC will be out for the season for the most part. In situations like this where they give no good intended options, using such a method in my mind is not an exploit, it’s simply a survival tactic.
1 Like
So, StarElven might be right about it not being corrected.
On a hunch, I wanted to see what would happen with Greater Rifts if you tried joining on a <70 game.
If you attempt to do this, absolutely nothing will happen the first two times. No Greater Rift will open. On your third attempt, you will be booted from the game. At which point, when I reconnected to the PTR, I was unable to join anyone for a few minutes.
I’m wondering if there was an exploit in the past about performing such a thing with Greater Rifts. I.e. Some players could get to unrealistic levels because enemies would deal practically no damage, even in the highest Greater Rifts, allowing them to go full out glass cannon, and a quick fix was added in, to just not allow you to start Greater Rifts in games below 70. And with the latest seasonal theme, if they just copied over some code from how Greater Rifts were handled.
If that’s the case, that would mean that the fix would be far more complicated than just a small correction. And it would result in either this bug would go live in the server, or they’d just handle it similarly to how Greater Rifts work, in that you couldn’t open up an Echoing Nightmare below Level 70.
If I go into a lvl 1 game as a lvl 70 with paragon I wipe out every monster.
In the past my Euro season team would do the early act1-5 bounties on lvl 1 because it was so much faster, but you don’t get any goodies from the cache.
When we did the lvl 7/8 trick for getting that quest fast we forgot we were in a lvl 10 game and did a rift but it was stupid easy and only gave one gr key.
I would see no point to wasting a gr key to try running a lvl < 70 gr.
It will not return what you get from a normal 70 w paragaon gr.
In this case… The rewards for running a max level Nightmare are not significant enough as incentive to do so. By running a lvl 1 Nightmare you will still get a high level Augment gem, and XP for paragon. If they want to make it preferable for people to run at max level then the item drops in the chest need to contain something precious enough for people to feel that they would lose out otherwise.
You need to be Level 16 to get an item. It could be 15, I forget, but either way, we’re talking 2 minutes to level up a character to that level. Set it to T6, and you also get 550k gold per cache. It was useful in the past, especially for monks, but now that most classes can play T6 easily… There’s still another reason why it’s useful for the early stages of the game. T6 caches give 550k gold, and the HF Ring & Amulet patterns count as jewelry recipes, especially since the amulet counts as 3 recipes. This is more though for if you’re trying to optimize the season start.
The items are really not important. What matters is the experience. 870 billion experience in 3 minutes is possible (4 minutes for hardcore since you can’t suicide end it). Basically, Season 25 felt like “Let’s give everyone easy access to higher level Greater Rifts”, and Season 26 feels like “Let’s give everyone easy access to tons of Paragon”.
I’m not being argumentative nor are you, but I was talking about:
after hitting 70 as a group in season start one of use would make a lvl 1 game for the act1 to act5 bounties to get that part of season journey done fast.
Another lvl 1 game trick is for HC to easily get Mathael quest done on a new lvl 1 for Adventure mode in a new region.
Yeah, I understood what you were saying. It’s a trick many people would use. I was just expanding upon it, how to make it a bit more efficient.
You hit 70, and you have a level 1 create the game on T6. You quickly boost them to 16, and they’re replaced by their 70 character. That way you have a 100% chance of getting items, hoping for a RRoG. It’s better than just doing a level 1 game, and only costs you about 2 extra minutes.
