Hey everyone!

I don't know how people are coming along in their routing but I wanted to see if people had any thoughts on what an optimal leveling route might look like.

In the runs I've done I typically finish the game around level 26-27, so primarily I've been looking for skills that 1) don't require a lot of investment and 2) do a lot of damage without gear requirements (i.e., lots of fixed damage and not %weapon damage). I'm 99.9% certain that means devouring swarm at level 1 because nothing I've tested even comes close to that skill's damage/investment ratio, but then comes the matter of what to follow it up with.

In my most recent run I've started just pumping points into shadow strike and using that, especially because it has a ton of fixed damage and not only that it seems like if you throw a point into dual wield and equip a second weapon shadow strike hits twice. Before that I was using briarthorn but I've found my shadow strike runs are 7-8 minutes faster so.. yeah. I'm wondering if there aren't even better ways to go though. Full disclosure, the idea for using shadow strike as DPS came from a beta build run I saw a long time ago (although the run I saw didn't use two weapons, it used a weapon + a focus).

So yeah I dunno any thoughts?

Really hope a community behind this game builds, I find it really fun to run.

e: Oh and I should probably add, whatever the secondary skill tree is that's taken will have to have a movement skill. Nightblade is easy because shadow strike is your movement and your DPS both, but... yeah I dunno.

So the 1.0.0.4 patch changed how Hammond's quests in Act 1 work - instead of killing X number of monsters, there are now specific heroes (with fixed spawns!) you have to kill.

In my early testing I'm finding that it's actually as much as a couple of minutes faster to go ahead and finish Hammond's quest chain in a full game run now as opposed to farming Reanimator over and over for money. It makes an act 1 run even more of an RNG nightmare though because it's taking away one of the reliable sources of scrap in the run (you kill 15 soldiers on the way to Warden anyway so it was literally no extra time to do the first leg, killing extra heroes is slow) and now you're dependent on drop luck just that little much more. I'm honestly wondering now whether it'd be worth it to kill Milton in an act 1 run just for his guaranteed scrap drop, or whether it'd be worth it to do Lost Survivor (but probably less so than killing Milton).