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New Hotfixes Feb 12th

A few new hotfixes have been deployed, namely to deal with snapshotting some damage buffs, a bug with the Shield pylon effect. We've also learned that the Alaric's quest mentioned a couple days ago will be hotfixed. Read below.

Originally Posted by Blizzard (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

The following hotfixes have been applied:

Items:

• Fixed an issue where the damage over time effect of Band of Hollow Whispers would permanently snapshot damage buffs (2/10)
• Fixed an issue where the damage over time effect of Pox Faulds would permanently snapshot damage buffs (2/10)
• Fixed an issue where the Haunt effect from Sebor's Nightmare would permanently snapshot damage buffs (2/10)

Rifts:

• Resolved an issue where it was sometimes possible to take damage while under the effects of a Shield Pylon (2/10)

The following hotfix is pending and not yet live:
General:

• Reducing the amount of experience and gold gained upon subsequent completions of the quest "The Broken Blade." Gold and experience gained on first completion will remain unchanged.

Leveling Tips and Tricks

With the leveling "method" previously featured to be fixed soon, players will be looking for the next best way of leveling up at the beginning of Season 2. A thread by HerpDerpenberg over at Reddit has quite a few considerations on which difficulty to farm, when to ramp it up, what to do once you reach level 70, among others. Great source of information! Check the snippet below, or the full thread.

TL:DR: Level up on hard or expert difficulty cherry picking efficient quests, high dense zones, and select cursed chests. At level 70, "slow roll" your greater rifts to maximize legendary gem acquisition while side farming T2 caches in act 1. You'll be able to do T2 and maybe T3/4 in 5-6 hours play time as a conservative estimate. Your mileage may vary based on drops and how much you prayed to RNGesus. Good luck!

Foreword
With all the talks on exploitive "no kill" leveling for seasons, there still is an interest in legit leveling methods.  I'm here to give a LEGIT way to level 1-70 in a timely manner for season 2.  The recent Alaric "no kill" exploit is known, you can find that out if you want. You'll get to 70 in about 4 hours that way.
Using this guide you can expect to be 70 in 6-7 hours, a little bit slower in hardcore as you'll still want to take it easy maybe a bit faster in softcore since you can take more risks.
This method was done by myself and a lot of my hardcore clan mates in Season 1. We were were able to get 1-70 in around 7 hours of gameplay.  It's by no means blistering, but it helps nevertheless and isn't much longer than those "no kill" exploits.

This guide is for those that don't want to death rush for hours on end or hardcore players who cannot afford to die.  You'll gain an advantage of already farming keystone fragments for rifts once you hit 70. I was going to make a YouTube of this (I still might), but honestly it was going to be too long, I'd have to divide it into sub sections, and I feel it is best represented in a wall of text.
In this guide, I'll present two methods of play, and go into tips for group or solo play. It doesn't mean you have to do either specifically in group or solo, both work interchangeably but group play gives you a better advantage over solo play for faster killing speeds.

Difficulty setting
The biggest question is what difficulty do you farm on? Most would say that going on Torments are best, but this isn't the case leveling up. While leveling, you want to be doing damage as often as possible. If you are in too high of a difficulty, monsters and champ packs take too long or you take too much damage and need to back out of combat to regen, or worse you die. You cannot kill monsters or gain XP while dead so you need to stay alive and in combat as much as possible.

To start an evaluation we need a baseline. I went and recorded myself running a bounty on normal difficulty. I went back and analyzed the time I was traveling vs time I was in combat. No matter what difficulty, your travel time will always be the same but your combat time will increase. I found for a 6 minute bounty, it was roughly a 50:50 split on travel:combat. We now have our baseline. I can then multiply each combat time by the increase in monster HP and get a scaled time for how long that bounty would take in a higher difficulty. So to keep it easy, here are the results below. **The reason XP bonus and XP total are different. Normal has zero% XP bonus, hard gets 75%. But your baseline has to be 100%, hard gives you 175% XP. I am simply adding 100% to all values. I will get back to formating it in a table later if this is jacked up (doing this on a tablet for now).
(continues...)

Ancient Crafted Weapons

MeatHeadMikhail has uploaded a video in which he reviews 50 crafted Sunders, and goes over why crafting an Ancient weapon, and getting some Legendary gems with it, is likely to be one of your first goals once Season 2 starts. Check it out.