Thu Mar 13, 2014 8:38 pm by nexxusofa178
The 2 most popular runs right now for XP and/or Paragon levels is COTA and Royal Audience. Run both of these at the highest difficulty level that you can comfortably kill mobs at.
COTA - Crypt of the Ancients
Start on Act 1 - Quest 6 - Talk to Alaric part
Follow the quest objectives until you find the Crypt of the Ancients
Once you go in, you will get the checkpoint
Clear the crypt, but don't get the quest update inside the cave
Once clear, exit game.
Now simply click resume game and you will have a waypoint in town right back inside COTA.
Clear again, rinse, repeat.
RA - Royal Audience
Start on Act 2 - Quest 4 - Begin Quest
Run a little bit until Ashera takes you inside temple/courtyard or whatever.
Clear courtyard, then clear all the way back towards town.
This run is over once the girl opens the manhole down into the sewers.
After clearing all mobs, go into sewer and you will get quest xp reward.
Exit game, and now reset your quest back to the begin quest part and start over.
Differences in the runs
RA has only trash mobs, wheras COTA has an elite each time.
You can typically run RA at a higher difficulty level. For instance, I'm boxing a barb and dh - We can do RA on torment 3, but COTA only on torment 1.
COTA has many pools of reflections that spawn inside - i have not yet seen a single one on an RA run.
Due to the randomness of the elite's affixes, COTA can be more difficult. I occasionally get a nasty one and one of my toons gets killed. This sucks if you have pool of reflection bonus xp, but not as bad as if you were/are a HC character.
COTA seems to be a little bit better on xp. I'm averaging about 330 million xp per hour versus right at 300 million for RA.
COTA is a shorter run and I tend to get bored of it quicker running it over and over.
I seem to get more rare drops in COTA - legendary drop rate is about the same. More rares can be good if you're looking for crafting mats, or bad if you have to stop to go do inventory maintenance.
Don't do too high a difficulty level. I can do the RA run on torment4, but it took forever to kill the mobs. After running the numbers, I was geting more xp doing t3 since I could kill faster. I ran numbers for t2 as well and wasn't getting as much as I was for t3. Your mileage on the difficulty level will vary so find that sweet spot.
As for me, I rotate between both of these runs. If i don't have pool of relection bonus xp active, I will do COTA. If I do, or if I'm really burnt out on COTA, I will switch over to RA for a while. Mixing them up keeps me sane. But if you're just powerleveling someone to 60, you will probably get them there very quickly and burnout won't be an issue.
TL;DR
COTA - that's what KingKongor was doing last i checked and he's like paragon lvl 545
Anybody else got any good, current runs that haven't been nerfed (yet) ?