The latest Diablo 4 season might have the fastest way to earn XP ever, but Blizzard is going to let you make it even faster next week.
On February 6, Diablo 4’s Lunar Awakening event will sprinkle Sanctuary, and its dungeons, with unique Shrines that boost your XP gains by 50% for 30 seconds when you activate them. Local events will also spawn around the open world that will help you earn reputation with a new faction for cosmetics and other rewards.
Lunar Shrines will give you a new version of the regular Shrine buffs. Blast Wave Shrines, for example, will not only periodically explode enemies around your character, they will set off a chain reaction of explosions right after. And Greed Shrines now have a chance to spawn Treasure Goblins as well as buckets of gold.
Blizzard knows how efficiency-brained Diablo 4 players are and made Lunar Shrines spawn a bunch of enemies as soon as you use them. Tryhards will probably still want to drag a group of monsters over to them to get the full benefit, especially if you have the extended Shrine buff duration Season Blessing maxed out, making them last 45 seconds. Gear with the Shrine Duration stat on it will presumably boost it as well.
On their own, the Lunar Shrines don’t sound like a consistent way to level up fast, but Blizzard has also added them to the list of modifiers for Nightmare Dungeon and vaults. When you find or make a Nightmare Sigil for high-level dungeons, they have a chance at being full of them. That means spamming the monster-rich NIghtmare Vaults—which are already season 3’s best leveling activity—will skyrocket your character toward level 100.
You’ll have around three weeks to pop Lunar Shrines and blast through levels before the event ends on February 20. Now that powerful gear is much easier to find in the game through world bosses and dungeons, you’ll be able to kit your character out before Blizzard drops The Gauntlet, a weekly dungeon with fixed affixes and leaderboards for the fastest players. If it’s like last season’s challenge dungeon, the Abattoir of Zir, you’ll want some flexibility for whatever the meta ends up looking like. Or you can just make a barbarian and bring a hammer with you every week because the meta doesn’t matter if you simply do more damage than everything else in the game.