I've just gotten into this game for the first time, got it for Christmas, and while I love the lore, love the mechanics, love just about everything about this game, I seem to have a problem I've never had in a videogame before. I'm playing as the Crusader, and I'm absolutely invincible. I simply cannot die. About the time I realized I'd never lost more than maybe a fifth of my health or needed to use a potion, I stood still for a moment and let a monster wail on me freely for a while, and I regenerated health faster than he could dish out the damage. It was literally impossible for this guy to kill me, and I was just standing there motionless.

I know the Crusader is a tank class, but this is ridiculous, you're not supposed to be this indestructible at level 17. I've played and enjoyed easy games before, I really liked Prey, after all, the gunfights felt tense and rewarding, and you actually couldn't die in that. But even after bumping the difficulty up to Hard, Diablo III is so effortless that I'm not really getting any satisfaction out of it anymore. I don't even need to use my powers, I can just run into a huge group of dudes and club them all to death with whatever random weapon happens to be in my hand before I lose 10% of my HP, and even then I'll regenerate back to full health less than three seconds after they're gone. It's starting to negatively affect the way I play, I'm deliberately not using the best equipment I can find because it makes it even easier to breeze through the game when you have an overpowered weapon that can kill anybody except bosses in 1-3 hits.

I'd bump the game up to Expert difficulty, but I don't like the idea of the +100% EXP boost, I actually waited until the identical bonus they gave all their players on Christmas had worn off before I really started playing. So here's the thing. I know I'm only in Act I (I just defeated the Skeleton King), but I've gotta ask: does the game get substantially harder in Act II and onwards, or am I going to effortlessly bulldoze my way through the entirety of the game like this?

Thanks for taking the time to read all of that. No story spoilers, please, if you can help it.

I understand your concern about spoilers and specifics, so I'll be blunt: bump that difficulty up twice, and you'll have the ability to dial it down to Expert if things for some reason get insane. But I feel you'll enjoy the challenge

The game is pretty much really easy with any class until you get to max level and play on higher Torment difficulties or higher level greater rifts. So yes what you are experiencing is completely as intended. Plus the sader is a pretty OP class in general even at high Torment difficulties.

The difficulties are balanced don't let the 100% exp boost fool you. I think one of them makes sure you can cap level in your first playthrough, whilst the easier ones require 2-3 runs of the game to cap.

I'm still on my first playthrough in the middle of Act II as a Crusader and I bumped the difficulty to Expert and it's still easy. You might as well bump it up before it gets too hard to bump it since you didn't have the EXP bonus.

Spoilerth: you left click on things until they explode and shower you with things that slightly improve your left clicky explodey powers.

E: my apologies, left click once and hold until said thing explodes.

Put on master diff, play through all 5 acts, get to 70 and then the hunt for proper gear begins and the game gets more challenging. Flip to torment and keep increasing that until you gear out and you can farm T6. Then the challenge begins for gem upgrades and greater rift runs where difficulty has no limit. Then seasons, play a HC character or 3 etc., etc., etc.

the meat of the game is the endgame,so you want to get to the level cap as fast as possible.then you want to farm for good gear to get to torment difficulty.torment has sets of items you can only get through the torment difficulty,which will be one of the main goals for you since they are rare.so dont worry about the difficulty and leveling up to fast,because you want to get to endgame as soon as possible anyway.

I'm playing on Torment VI now and it is VERY challenging. I am prob a bit under-leveled and under-geared for it but I stay alive as long as I focus on what I am doing, positioning, etc.

Don't worry about the difficulty too much, you will be switiching between Torment levels later. Also, if you create a new char you get all your paragon levels and that lets you pump up the difficulty on your next run. Never mind equipping uber gems in your gear :) One of the most fun things about a new char for me is making them OP.

The entire game scales with your characters, so it's not like you'll outpace the game because of the XP bonus. All it really means is that you'll be able to hit the level cap without having to play through the campaign several times. It also means the game escalates based on your level, not your campaign progress. It is by no means a game where finishing the campaign and getting to max level means you completed the game.

As far as difficulty goes Diablo 3 isn't really a "can you beat it" kinda game, it's been changed into more of a score/time-attack thing. Sure, if you pump the difficulty high enough you will eventually get to a point where it's very challenging, but most of the higher difficulty notches only means it takes longer to kill stuff. What you're really aiming for is the difficulty where killing stuff is still fun, while you get as high as possible bonuses to xp/loot to speed up your character progression (which is the main draw of the game).

Like Ares42 said, it's all level scaled friend. The xp bonus isn't going to negatively impact you at all. Oh, and the difficulty options are kind of misleading in how they are named. On normal mode, you'll never be in danger and you'll probably never die. If you go to hard, you might die until around level 7 to 8 when you get a full suit of blues. At that point, nope. You're good. Once you are in a full suit of yellow items and have a passive skill or two under your belt, the same could be said for expert as long as you don't stand in puddles of poison or lightning sparks. If you're looking to be in fear for your life and have to duck and weave, you'll want Master. :-P You can always turn it down later too if you want, which I had to do on the Act V boss due to out-leveling my gear at the time. No need to suffer boredom for 30 hours prior, haha.

A couple things.

The crusader is tanky as shit at low levels. Until you hit about lvl 50+ when the elite mobs start getting 3 and 4 traits its super easy. The game scales to your level, and any zone you go into will have mobs of an appropriate level for you so out-leveling your game isn't possible, but out gearing your difficulty certainly is.

Lastly, you're approaching the game in a slightly backwards mindset. This game really starts to ramp up at the level "cap". Keep in mind that though your character has a level cap, there are virtually endless "paragon" levels to continue to gain. Couple that with the classic Diablo loot treadmill and you have pretty much endless content at the endgame. I would go so far as to say you're actively hurting your experience by worrying about leveling too fast. Bump that difficulty up as high as you like and enjoy the challenge. It helps more than you think because you'll be at, or close to, the level cap by the time you finish the story the first time. I had to go to torment 1 for a large part of my crusader leveling, and then drop it down to master on act 5 because the expansion is a bit harder than the vanilla content, but this is going to depend entirely on your gear at that point.

You get more exp on higher difficulties but monsters take longer to kill.

It sounds like you're playing the game on Normal. You really shouldn't be playing on normal. Higher difficulties are more challenging but reward better loot drops and greater EXP which shouldn't be avoided. Also playing in bigger groups increase difficulty and EXP earned. Your initial goal should be trying to be survivable in at least Torment 1 when you're 61-70.

Bump it up higher. I don't know why you wouldn't want the bonus exp, if the challenge goes up to a decent level for you, isn't the exp just a nice bonus?

Even super buffed as they are Crusaders are still one of the softer classes in the game in Hardcore; just keep bumping up the difficulty until you find one you like. Everything scales so there's no danger of "over-leveling."

There's no reason to be afraid of bonus xp, so crank the difficulty up. There really is no level cap anymore. You continue, after attaining level 70, to accrue paragon levels. My season wizard leveled to 70 in maybe a week, but I have been continually building her paragon levels, now at 145. As far as I know, this just keeps going.

At some point, at least for me, xp became pretty much unimportant. You want gear, gold, and to keep getting new and better gear so you can get more gear and more gold. Paragon levels are a great benefit, and my wizard loves getting increases to intelligence, resist all and gold find, but that's not really what I come to the game for, as it is now.

You will have more fun if you crank up the difficulty, and there is no detriment to fast leveling.

Any difficulty before torment is a walk in the park. Normal is really just casual/story mode; if you're familiar with hack and slash games, you should be playing it at a higher tier difficulty. To top it off, since the crusader is an expansion class, its seemed way more powerful in the lower levels, but once you hit 60 or so things taper off. Once you hit elite packs that can wall, things ramp up.

And the game scales to your level. I'd say you want to hit max level asap, as the game only really gets challenging once you start hitting torment levels. Then you need to start worrying about sets, gems, and bonuses to survive.

It does get a bit harder in the later Acts. The enemies aren't just melee dudes. You eventually run into guys that explode after you kill them, enemies that swarm you, enemies that knock you back and stun you, etc. That said, you should probably bump it up. I felt like the crusader class was too beefy myself.

This is simply not true. Crusaders are extremely tanky and have permanent immunity to enemy crowd control effects via Akarat's Champion along with the huge armor bonus from the Prophet rune. They have also have 2 ways to cheat death and their best end game build can permanently stun and knockback enemies. Crusaders have the best survivability in the game.

On my Crusader the game didn't start getting difficult until Torment V.

Put the difficulty up as high as you can to where you dont get stomped and beat the game. Don't worry about the XP boost, you want to level up as fast as possible. The story and everything is fun the first time through, but the real meat of the game is after you beat it.

Also the acts do get harder. My first time though I glided through Act 1, but actually died a good amount in Act 2. With that said it isn't that much harder. You should still bump up the difficulty.

Edit: After rereading the OP I realize the below advice is more suited for endgame, but hey, doesn't hurt to have it, so I'll leave it.

It's not really hard to be invincible if you want to be invincible as a Crusader. There are some other classes like that too. The thing is that the objective of the game is not simply to survive. The objective is to turn yourself into the most efficient killing machine possible while having the game on the highest difficulty (read: highest loot difficulty) you can handle. In other words, legendary drops per second is your priority. So if you think you're taking hits too well but you don't think you're killing fast enough to knock it up, what you really need to be doing is trading damage for toughness, either with drops or using the enchanter to transmute the stats on your items.

You're kinda coming at the game from the wrong direction.

I'd write more, but it's mostly already covered above me. The difficulty slider has like 10 different levels, and hard is 2/10 (they also scale exponentially, not linearly).

So, yeah. Bump it to the highest difficulty you can manage to play on; anything else and you and the game are doing a disservice to each other.

Bump it up to Master. It still won't be that difficult even then.

Part of the problem with playing on the lower difficulties is that you'll have to play through the entire game multiple times to actually level to 70 - or grind in Adventure mode.

Hey guys,

I am playing on the PlayStation 4 and just finished the story mode and unlocked the adventure mode i beat it on hard and want to try master level for adventure mode.

i am playing a monk level 70 (paragon level 15)

what would be the best difficulty level to try in adventure mode ? is it mental to try torment (level 1) ?

It doesn't hurt to try torment but if you find you are dying to elites in one or two hits you may need to drop your difficulty back down. If that is the case do master until you get some decent gear and it starts feeling easy and then work your way back up.

Start with Torment I. With the Torments, some of this is based on feel. If your hits are only doing like 2% of a regular enemy's health and they are doing 10% of your health with each hit, it's obviously set too hard. You can find the stats posted by Blizzard, but the Torment difficulties quickly skyrocket. The earlier Torments have a slower difficulty curve compared to the mid and later ones though.

With you being Level 70 and starting to get Paragon points, you probably have the level and gear able to do Torment I. If you're dying too much, drop it down. When Master becomes way too easy, bump it up again.

@clagnaught:

Thanks for the advice, i did try it on torment 1 and it was ok but rightly so i got destroyed to elites so i tried different tactics and it helped but the damage i was doing was to little so i had to bump it back down to master and its fine but the drops i am getting are not helping.

@zirilius:

thanks i did try it out and sadly had to get back to master but i have been very unlucky with the drops. i had 3 legendary drops and they were not for my class i wanted to snap my controller in half .... haha

@fzcreations: For me when doing fresh level 70 gearing I always just picked what ever difficulty was the highest that I could still crush elites and just spammed that in rifts. You get gear at a decent rate and then you can move on to bigger and better things!

@boxxybae:

Thanks will try that but for now had to put the game down for a while since i played it straight for a week. Need some sleep .....ha ha

@fzcreations: If you get the chance check it out on PC. Its the most up to date version of the game and you will get Seasons. Its not a super demanding game either so a budget build PC will be able to play it.

Legendaries aren't everything. For Master you are going to want to focus on Yellow's as the set drops and good legendaries only drop in Torment level. If you are a monk I recommend gemming with Vitality instead of Dex until you can get gear to augment it back up. Being able to survive a fight is more important than being able to deal crazy damage and die in 2 hits.

I don't know about the consoloe versions of the game but running public games on Torment 1 (even if you can barely do more than survive) will get you some much needed gear quickly. Don't forgot about Kayla either if you are running bounties. 98% of her stuff is absolutely garbage but it's free and you can focus on specific gear slots.

Make sure to raise your Blacksmithing up for crafting too if you haven't already. You'd be surprised how good some of the gear you can get from crafting can be and if you got any legendary recipes they can make the difference jumping to Torment one.