Can I stay on normal difficulty and continue to level up?

Question

I am not particularly excited by the difficulty levels in Diablo III.

My question is, can I play normal repeatedly and continue to level up? This way I would get better but the enemies won't and I will feel as if the leveling has had some benefit. Better gear won't drop, but I could buy upgrades on the AH.

Answer 1

Monster levels do not scale, so you will quickly find that killing things in normal awards you 0 exp.

You may be able to repeat quests for the exp reward (I am not certain if there is a level cap for the quests), but this will be painfully slow.

About the only other way to get exp in Normal that I can think of would be the destruction bonus for destroying the environment. Again, this would be painfully slow, and I imagine even more boring.

If you don't want to progress into Nightmare, your best bet is to try new characters. Perhaps try out Hardcore mode.

Answer 2

It is possible to do this, with some caveats:

• Once you are ten levels above a monster's level, you will no longer gain XP from that monster(at 6 levels above a monster's level you will no longer receive +xp from gear for killing that monster). This means your only XP source after reaching this point will be quests and destruction bonuses.

• Some items needed to level the artisans are impossible to find in normal mode. You can buy them off the auction house, but due to your limited leveling ability, it is doubtful you'll find much utility in leveling the Black Smith. Due to the nature of the gem system, the utility of this artisan will be limited by the fact that it will take literally millions of the gems you find on normal mode to reach the highest level gems.

Even with these caveats, you'll be ridiculously overpowered on normal just starting out again after beating the game first, so I wouldn't worry too much.