Diablo 4 Season 15 Leveling: Helltide or Undercity to Level 70

Season 15 rebalanced the two fastest ways to push a fresh character to level 70 in Diablo 4. The Helltide maggot farm lost some of its raw experience output, while Kurast Undercity gained a large orb buff. That leaves a real choice for the first few hours of a season, and the answer depends less on pure experience per hour than on what you are wearing when you get there.

Quick answer: Run Helltides. The maggot nerf is real, but Whisper caches, War Plans, and gear drops more than cover the gap, and Undercity forces you to buy equipment from vendors to keep up.

What Season 15 changed for leveling XP

Four adjustments define the current leveling meta. Two of them hit the Helltide maggot loop, and two of them pushed experience back into other activities.

Source	Change	Effect
Hellmouth Plague Maggot Young	Lower Experience Orb drop chance	Nerf
Portent of Pain, Plague Devourers	Drop 1–2 orbs instead of always 2	Nerf
Whisper Caches	Orbs raised from 3–5 to 4–6	Buff
Jade Epiphany (Undercity)	Orb count doubled	Buff

War Plan experience also went up, which matters more than it sounds. War Plan rewards scale with the difficulty you complete them on, not the difficulty you farmed on, and that opens the single most useful trick in the season.

Helltide route: the recommended path to 70

The Helltide loop works from level 1, never gates you behind a level requirement, and drops usable equipment the entire way. That last part is what decides the comparison.

Create your seasonal character and start on Normal difficulty. You are not trying to feel challenged here — you are trying to kill things instantly so the Cinder count climbs.

Diablo 4 class selection screen with Warlock selected and the Confirm Class button highlighted — The class selection screen with Warlock picked and ready to confirm. Image: Blizzard Entertainment

Enter a Helltide and collect 75 Aberrant Cinders. Do not open a single chest yet. Opening early on Normal throws away the whole point of the next step.

Return to town and swap your difficulty to Penitent. Your Cinders carry over, and the War Plan objective only registers at the moment the chest opens.

Go back in and open Helltide chests on Penitent to complete the Helltide Harvest War Plan. Because the completion is credited at Penitent, the experience payout roughly doubles compared to turning it in on Normal.

Penitent can kill a low-level character before you reach the chest, and dying with a full Cinder stack costs more time than the bonus is worth. Skip the swap if the run in feels unsafe.

Spend your War Plan progress on the Helltide side of the tree and unlock Writhe and Rot. This is the node that makes maggots drop Experience Orbs at all, and nothing about the Helltide route functions properly without it.

Once the node is live, hunt hellworms. Build your threat meter up, then stop clearing trash and ride between known worm spawn points instead. Kill the worm, collect the orbs from the maggots it spawns, move to the next location.

Fold Whisper objectives into the same loop. Blood Maiden and the PvP zone bosses are worth detouring for, and Whisper Caches now pay out 4 to 6 Experience Orbs each. Spawn timers and worm locations are tracked live at helltides.com, which saves a lot of aimless riding.

Undercity route: fast levels, no loot

Kurast Undercity is genuinely quick now, and the doubled Jade Epiphany orbs make a clean run feel absurd. The catch is that it is locked behind level 25 and it barely gives you anything to wear.

Get to level 25 first. Helltides or Whispers on Normal are the simplest way there, since Undercity does not exist for you before that point.

Run your first few Undercity attempts on Hard or Expert and ignore every enemy in the place. Sprint to the boss, kill it, reset. You are farming activity experience and War Plan points, not kills.

Unlock Jade Epiphany in the Undercity portion of the tree. It is the only node this route actually needs.

Now light the Spirit Braziers on every run. Each attunement rank you reach spawns more Experience Orbs, and with the doubled values a high-attunement run is where the levels come from.

A Spirit Brazier in Kurast Undercity showing the Interact prompt as the player walks up to it — A Spirit Brazier showing its Interact prompt — lighting these raises your attunement rank. Image: Blizzard Entertainment

Pick the orbs up by hand. Your pet will not collect Experience Orbs, and walking past them is the most common way people lose value on this route.

Stop in Kurast between runs and buy gear from the vendors with the gold you accumulate. Undercity hands out very little equipment on its own, so vendor shopping is the only thing keeping your damage in line with rising difficulty.

Side-by-side: which one wins

Category	Helltide	Undercity
Available from	Level 1	Level 25
Gear drops	Strong	Limited
Crafting materials	Strong	Minimal
Key node	Writhe and Rot	Jade Epiphany
Risk	Higher	Low
Repetition	High	Very high

Undercity is the smoother experience and it is genuinely fast once Jade Epiphany is online. Pylon buffs make your character feel far stronger than its level suggests, and a single run can be over in a couple of minutes. But levels alone do not get you into the endgame. Arriving at 70 with vendor gear, no tempering materials and no sigil powder just moves the grind to the other side of the level cap.

Helltide levels you at a comparable rate while also filling your bags. That is the deciding factor in Season 15: the maggot nerf shaved off some experience, but the route still delivers targeted gear, crafting resources and Whisper progress in the same loop. The Undercity run gives you a number on the XP bar and not much else.

Diablo 4 characters gathered in town with a green cursor marking the player character — Players regrouping in town between Helltide runs. Image: Blizzard Entertainment

Stack the Experience Well before you commit

Whichever route you pick, there is a free multiplier sitting in Nightmare Dungeons. Look for a sigil carrying the Forgotten Wisdom affix, which places an Experience Well inside the dungeon. Interacting with it grants a 15% experience buff that lasts one hour.

Grab the well right before a Helltide window opens so the buff covers the full hour of farming rather than expiring while you are in town sorting gear.

How to confirm each route is set up correctly

Writhe and Rot is working when killing hellworm maggots visibly drops Experience Orbs on the ground.
The Penitent chest trick worked if the War Plan completes with the larger experience payout after you open the chest.
Jade Epiphany is active when raising your attunement rank spawns a visible cluster of orbs.
The Experience Well is applied when the 15% buff appears with an hour timer on your status bar.

If you want a change of pace, there is nothing wrong with alternating. Undercity is a reasonable filler when no Helltide is active or your War Plans happen to line up with it. The default for the season, though, is the Helltide loop, because it is the only one that levels your character and gears it at the same time.