Double bounty caches this weekend and the buff is already active. 
I just started my 2nd character (Demon Hunter) of season 4. Instead of simply socketing a Gem of Ease, I used the cube to merge it with a lvl 70 bow. This loses the bonus EXP of the GoE, but leaves the option of a socket. I played with a random guy who simply socketed a GoE. Even still we leveled the same. So it seems the that added exp from the GoE is a drop in the bucket compared to the bonus exp (1600%) you get from playing at T6.
Of course, if I want to start a 3rd character this season then I have to level up another GoE, but doing low-level Grifts to level new gems is what new-to-lvl70 characters are good for.
It took about 1 minute to get to lvl 30+ and start getting 1-shot killed. X showed up to help us finish our first rift and carry us through another. After ~10 minutes my new DH is at lvl 59.
I also foolishly forgot to select mods from the cube. The Furnace is not an option for the DH, but many other non-bow weapons are.
Yeah, this morning I started a new character with a GoE socketed into the weapon and leveled up pretty quickly. The problem wasn’t doing damage, but getting killed. In the future I wonder if it might be better to fuse a GoE with some armor along with the GoE in the weapon so I don’t get killed as fast, and also so that I level up faster once I hit Level 60 or so.
(Oh yeah, and I’m X in Diablo.)
The thing about quick leveling with a GoE is that about 2 minutes in you hit level ~30 and you start dying very quickly because you have no armor. You need to use defensive gems to mitigate that.
(bolding mine)
A few patches ago they made it so that all XP bonuses on gear are divided evenly to the whole group to stop people running around in full XP gear just leeching. So if you leveled together, you basically benefitted from his GoE as much as he did.
I sort of wonder about gems of ease… Is the time it takes to level the gem (or gems, if you cube armor too) really less than the time you save in leveling up? Just finding and saving a few incidental reduced requirement items along your journey already makes leveling up quite quick, and even on the first character of a season, it doesn’t take all that long. Leveling up a gem of ease, meanwhile, requires at least eight grifts plus eight regular rifts to get the griftstones. I guess it’d eventually become worthwhile if you start up enough new characters and re-use the gear, but how many characters are you really making per season, anyway?
I’m sure it takes way more time to level the GoE than it saves. But that’s not the point. The fastest way for me to get someplace 26.2 miles from where I am without a car would be to just jog/walk it. But if the goal* is to be able to run a marathon in the least amount of time, you spend weeks or months training for it. Yeah, between leveling ALL of the gems and doing Keywarden runs and Ubers and checking the level requirement of yellows before melting them, I spent WAY more time prepping for a new character than it would take to just level it normally.
If the point was saving time, I’d be doing something more productive with my time than playing a video game. 
That being said, my strategy with a new-to-70 character is to have them start with a level 10 Grift, level 3 or 4 gems, then do an 11 Grift, etc… It’s the old ‘carry a newborn calf up the mountain and back down every day until it’s a full-grown bull’ method of building up a new character. So it’s not totally time wasted just on the GoE. (Of course, if you just socket it, you can reuse that one GoE over and over).
That said, I messed up last time. I melted a GoE into a DH only weapon. If I had put it into a regular bow, I could have later given that weapon to my 3rd new character’s Scoundrel and doubled my killability. So this time (3rd new character is a Wizard) I gave my new Wiz a GoE enhanced staff that I could pass off to a 4th new character’s Enchantress.
- I realize that my point would be easier to make if I actually timed how long it took to level a new character, or if there was an achievement to be earned by leveling a new character from 0 to 70 in the shortest time.
Eh, I’d just use the same weapon for all new characters, of any class. When you’re doing level 70 damage at level 1, or even at level 50, it doesn’t really matter if it doesn’t have your mainstat.
BTW, I haven’t seen anyone on for a while, but in case anyone’s still playing, I have a Puzzle Ring and a couple of Bovine Bardiches to cube into portals the next time there’s three or more of us on.
I’ve slacked off the PS4 version since I got the Platinum trophy…
Patch notes are up for 2.4 PTR.
Haven’t played for a while but I still try to keep up with the D3 news.
I played last night after a very long time off. Could someone tell me what Zoltun Kulle is doing in town in adventure mode. He said something abut a relic. How do you get the relic?
OK I looked it up, you get a horadric cube by clearing some level or something?
The cube is at the far end of the new wintery zone part thingy, it’s somewhere in Act III. Just walk to the cube and click it and it is yours and then you can do all sorts of fancy stuff with it, like drain the power out of legendaries and equip up to three of those (weapon, armor, jewelry). Or upgrade rare items to random legendaries, good way to get a specific weapon you want since it keeps the same base type.
If you talk to ZK and use the cube and so on you get some background. Something like “Yes, yes, I’m alive. I’m very hard to kill, and really, you did a sloppy job.” The cube isn’t actually a Horadric Cube, but something more powerful: The story goes that the Horadrim made this thing at terrible cost, and found that they were depending on it for everything, and it was too powerful, and led to things that Man Was Not Meant to Know, and so on, so they hid it away and entrusted it to this barbarian dude, and made the Horadric Cubes we know as feeble copies to do some of the same work more safely.
Not sure if I want to play S5, we’ll see.
My 7 or 8 year old computer has finally taken THE DUMP, and I will be shopping for a new one this christmas…I will probably give S5 a go since I felt that I have been playing on an inferior system that consistently lags this last year… I would like to see what this will do on season 5… http://www.amazon.com/G11CD-US006T-Gaming-Desktop-Nvidia-GTX980/dp/B016E80LF0
May also buy X-Plane 10 and play that as well.
The 2.4.0 patch dropped on Tuesday, and I just got back in. They’ve changed several sets and jacked up the power levels. Adds some interesting new ways to play, but as usual I think a lot of it just changed the calculations. Marauder seems to be better than Unhallowed Essence now, for example. Del Rasha no longer gives the massive Slow Time damage, but instead 50% damage reduction (while Tal Rasha’s damage boost is higher and easier to maintain).
My wife and I will be on occasionally, if anyone else is coming back. Not sure if I’ll start a new seasonal character, but I’ll definitely stick around to snag some of the new items and try out the new loadouts they support.
I’ll be making a new seasonal character just to get the expanded stash space. After that, though… I dunno, I think I might have tired on power level hyperinflation.
Yet again I’ll be starting with a pet doctor. (I just think it’s the best build to start with, since it does OK with no gear). Last season it seemed that Monks were beastmode, but I didn’t play one. In the offseason I found out that my S3 Wastes Barb was better than any WD I made in S4 (I tried Helltooth, since the WD’s at the top of the leaderboards were all using that set. IDK how those guys were doing 50+ Grifts when I could only muster ~43).
The beefed up Zunimassa’s set so that enemies hit with a mana spender now take 800% dmg for 8 seconds. So I would hit an elite with Phiranado and as long as my fetishes weren’t occupied with other monsters, the elites would do down in seconds.
But then… I found the Belt of Transcendence. This allows you to summon fetishes with mana spenders. So I swapped out Plague/Rain of Toads for Haunt. Now EVERYTHING is pretty much constantly taking 8x dmg from my pets. I changed a few other things (boring details upon request) around and now I have 30 pets doing 8x dmg all of the time. Stuff just dies so fast that Torment 10 is not a problem. But since my dmg is no longer a concern I need to focus on leveling up some defensive gems to survive the higher Grifts.
So, if you want to join the new season, I’ll be glad to do some low- to mid-level Grifts to level new gems.