I used to level the same way as all of you : 15-20 trist, 20-24 cows....
until I finally discovered a much faster way to do it : Hell CS Runs
If you are in a P8 Hell CS run with lvl 25, you will gain 5+ level/game!
Here's how you do it :
1) Create a new classic character
2) Get him rushed to Hell. You can (in the past at least) easily hire a guy to rush you for some rune (most classic players also play in LoD) if you don't have the char to do it. Try posting at the battle.net forums.
3) Once you reach Hell (still in classic mode!), get to act 3. This is very important, since if you convert a char that is still in act 1 or 2 Hell classic to a LoD char, it will still be in nightmare mode.
4) Convert your classic char to LoD. You should now be able to go to hell mode without the level requirements of the ancients quest (note this can also be done using the baal quest bug, but it's more of a hassle).
5) Get rushed through act 3, and start searching for CS Runs
Note : You won't get that much XP until you reach lvl 25. Don't worry, it's still paying more than killing quill rats in act 1 :P. Once you get to 25, it will be insanely fast and you will get to lvl 60 in a record time. It's still worth doing those CS runs after lvl 60-70, but I prefer doing baalruns as usual (safer). From what I've heard, it's supposed to be kinda equivalent.
If it didn't take you too long to get rushed, this is the fastest way to get a high level char
Now that you have your char, you will need monnies. A very good way to acquire some nice runes is to forgerun. The principle of forgeruns is to rush a char only to get the runes from the hellforge quest.
For that, you will use the same technique as above : Rush as many char as possible (you will need multiple cd-keys to do this, but remember that you can only have a maximum of 4 chars online at the same time) at once to hell exactly the same way I explained above, but instead of CS-runs, go to the hellforge.
It's recommended to have a classic high level sorc to complete these rush as fast as possible. I can post an appropriate build if somebody is interested.
I used to do these with a friend of mine (we both had 4 cd-keys), he was rushing while I was completing the quest. It took us about 1-2h to get 7 runes from hell, which can all become Ist or Gul runes. Way to stuff a char ;P
(too bad for us half of the runes were io's
)Voilą. Feel free to ask questions if something's unclear.
