Dungeons & Dragons: Daggerdale

NOTE: This achievement can be glitched and won't unlock. There is currently no feasible work-around yet, and I don't think anyone would be mad enough to try the 'delete everything and clear cache'. There is however an announced patch coming *soon* that will hopefully remedy this.
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This is going to be a drag however you view it, and take you roughly 25-30 hours. All four character classes - Mage, Fighter, Rogue, Cleric - has to reach level 10 and the achievement will pop the second the last one levels up.

Preferences aside, I found the Fighter to be the quickest and easiest to get experience with. You simply can't beat a good stable dishing out of melee damage.

Second and runner up was the Rogue with ranged weapons only. A nice bow or crossbow as primary weapon coupled with as many damage bonuses of varying types you can fit will leave no enemy able to get close to you.

The Cleric is a bit slower again, but can still be made a decent fighter with 1 or 2h axes or hammers.

Last I played through with the Mage and it was slow and painful all the way. The spells at your disposal never really does as much damage without concentrating all modifiers (gear) towards that particular type of magic, and with the longer cool-down on the spells, you have to rely on your weapons anyway. There's not much you can do, and weapon choices are limited, but I found having played through the other characters, I had a lot of purple 1h swords lying around and dumped everything on the Mage. It helped a bit, but I was practically playing a melee Mage.

Some tips:
- If you can get higher level friends to bring you along, you'll get more experience. They will get less though, so in the end this is not a good option. It's a bit strange that playing coop doesn't give you any bonuses to xp, and if you break it down, 4 roughly equal level players have to kill things 4 times faster to have any gain.

- Make a mule character on a guest account if you have two controllers. Hand-me-down gear from your previous characters will help speed things up a lot for the following characters.

- You can replay certain sequences in quests where there are many enemies gathered together (waves). Just save before you end the waves and finish the quest, then either load the same chapter or the game to start over.

- The end sequence is mighty good for xp grinding. Hit up the boss a couple times until he starts spawning the green oozing skeletons and concentrate on those. They give 2k xp a pop. Just be careful and save often during this, or the end-fight will restart and you will loose everything. For the last 3 characters I came into the end-fight at level 7-8 and leveled up to 10 on those green skeletons every time.

A way to ensure this achievement pops without any issues is to get all four character types to level 9 and only a few thousand experience from level 10. Then, make sure you copy your game save to cloud storage, a memory card, or a USB stick. Get all four characters up to level 10 in a single play session and the achievement should pop. If for some reason it doesn't pop, copy your backup save over your hard drive save and rinse and repeat until it pops.

While attempting to level up the other 3 classes, I noticed a few things. First, you can get enemies to respawn, either over time or by moving a certain distance. Second, some spawns were based on your character's level; being higher level created higher-level enemies, which gave more experience as a multiple of that level. Lastly, during some quests in the first act, the maze area farthest to the east/right on the map would have a lot of enemy spawns you could trigger by going back and forth between the entrance and the farthest part of that mini-maze.

So one thing you may want to do is get to the main-line quest to find the gear and oxenmoor. I believe the latter is in the maze. There's another main quest to rescue a lost dwarf, which also entails finding his 3 lost items within said maze. Both seem to populate the mine area with better monsters.

As far as being in the maze, the side path at the beginning should host a lot of goblins (good for your 1K goblin kills). This may include the Shaman who can raise the dead, so if he appears in your current run, remember that you need to take him out quick as raised goblins don't give extra experience, but will still hurt you. Travelling along the edge of the maze, you'll come to another open room that will likely have goblins there, and probably a few in the nearby paths. Further along the edge, you'll descend the ramp-like passageway, and the enemies will turn into skeletons., including archer and fireball-flinging ones. Continue to the very end, to the large dead-end cavern room. The turn had a bunch of archers that can really hurt you bad, and then inside the cave was a lot of skeletons. Several are the cheap, low-XP kind, but are worth a bit in mass and at later levels. However, there should be two Elite skeletons worth a lot more, and will increase in worth as you level up yourself. Later levels had regular skeletons in there as well, with more XP to boot.

I can't remember the amount of XP earned, but it seemed to be several bars each trip to the cave then back to the entrance area. With the enemies increasing in level to match your level-ups, there wasn't that big of a slowdown even as the experience requirements rose.

Warning: If you complete Act 1, the maze will no longer have monsters to fight. I managed to bring some back by going on a side quest, but once you run out of quests, you'll have to find later areas for grinding.