Blizzard has added [wiki]Leaderboards[/wiki] for Greater Rift exploits to the official site. Now you can check out how fast every class is managing the Grifts, along with the build and gear of the fastest qualifiers. Obviously it’s very early in Patch 2.1, and no one has changed their gear much, found updated legendary items, ranked up their Legendary Gems, etc. So all the current rankings are just giving us a sense of the relative power of characters in pre-Patch 2.1 gear.
But it’s interesting to compare, now that Live Leaderboards are a Go in Patch 2.1:
Highest Rift cleared, hardcore: 31: DH, WD, Wiz. 29: Crusader. 28: Barbarian. 27: Monk.
Interesting only a 2 level disparity between softcore and hardcore Wizard. How about the party rankings?
The party rankings seem really low, probably since not many people have tried yet. I also expect to see a lot more more organized co-op play now that there’s the Greater Rift leaderboard incentive for teamwork. After all, if solo DHs can do GR37, surely a party of 2-4 players should be able to push a lot faster than that? Even just a pair of Demon Hunters; if 5 sentries are good, shouldn’t 10 be that much better, with monsters only going up 50% in HPs for a 2nd player?
And look at those Hardcore parties. Pathetic! Right now the fastest solo DH, WD, and Wizards are faster than any 3 or 4 player party? Teamwork, guys. (And yes, easy for me to say writing this post and updating wiki pages, without even time to DL the patch yet.
We’ll check in on the leaderboards later tonight and see how things have changed/progressed, so check back for that.
Update: As of 2am PDT, here are the updated leaders on the US realm.
Softcore Leaders:
| Class | Char Name | GRift# | Time |
| Barbarian | HALIS | 35 | 13m 32.833s |
| Crusader | MingMing | 36 | 10m 34.033s |
| Demon Hunter | Vibe | 38 | 10m 56.316s |
| Monk | Testsubject | 35 | 11m 34.916s |
| Witch Doctor | JOGI | 34 | 11m 32.800s |
| Wizard | Evilear | 35 | 14m 43.966s |
| Two Players | Destroyer (Barb), Chastiefol (Wiz) | 38 | 14m 45.250s |
| Three Players | supern00b (DH), Nightcrawler (Wiz), BadBoy (DH) | 39 | 13m 19.383s |
| Four Players | Nerth (DH), Kadryel (Barb) Gabynator (WD), Bruise (Monk) | 40 | 13m 39.500s |
Hardcore Leaders
Hardcore has fallen much further behind over the course of the day, and I’m a little bummed for my fellow mortals. The Softcore chars don’t really have better gear; so it’s the lack of fear of death that’s allowing them to go much higher on DPS and play more recklessly.
If there’s a real Softcore advantage to this Leaderboard, it’s in party play, since you can in a Softcore Grift party and get a res from a teammate and get right back into the action. Dying in a solo Grift, even in softcore, is going to ruin your time on a record run unless you die very near the entrance, since there’s no restart at corpse option in Grifts.
| Class | Char Name | GRift# | Time |
| Barbarian | Shadow | 28 | 9m 30.350s |
| Crusader | ?? | 30 | 11m 45.033s |
| Demon Hunter | PhantomSin12 | 32 | 9m 44.949s |
| Monk | Gerarlt | 29 | 14m 45.683s |
| Witch Doctor | glen | 32 | 13m 34.449s |
| Wizard | Gunaresh | 32 | 12m 5.583s |
| Two Players | kingjb (Barb), Svorn (Wiz) | 30 | 9m 48.783s |
| Three Players | jnev (DH), Ecto (WD), Panderas (Wiz) | 31 | 13m 2.283s |
| Four Players | joshtrav (Crus), TITAN109 (Barb), Eonblade (Monk), Atreus (Crus) | 30 | 10m 45.066s |
It’s interesting how many of the top times are way under the 15m limit, in the 10 and 11m range. That was probably a mistake by the players, since going that far under will jump them up 2 or 3 Grift levels. If they’d paused to wait and finish at 14:30 they’d only have gone up one higher level, and might have been able to finish it?