Temporal Rift with a melee character is pretty suicidal. Movement Speed of everything is greatly reduced, so even taking one step means your enemies can attack you several times from afar.
Which is largely why you don't move, or if you do, it's via stuff like rush. Temporal Rift's actually not that bad with melee, you just have to be quite careful about positioning and largely let the elementals come to you. And not try to fight more than one or two at a time, really. Once you're past the initial time!E gauntlet, it's a bit less tetchy (until you hit the twins, anyway. They can mess you up if you're not careful. Stay in the little starting corridor, if you can manage it.).
Alternately you can go in with a couple sources of teleportation (double rune, maybe psychoport or whatever) and hopefully a movement infusion and just teleport around until you land close enough to the exit to make a dash for it.
But yeah, movement speed is cut to a third (not by a third,
to) and there's some other stuff going on (iirc, projectiles are slowed, too), so you do have to be really, really careful about when you move and where you move to. Unless you've got a ridiculous amount of move speed, I guess...
Well crap. Suggestions? Last Hope Graveyard seems like a bad idea, although if I take on the crypts individually, I should be able to beat even greater undead into submission, mano-a-corpseo.
Oh, I suppose I need to go find the Ring of Blood. Place like that is right up my alley, being mostly physical and melee. Not a whole lot to grind though.
Peeked into the elven ruins, but yeah...way over my level. Killed a handful of things then got out while the getting was good.
I *think* the Caldera is available, but according to the Wiki that's a beefier zone than Dreadfell is. I really want to get a character to the East so I can unlock anorithils and sun paladins.
Ring of blood isn't really an XP joint, per se. It's mostly there for the awesome ring. 25 should be fine for starting to duck into dreadfell, but... yeah, you've got problems with that. Could try to clear out the ruined dungeon if not already done so, but i hear it's turned nasty recently so... maybe not. Caldera definitely didn't seem beefier than dreadfell (finally got a damn character that spawned it, yesterday), but it does have its (somewhat annoying) gimmick. Graveyard's eternally iffy. If the RNG doesn't decide to screw you, you're fine. If the RNG
does decide to screw you, you're stuck in a small room with a murderbeast.
Maybe do a farportal run or try to nibble on a few adventurer parties?