Progressing through Chains might've been a bit too grindy to begin with, but definitely became so with the new characters introduced in 1.2.0. This has been completely reworked. The chains still require unlocking, but it can now happen much faster.

The highest unlocked Chain is now shared between all characters, and the required dungeons can be conquered by different characters.

To be clear, the difficulty itself is unchanged, and actually conquering the chains is still separate for each character (same for the achievements), but you can skip a bunch if you feel up to the challenge. Conquering a chain counts as conquering all the lower ones as well.

change: reworked chain progression, as explained above
change: player gets fully healed before entering the Gauntlet
change: menus have new crown icons that correspond to dungeons conquered for the currently selected character and chain
change: chains on the character select screen turn gold as they're conquered, instead of all being gold at Chain X
fix: game starting in a broken state if never launched through Steam

Cheers,
Jan