I tend to have the kick and bass as the loudest parts , all the other channels combined at the master may total to 2 or 3 times the volume of the kick, so when your limiter kicks in its pushing all the dynamics down , you ideally want your kick and bass to be nearly hitting the threshold of the limiter when it starts to push back , that way the loudest part of the track will be the drums ,
a good way of working is using another tracks waveform as reference , load it into your DAW and look how the kick drums fill the tracks block from top to bottom. trying to achieve this is a good starting point .
everyone works differently but i try to work quiet , have the track in full peaking at about -6 , if the track during the busiest parts aren't consistently hitting -6 then i know i need to re-tweak the mix.
Hope this helps
MR.