Everything to Know
This guide is NOT intended for beginners unless you know what you're doing. This is not a guide for fast 3-50 leveling. It is purely a general study of what non-exploit experience grinding methods are good/bad, comparing them, and then going into detail on how to efficiently grind in BRP and Skyreach at CP160 and above.
What's the fastest EXP Grinding Spot?
The most efficient experience grinding method in the game, assuming efficiency means least time spent ingame, would obtain us approximately 1.2 billion experience per hour.
First, we must have every single experience bonus for writs. Including both the event bonuses putting us at 371% exp bonus, or 4.71x base experience.
We will be crafting equipment writs which have a base experience of 18525. 18525 x 4.71 = 87252.75 experience per writ turned in.
This means we will be getting 87,252.75 experience per writ turned in.
Since we can store up to 107 writs, and assuming we can turn in 1 writ per second, during these 107 seconds, we would be gaining 314,109,900 experience per hour.
However, this is without adding the highest experience bonus of all: Enlightenment.
You can have a maximum of 4,800,000 experience worth of Enlightenment at a time, you get 400,000 enlightenment experience every 24 hours, so it takes 12 days to build up to 4.8 million.
Enlightenment buffs your experience gain by 4 times, meaning we would be getting a mind boggling 1,256,439,600 experience per hour.
At this pace, you would get from CP 10 to CP 3600 in 1 hour and 45 minutes turning in writs.
Though, this is obviously extraordinarily impractical. We would need a total of 6321 writs in our inventory, with the items pre-crafted. We would also only be able to do 13 writs every 12 days, meaning the real life total time taken to level from cp 10 to 3600 would be 15 years and 357.2 days.
At moment of writing this, PC/EU writs cost about 50k gold each, meaning you’d be spending 126 million on writs alone when doing this, or 1.2 billion gold assuming no inspiration bonus, and this isn’t even including the materials required which will probably add up to over double the total writ cost.
Every writ would give you 349011 experience, so 107 writs in this method would give you 37,344,177 experience. Which is ridiculous. But assuming you do this in 1 go starting with full enlightenment, it would only give you about 12,900,000 experience, because the enlightenment will run out quickly.
Other Information
In the video, I said the max practical experience bonus is 382%, but in the video I also correct myself in editing, sayings its 381%. But it is actually 382%.
Writs are difficult to calculate so I shouldn't have bothered applying measurements to them.
My per hour numbers can be taken with an extremely large grain of salt, but the other data is correct.
Skeletons from skeleton piles in Skyreach don't give experience, which is why its possible to know the exact EXP per complete run while enemy amounts vary.
The reason enemy amounts vary is because of the skeleton piles/chest basically just being a fairly random number of skeletons. total max exp bonus:
- 150% scroll/ambrosia (mutually exclusive)
- 100% event
- 86% training trait (7, 8, 9, 10, 11 for armor (x7), 2.5, 3, 3.5, 4, 4.5 for weapons/shield, double if 2h
- 15% mora’s whispers mythic
- 10% ESO Plus
- 10% Marriage/Ring of Mara
- 10% Group (Being in a group of 2, 3 or more will lose ~30% XP overall)
- 9% Heartland Conqueror (on gold training weapon, double earlier values from training)
- 1% High Elf
26900.54 is total Blackrose PRrison round 2 experience, I round it down but if you look at the values over a long time you'll notice this tiny discrepancy. Flame Atronachs do not give experience in Blackrose Prison. The highest possible single writ EXP gain is 68827.92 experience (Equipment writ with all exp boosts)
EXP Grind Methods (Base EXP Per Hour)
- Dolmens: ~250k per hour
- Overland mob grinds: 300k-900k per hour
- Random normal dungeon spam: 500-900k per hour
- Skyreach (solo): ~850k per hour
- Skyreach (duo) 1m+ per hour
- BRP (solo): 1.6mil per hour
- BRP (incredibly optimized duo): 3.9mil per hour
- 1x Consumable Writ: 11,227 (~3-5mil per hour)
- 1x Equipment Writ: 18,525 (Assuming Q4 patch with combined attuneable stations: ~6-9mil per hour, also need pretty much all motifs researched and costs insane amount of gold, but probably fastest method in the game)
Level 3 to 50 Grind
Level 3-50: 3-50 is a bit weird, you need 2.8 million experience to get from lvl 3 to 50, but this isnt ''true'' exp since it scales a bit weirdly down there. It's easiest to just calculate the CP experience equivalent, which is almost exactly 6066000 experience from 3 to 50.
We can use this to figure out how much of a certain method we need to do this way, to level up as shown below:
With Double EXP Event
- Consumable Writs: (No high elf, no ring of mara, 3.6x exp) 151 Writs
- Equipment writs: (No high elf, no ring of mara, x3.6 exp) 91 Writs
- BRP Carry: (Full gold training, heartland conqueror, no high elf/ring of mara, x4.65 exp) 48.5 BRP rounds (assuming 60sec round cycle, 48.5 minutes 3-50)
- Skyreach Carry: (Full gold training, heartland conqueror, no high elf/ring of mara, x4.65 exp) 27 Skyreach runs (assuming 3.5 min run cycle, 94.5 min but it lvls FG)
- RND Spam: (Full gold training, heartland conqueror, no high elf/ring of mara, x4.65 exp) 40-50 Random Normal Dungeons, not including the first 3x exp one.
- Dolmens: (Full gold training, heartland conqueror, no high elf/ring of mara, x4.65 exp) 217.5 total dolmen completions.
Dolmen completion EXP is affected similarly to writs, so it only has 3.6x exp, the kills do get full exp tho.
But I didn't add the add exp in.
Dolmens: (with adds this time): between 180-140 runs depending on how active you are.
This is between 5.1 and 7 hours of dolmen grinding to get from 3-50.
Without Double EXP Event
- Consumeable writs: 207 Writs
- Equipment writs: 126 Writs
- BRP Carry: 61 BRP rounds
- Skyreach Carry: 34.5 Skyreach runs
- RND Spam: 55-65 random normals
If you save up on specific writs, especially equipment that are easy to get or craft, just get 275 cp 150/160 intricates ready (this is the amount required from 0-50 on blacksmithing, woodworking and clothing, not jewelry though) and, and 91 of similar motif equipment writs ready as well.
If you then create new character, grab writs from storage, deconstruct all intricates, collect a total of 9-13 skill points, slap on all exp bonus stuff, and craft the writs, turn them in and boom you're lvl 50. Probably more practical with alchemy writs but takes a lot more of them.
FAQ
What about the Atoll method?
Yes, I know about the atoll grinding method. It is an exploit, I don't exactly condone it. Regardless, macros are often used with it which is against Terms of Service. The developers have logs of all happenings in the game instances so I wouldn't recommend it if you value your account. It can be afk grinded though. It's surprisingly slow, only a little faster than Blackrose Prrison and way behind even consumable writs, of course easily made up for by how ridiculously easy and afkable it is though.
What about Spellscar?
It's not remotely as good as people make it out to be, not to mention impossible to farm faster than dolmens when literally anyone else is there (this is quite common, happening 100% of the time except at 4-7 am on pc eu at least) It's definitely faster than Skyreach though, it's the top end of my overland grind spot estimate (~1mil exp per hour) when alone, but I may have been using incorrect routes. Regardless I don't see it coming remotely close to BRP even solo, let alone writs.
Should I use this guide to grind from Level 3 to 50?
You could, but it'd be hard. I was actually making this guide specifically for low level solo grinding, but unfortunately the 1 set that made it possible, Plaguebreak, was removed from PVE. The best you could do to grind exp solo at lvl 3-50, is probably to spam Random Normals or do the first wave of round 2 in brp, maybe 2 when you're above 40?
Regardless it's a tedious way to level.
This is what I'd recommend you do instead: Purple training gear, Adept Rider 5pc, Shattered Fate 5pc (low lvl characters have extremely low Penetration due to no passives, its the best setup overall)
Pick up Undaunted, Mages Guild, Fighters guild, Psijic Order along with Urich's Skill Point Finder addon and the Map Pins addon (assuming you're on PC).
Now do psijic order main quest, and collect all Skyshards/mages guild books (could ignore books if you dont need it) just go zone-by-zone making sure to fill it out.
When you hit lvl 10, queue for every dungeon you don't have the quest of. This grants you a skill point each and a shit ton of exp. Also do daily Random Normal Dungeon of course, and if you ignore it for the first 20 or 30 levels, you can spam RNDs for even more exp since you're likely to get new dungeons each random queue, but it gets annoying quickly when you repeat them.
Make sure to keep killing enemies you find in delves, overland etc,
Dont go out of your way to kill them but don't deviate from the fastest path too much. I am a bit of a grind addict but I usually collect every single Skyshard, Public Dungeon skill point and all dungeons before 24 hours into my character.
It lines up perfectly for you to reach lvl 45 when you finish City of Ash II, as long as you have an exp scroll active most of the time. This means you can just dungeon queue spam the last skill points from DLC dungeons, and you're lvl 50 with a character that has: mages guild 10, FG 8+, Psijic 10, undaunted 9, 300+ skill points, and you can very easily start grinding the important skill lines in BRP because mora's is near maxed.
You will never need to go into the wild for skill points either, and don't need to do any undaunted leveling. That's just what I recommend though, especially for new players who want to rush endgame this is absolutely the best method but I wouldn't recommend it to new players anyway.