Rested XP is still the biggest experience bonus in WoW Forever. Log out in an inn or a capital city and your character banks bonus experience that doubles what you earn from kills, up to one and a half levels of it. Forever then adds a handful of small bonuses on top: the Well Rested Legacy perk makes the pool grow faster and hold more, a Leatherworker's Camp Tent tops it up at any campfire, most cooking food adds 5% to kill experience, and the Cozy Sleeping Bag adds up to 3% more. None of them changes the experience curve itself, which still asks for 4,084,700 XP from level 1 to 60.
Below we explain how rested XP builds up in and outside rest areas and how much it is worth at each level, then put every XP bonus into one table with how to get it and what it stacks with. You will also find which bonuses work on quest experience and which only on kills, the XP needed for every level, the difference between rested XP and the RestedXP addon, and the habits that keep a full rested bar working for you.
Rested XP is a pool of bonus experience your character builds up while it rests. As long as the pool lasts, every kill gives double experience, and the bonus ends when your experience bar reaches the rested marker. Quest turn-ins and exploration do not use it up. When you hand in a quest, the marker moves forward together with your bar, so the rest you banked is still waiting for the next pull.
The pool grows whenever you are logged out, and it grows fastest in a rest area. In an inn or anywhere in a capital city such as Stormwind City, Ironforge, Darnassus, Orgrimmar, Undercity or Thunder Bluff, a character gains 5% of its current level every 8 hours, which is about 15% of a level per day. Logged out anywhere else, it gains only a quarter of that. The cap is 150% of your current level, the same 30 bubbles on the experience bar as in Classic, and it takes about 10 days in an inn to fill.
Two quick checks tell you that you are in a rest area: the level number on your portrait turns into a "zzz" icon, and logging out is instant instead of a 20-second countdown. When you have rested XP, the filled part of your experience bar turns blue, and a small marker further along the bar shows where the bonus runs out.
Rested XP is counted as a share of the level you log out at, so the same night in an inn is worth very different amounts at level 10 and at level 50. The table shows the raw numbers for a few levels without the Legacy perk.
| Character Level | XP for the Next Level | Rested XP per Day in an Inn | Full Rested Pool at 150% |
|---|---|---|---|
| 10 | 7,600 | 1,140 | 11,400 |
| 20 | 23,200 | 3,480 | 34,800 |
| 30 | 47,400 | 7,110 | 71,100 |
| 40 | 90,700 | 13,605 | 136,050 |
| 50 | 147,500 | 22,125 | 221,250 |
| 59 | 209,800 | 31,470 | 314,700 |
At level 20 a full pool covers 34,800 XP of your bar that kills fill twice as fast, which one or two dungeon runs burn through. At level 50 the same pool lasts for hours of grinding. That is why rested XP pays off most in the second half of the climb, and why a week away from the game hurts much less at 55 than it seems.
Well Rested is the only Legacy perk that changes rested XP. Each of its five ranks in the Adventure tree makes rested XP build up 4% faster and raises the cap by 4%, so at 5/5 the pool fills 20% faster and holds 20% more. In practice a character in an inn banks about 18% of a level per day instead of 15%, and the cap rises from 1.5 to 1.8 levels. Filling it still takes about 10 days, because both numbers grow together.
For a main you play every day, that is a small gain: the extra 3% of a level per day only appears when you are offline anyway. Alts get more out of it, since they sit in an inn for days between sessions. Well Rested 5/5 is also the gate to Talented, which gives your first talent point up to five levels earlier, so most leveling and alt builds take both.
Other Legacy perks speed up leveling without adding experience. Thrill of Adventure returns health and mana after a killing blow in the open world, Frequent Flier and Mount Up cut travel time, and Permanence makes camp buffs last 50% longer.
You can compare every leveling and alt setup, with the points they cost, in our best WoW Forever Legacy talent builds.
Camping turns any campfire into a small rest stop. It unlocks at level 5 with The Great Outdoors, and a Basic Campfire Kit needs only 1 Cooking skill, one Simple Wood and Flint and Tinder. A Leatherworker with 20 skill crafts the Camp Tent from five Light Leather and places it next to the fire. Everyone who sits nearby for about a minute has their rested XP raised to 5% of a level, grouped or not.
The tent only tops you up. If you already have more than 5% of a level banked, it does nothing, so it pays off after a long session has burned your pool down. Using it also puts the Boosted Rest debuff on you for one hour, which stops you from topping up again at the next camp you pass. Since every camp object shares a one-hour cooldown as well, an hourly stop fits the rhythm Blizzard built into camping: sit, eat, drink, sort your bags and move on with a fresh 5%.
5% of a level sounds small, but at level 40 it is about 4,500 XP of double kill experience every hour, and the whole camp shares it. One Leatherworker in a group of friends is enough for everyone.
Every camp object, campfire size and buff is listed in our WoW Forever camping guide.
Apart from rested XP, Forever has three flat experience bonuses: crafted food, the sleeping bag and one dungeon necklace. They come from different sources, so they run at the same time as rested XP and as each other. Food is a Well Fed effect, the sleeping bag is its own buff, and camp objects never replace either of them. Blizzard has not said whether the percentages add up or multiply, but on a single kill the difference is a fraction of a percent.
The table puts these bonuses side by side with rested XP.
| Bonus | How Much | How to Get It | Works On | Stacks With |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Rested XP | Double XP from kills until the pool runs out, up to 1.5 levels banked | Log out in an inn or a capital city | Kills only | Every bonus below |
| Well Rested | Rested XP builds 20% faster and the cap is 20% higher at 5/5 | Legacy perk, Adventure tree, 5 ranks | Rested XP | Every bonus below |
| Camp Tent | Tops rested XP up to 5% of a level, once per hour | Leatherworking 20, five Light Leather, placed at a campfire | Rested XP, so kills | Every other bonus, but adds nothing above 5% rested |
| Well Fed XP Boost | +5% XP from kills for 15 minutes, lost on death | Eat most crafted food for 10 seconds | Kills only | Every other bonus, one food buff at a time |
| Cozy Sleeping Bag | +1% XP per minute of rest, up to 3%, for 2 hours | Quest chain from level 14 | Kills and quests, per the game data | Every other bonus |
| Archmagister's Faceted Pendant | +10% XP from Undead kills for 5 minutes, 6-hour cooldown | Drop from Shade of the Archmage in the City of Dalaran, level 30 | Undead kills only | Every other bonus |
Most crafted food in Forever carries a second effect, Well Fed XP Boost. Eat for at least 10 seconds and your experience from kills rises by 5% for 15 minutes, on top of the normal Well Fed stats. Even Roasted Boar Meat, which gives a single point of Strength, is a full XP food. Not every recipe has it, though: Goblin Deviled Clams only gives Stamina and Spirit. Look for the line about experience from kills in the tooltip before you cook a stack.
The buff fades when you die and works only on kills. Blizzard cut experience from low-level mobs in the open world on purpose, and when players reported it as a bug, a designer pointed to new bonuses like food as the reason. Keeping the buff up is therefore part of leveling at the intended speed, not a min-max trick. Eat every time you sit down to drink. If you skip Cooking, cheap meat from the auction house does the same job, and new Forever recipes such as the Twice-Spiced Raptor Slice, the Breakfast Omelette and the Prehistoric Pulled Raptor cover the whole climb.
The Cozy Sleeping Bag from Season of Discovery is back. Unroll Bag, lie inside, and each minute adds a stack of Well-Rested, 1% bonus experience each, up to three stacks. The buff lasts 2 hours and stays through death, and the bag itself has a one-hour cooldown, so you can always renew it before it ends. Per the game data the buff also applies to quest experience, which makes it the only bonus in this guide that touches quest turn-ins. Do not confuse the Well-Rested buff from the bag with the Well Rested Legacy perk: same name, different effects.
The chain starts at level 14 and crosses both continents, through The Barrens and Westfall, Stonetalon Mountains, Loch Modan and Hillsbrad Foothills, where This Must Be The Place hands over the bag. Done as a separate trip at 14, it took about an hour and a half on each faction in one timed test, which a 3% bonus takes a long time to pay back. Most players fold the steps into their normal route instead, and some wait until about level 20, when travel is safer and faster. The quests themselves give a good chunk of experience along the way, so the detour is not wasted.
Every step of the chain, with coordinates for both factions, is in our WoW Forever Cozy Sleeping Bag guide.
The Archmagister's Faceted Pendant is a level 30 neck that drops from Shade of the Archmage, the last boss of the City of Dalaran. Its use effect raises experience from Undead kills by 10% for 5 minutes, on a 6-hour cooldown. Save it for a big Undead pull or a grinding spot full of Scourge, where five minutes of +10% on top of rested XP are worth the button press.
A few things that sound like XP bonuses are not, or no longer are. Student Fodder gave rested XP in Season of Discovery, but in Forever it only heals and restores mana. None of the six blessings that Mangletooth trades for a Blood Shard in The Barrens adds experience, although Spirit of the Wind speeds up long runs before you have a mount. Legacy rewards are cosmetic, and no heirloom gear, guild perk or Recruit-a-Friend bonus with experience has been announced for Forever.
Almost every bonus in Forever boosts kills only. That matters more than it did in Classic, because Forever moved a large share of leveling experience into quests. There are more than a thousand new quests, dungeon quests pay well above their Classic values, and dungeon mobs give only about 30% of their Classic experience. The table shows which bonus works on which source.
| Source of Experience | Rested XP | Cooking Food | Camp Tent | Cozy Sleeping Bag | Faceted Pendant |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Open-world kills | Double XP | +5% | Refills rested XP | +1% to +3% | +10% on Undead |
| Dungeon kills | Double XP | +5% | Refills rested XP | +1% to +3% | +10% on Undead |
| Quest turn-ins | No bonus, and rest is not used up | No bonus | No bonus | +1% to +3%, per the game data | No bonus |
| Exploring new areas | No bonus, and rest is not used up | No bonus | No bonus | Not confirmed | No bonus |
So there is no reason to save rested XP for quests: turn-ins never touch it. Spend it where you kill the most, in dungeons and grinding spots, and hand quests in whenever they are done. The one habit worth keeping is the reverse: before you burn a big chunk of rested XP, make sure your food buff is up.
In a group, experience from kills is split between members, and rested XP doubles your own share. Quest rewards are never split. If a party member is far above the enemy, nobody in the party gets experience from that kill, rested or not, so a high-level friend cannot carry you through a dungeon on double XP.
For dungeons, the order of the day is to take every quest with you. The first run with all of its quests is one of the best sources of experience in the game, while a repeat run without them pays little even with a full rested bar. Our WoW Forever leveling guide lists every XP change from the beta and gives a go-or-skip verdict for each dungeon from 13 to 60.
Blizzard did not change the experience curve. Each level needs exactly what it did in Classic, from 400 XP for level 2 to 209,800 for the last step from 59 to 60, and 4,084,700 in total. The curve is steep: levels 1 to 30 are only about 12% of the climb, and you pass the halfway point in experience at level 48. That is also why every percent of bonus counts for more the higher you get.
The table splits the climb into bands of ten levels.
| Level Band | XP Needed | Share of the XP From 1 to 60 |
|---|---|---|
| 1–10 | 27,600 | 0.7% |
| 10–20 | 139,600 | 3.4% |
| 20–30 | 331,800 | 8.1% |
| 30–40 | 655,400 | 16.0% |
| 40–50 | 1,151,700 | 28.2% |
| 50–60 | 1,778,600 | 43.5% |
The full table for every level is under the spoiler below.
| Level | XP to the Next Level | Total XP to Reach This Level |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 400 | 0 |
| 2 | 900 | 400 |
| 3 | 1,400 | 1,300 |
| 4 | 2,100 | 2,700 |
| 5 | 2,800 | 4,800 |
| 6 | 3,600 | 7,600 |
| 7 | 4,500 | 11,200 |
| 8 | 5,400 | 15,700 |
| 9 | 6,500 | 21,100 |
| 10 | 7,600 | 27,600 |
| 11 | 8,800 | 35,200 |
| 12 | 10,100 | 44,000 |
| 13 | 11,400 | 54,100 |
| 14 | 12,900 | 65,500 |
| 15 | 14,400 | 78,400 |
| 16 | 16,000 | 92,800 |
| 17 | 17,700 | 108,800 |
| 18 | 19,400 | 126,500 |
| 19 | 21,300 | 145,900 |
| 20 | 23,200 | 167,200 |
| 21 | 25,200 | 190,400 |
| 22 | 27,300 | 215,600 |
| 23 | 29,400 | 242,900 |
| 24 | 31,700 | 272,300 |
| 25 | 34,000 | 304,000 |
| 26 | 36,400 | 338,000 |
| 27 | 38,900 | 374,400 |
| 28 | 41,400 | 413,300 |
| 29 | 44,300 | 454,700 |
| 30 | 47,400 | 499,000 |
| 31 | 50,800 | 546,400 |
| 32 | 54,500 | 597,200 |
| 33 | 58,600 | 651,700 |
| 34 | 62,800 | 710,300 |
| 35 | 67,100 | 773,100 |
| 36 | 71,600 | 840,200 |
| 37 | 76,100 | 911,800 |
| 38 | 80,800 | 987,900 |
| 39 | 85,700 | 1,068,700 |
| 40 | 90,700 | 1,154,400 |
| 41 | 95,800 | 1,245,100 |
| 42 | 101,000 | 1,340,900 |
| 43 | 106,300 | 1,441,900 |
| 44 | 111,800 | 1,548,200 |
| 45 | 117,500 | 1,660,000 |
| 46 | 123,200 | 1,777,500 |
| 47 | 129,100 | 1,900,700 |
| 48 | 135,100 | 2,029,800 |
| 49 | 141,200 | 2,164,900 |
| 50 | 147,500 | 2,306,100 |
| 51 | 153,900 | 2,453,600 |
| 52 | 160,400 | 2,607,500 |
| 53 | 167,100 | 2,767,900 |
| 54 | 173,900 | 2,935,000 |
| 55 | 180,800 | 3,108,900 |
| 56 | 187,900 | 3,289,700 |
| 57 | 195,000 | 3,477,600 |
| 58 | 202,300 | 3,672,600 |
| 59 | 209,800 | 3,874,900 |
| 60 | Maximum level | 4,084,700 |
Many searches for rested XP in WoW Forever are really about RestedXP, a third-party leveling addon named after the bonus. The two have nothing in common except the name. The in-game rested bonus is free for everyone and needs no addon. RestedXP is a step-by-step route with an arrow that tells you which quest to do next. The addon itself is free and comes with free Forever routes to about level 20 on Alliance and 22 on Horde, while the full routes past that point are a paid one-time purchase.
If you want a guided route without installing anything, our WoW Forever leveling guide has a free quest-by-quest route right on the page. It covers both factions, from every starting zone to level 60.
None of these habits takes more than a few seconds, but over 60 levels they add up to hours.
Leveling several characters is where rested XP shines, and our WoW Forever alt leveling guide turns these habits into a full rotation in which almost every dungeon runs on double kill experience.
If you would rather skip the climb on an alt altogether, our WoW Forever leveling boost takes a character to the level you need.
These guides cover the systems behind every bonus in this article.
These are the questions players ask most often about rested XP and experience bonuses in WoW Forever.
A pool of bonus experience your character builds while it rests. Until the pool runs out, every kill gives double experience. It builds fastest when you log out in an inn or a capital city.
In an inn or a capital city, 5% of your current level every 8 hours, about 15% of a level per day. Logged out elsewhere, a quarter of that. Five ranks of Well Rested raise the rate to about 18% of a level per day.
150% of your current level, or one and a half levels, the same as in Classic. It takes about 10 days in an inn to fill. With Well Rested 5/5 the cap is 180% of a level.
No. Quest turn-ins give their normal experience and do not use up your rested pool, so there is no need to save rest for quests. Of all the XP bonuses, only the Cozy Sleeping Bag buff applies to quest experience, per the game data.
Yes. Dungeon kills give double experience while you are rested, just like kills in the open world, which makes a dungeon run the best place to spend a full pool.
Yes. Rested XP, cooking food, the Camp Tent, the Cozy Sleeping Bag and the Archmagister's Faceted Pendant all work at the same time. Only two food buffs, or two uses of the tent within an hour, do not stack.
The addon is free and includes free Forever routes to about level 20 on Alliance and 22 on Horde. The full routes are paid. It has nothing to do with the in-game rested bonus, which works without any addon.
For a free quest-by-quest route with no addon at all, use the interactive route in our WoW Forever leveling guide.
No. In Forever Student Fodder only heals and restores mana. For rested XP outside an inn, use a Camp Tent at a campfire.
For alts and players with little time, yes: it adds about 3% of a level of rest per day and raises the cap to 1.8 levels. For a main you play every day it is mostly the five points that unlock Talented.
