WoW Classic Guide to Rested Experience

World of Warcraft’s rest system is an innovative way to help the more casual or alt-addicted player keep up with the virtual Joneses. To use it to its full potential, you’ll have to play a few alts or have a lifestyle that takes you away from your gaming for a couple weeks at a time, like British super spy or hippy whaleboat vandal.

How to accumulate rested bonus.

Any time a character is logged out, it’s at rest. There are, however, two kinds of rest. There’s normal rest that comes from being logged out in the wild and accelerated rest that comes from being logged out in an inn or capital city. The latter accumulates rest 4 times faster than the former. From here on out, this faster rest state will be referred to as “rest”, thereby assuming that you always log out in an inn or capital. You have a Hearthstone for a reason! There are 2 easy ways to tell if you’re in the accelerated rest state. First of all, your character’s portrait in the upper-left will flash yellow. Secondly, if you try to log out in an area other than an inn or capital, you’ll have to wait 20 seconds to log as opposed to the immediate logging of a resting character.

Great. You’re rested. So what? If you mouse over the XP bar at the bottom of the screen, you’ll see that you will now get 200% XP from your kills! That is, XP received via exploration or quest rewards will NOT count against your bonus, which is a good thing. Read further to see how you can maximize this bonus.

The math behind rested experience.

Your XP bar is split into 20 sections commonly referred to as “bubbles”. According to Blizzard, it takes 10 hours to fill up one of these bubbles with rest. You can tell how much rest you have stored up by looking at the XP bar. Any blue section is under the rest bonus. The remaining purple part is not. Filling one bubble requires 10 hours in the accelerated rest state. So, if you play for 4 hours at a time tonight, let’s say from 8PM to midnight, when you log in tomorrow, 2 bubbles (or 10% of the level) will be under the rest bonus. The maximum bonus is 30 bubbles, or 1.5 levels. At 10 hours per bubble, it takes 300 hours or 12.5 days to maximize the rest on any one character. While this only reduces the time it takes to get from level 10 to level 11 by 20 minutes or so, it may reduce the time it takes to get from 59 to 60 by several days! That said, once you’re level 60, rest is completely irrelevant. Following are the XP tables from 1 to 60. These are derived from the 3 tiers of XP progression, 1-29, the anomalies at 30 and 31, and 32-60.

Disregarding exploration XP, it’s now important to understand what part rest and XP via kills, or “grind XP” will play in your leveling procedure. Below are the rough averages of quest XP, based on the highest possible XP yields at their respective levels:

As you can see, less and less of your leveling will come from quests, so grinding becomes that much more important later on. Why get half the XP you could be getting from it without using up your rest bonus?

The importance of alts.

WoW is very alt-friendly. Not only can you have 10 characters on the same realm, you can be storing up rest on them as soon as you get to your first inn! Doing so should take no more than 90 minutes (under 50 if you’ve done the same starting zone a few times), so many people roll multiple alts, stashing them in inns at level 5, and starting their rotation. It takes a little planning and discipline, but proper alt play is the cornerstone for many people’s playstyle.

Let’s say you have your main and 3 alts. You play your main every other night and one alt on each in-between night, leaving one night off per week. Your main will level three times faster than any of the 3 alts, right? Wrong! Those alts, being played only one night a week are accruing enough XP to level 82% of a level under the rest bonus. Your main, taking off only 4 nights a week, is getting only 46% of a level per week. “Why take this approach? It takes longer to get that main to 60!” Yes, it does. Personally, I’m forcing myself to stunt my leveling based on the fact that you’re 60 for a virtual eternity compared to the other 59 levels. Playing multiple alts allows for the following:

• Play multiple classes. For the PvP’ers, there’s no better way to learn what makes your opponent tick than to play as your opponent. PvE’ers will want to experience every class quest and explore every part of how their class can be utilized in groups. Every class has several “oh, MAN I wish I could do that” abilities that every other class envies.
• Play multiple races. Don’t rob yourself and only experience one of the games’ races. You’re doing yourself a great disservice. Get under the skin of a Dwarf or Forsaken and see what it’s like in the other guys’ shoes…or bones, as the case may be.
• Play less zones. You could level from 30- 40 in Stranglethorn Vale, Desolace, Arathi Highlands, Dustwallow March, Swamp of Sorrows, Thousand Needles, and Duskwood, OR you could do it in just 1 or 2 of those zones. The more that you leave undiscovered for your other alts, the more fun you’ll have mapping out who goes where and in the process, experience more quests and content!
• Use all of the tradeskills. Most of the crafting Professions use by-products of others. Using alts to perform those services saves money in the long run, but more importantly, gives the satisfaction of crafting something yourself. Player-to-player commerce is a good thing, but it’s tough to beat the synergy that you can have with multiple crafting characters.

And while you’re relishing all of the above, you can be avoiding those dreaded words, “You feel normal.”