Rested Experience

Rested experience is a bonus that builds up while a character is logged out or resting in an inn or city, and doubles the experience they earn from killing monsters until it runs out. Blizzard designed it to help players with less time to play keep up, without punishing those who played more.

How it works

A character is either "Rested" or "Normal". While rested, every monster killed gives twice its usual experience, and the extra half is taken from the rested pool. When the pool is empty the character goes back to Normal and earns the usual amount. Experience from quests and exploring new areas is never doubled and does not use up the pool.

The experience bar shows the pool directly. A rested character's bar is blue instead of purple, and a small marker sits ahead of the current experience, showing where the bonus will run out. The character portrait also changes: a resting character has a small "zzz" beside their level.

Building up rest

A character gains rest in two ways:

• Resting in an inn or city. Standing in an inn, or anywhere in a capital city such as Stormwind City, Ironforge, Orgrimmar or Undercity, marks the character as resting. Logging out there earns rest at the full rate: 5% of a level's experience every eight hours.
• Logging out elsewhere. A character logged out in the wild earns rest at a quarter of that rate.

The pool caps at one and a half levels' worth of experience, which takes about ten days of logging out in an inn. Because the amount is a share of the current level, a level 55 character earns far more raw experience while resting than a level 15 one, but it takes the same time to fill.

Innkeepers such as Innkeeper Farley in Goldshire, Innkeeper Gryshka in Orgrimmar and Innkeeper Firebrew in Ironforge are where players also set their Hearthstone, so the habit of logging out at an inn became part of the routine: finish the evening's quests, hearth home, and log out there to wake up rested.

Playing with rest

Rest changed how many players leveled. A player who logged in a few nights a week could spend most of each session rested, killing monsters at double speed, while a player who played for twelve hours straight used up their pool in the first hour or two. Players with several characters often rotated between them, leveling one while the others rested.

Some habits followed from the rules:

• Players saved rested experience for grinding monsters rather than turning in quests, since quests did not use it up.
• Groups farming a dungeon over and over noticed the difference between rested members, who gained levels faster, and those who were not.
• Leveling guides often suggested ending each session in an inn or city, even if it meant a short walk, because the full rate was four times the rate in the wild.

History

Rested experience has been in World of Warcraft since before launch. In the beta it was paired with a second state, "Tired", in which characters played for too long earned less experience. Players disliked the idea of being penalized for playing, so Blizzard turned the same system around and presented it as a bonus for time away instead. The arithmetic was similar, but the change in framing made the system popular. The mechanic has stayed in the game ever since, with only small changes in later expansions.

Sources

• Rest on Warcraft Wiki
• Experience on Warcraft Wiki