After seeing the experience chart, one realizes that players have a long way to go to max out a job's level, especially if character death factor in. Next, the player needs to understand about gaining experience. There are many nuances to understanding experience gain, such as what kind experience is gained for solo combat, party combat, or in skill chains. Each will be discussed in some detail, followed by tables and formulas to help understand.

   The first type of experience to learn about is solo experience. This experience is gained by a character when they are alone, either not in a party or in a party but none of the members are in the same zone. It is base experience, with little in the way of multipliers. One point to be clear on is that the game bases its experience on fights conned (check) as Even Match, with the amount of 100 Exp. That is not to say that an 'Even Match' even is an even match. In order for a creature to be considered an 'Even Match', it must be 2 levels higher than the character. When you carry this down the line, you can con (check) a creature that may say it is easier than it actually is, and some 'Decent Challenge' monsters might offer more of a challenge than some characters can stand. The table for experience gain at different challenge levels is defined below. Please note the table is listed on the Even Match basis of level difference, not the actual level difference.

   As a character levels higher and higher, the amount of experience earned decreases, level difference seems to make less and less impact. Time to complete an exp chain increases, but at that point the time required to defeat a monster also goes up. It balances out that each character gets less and less experience, while requiring more and more to level. This makes leveling a job past level 50 an arduous task, and beyond 60 only for the steadfast. Of course, by the time you get to that point, you will have to eventually join a party, so let's give a minute to party experience.

   Experience in a party works very similar to experience solo, as the more difficult the fight becomes, the more experience is earned for the fight. At the same time, however, because there are more players contributing to the fight, the monsters become easier to defeat, so less experience is earned than if the character were to solo for experience. On the following table, take the experience modifier and multiply it by the experience based according to the highest level member of the party, then divide by the number of members in the party to get the final experience awarded. In the formulas, always round down, as no fractions of experience are awarded. (For experience in an alliance, experience is always multiplied times 1.85 and divided by the number of members) Again, no member can ever get more than 200 exp. for one battle (Note: Rule Change in place allows for exp up to 350 for a single battle and up to 525 from chain exp, but only after reaching level 55).

   A disorganized party can make experience gain messy as well, because other factors take play as well, such as penalties to experience for level difference, as well as the difficulty for base experience being based off of cons of Even Match to the highest level character in the party. This may not seem like much for a party of all the same level characters with one team member much lower than the others, but can be crippling for a party of all members the same level with one team member much higher than the others. Fights in a disorganized experience party can be very difficult fights with little or no experience gain.

    The formula for experience gained when there is a level difference in the party is either one of the following. The first formula is if there is a level 51 or greater level member of the party, or if the level difference in the party is 8 levels or more. The second formula should apply to all other cases. The first of the two formulas always takes precedence if the two conditions (level 51+ or 8 levels of difference) apply.

   As you can see with the examples, it doesn't pay to be in an experience party with higher level characters, but the closer you are to the highest level character in the group, the closer to maximum experience you gain.

   In addition to penalties for parties, there are other forms of penalties to experience. The known experience penalties are listed for those below.