Comparing XP Grinds in Elder Scrolls Online

Welcome to my ESO XP/CP Grind Comparison.

Here I look at several ways to grind xp such as Dolmens, overland mobs,
arenas and more to get a better idea of what the best places to grind xp is for you.

Please keep in mind that the amount of xp you gain in a certain amount of time can
vary greatly based on how quickly you can kill mobs, what your mount speed is and
even what motifs you know and how much gold you have to spend. I will try to explain
which types of grinds.

I main a healer, I’m an average dps and I have not optimized my builds for farming xp
so your numbers may vary based on how well you can kill mobs and what kind of experience
boosts you have active.

I am doing this during the anniversary event which gives me a 100% xp boost, I am
also using 150% xp scrolls in all comparisons and I am using a full training set
with Julianos and New Moon Acolyte.

I am using my templar and mostly use wall of elements, puncturing sweep and iluminus
shards to kill adds. I also have silver leash to pull ads in and Equilibrium to bring
my health down quicker when needed.

Alik’r Desert Dolmen Farming

First up is Dolmens in Alikir Desert, this is pretty much the easiest xp grinds as there
is almost always someone doing these and you only need to tag the mobs to get xp.

There is almost always a group to join if you need a wayshire but otherwise there is really no need,
just go there and start attacking things. You can also do these to level
fighters guild which is a nice bonus. However with my gear setup and buffs Dolmens come in at
an average of around 800k xp per hour.

Spellscar

Next I looked at an area in Craglorn called Spellscar. This area can vary a bit if there are too
many others around or if you are alone. Typically if there are more than 4 other players running
around killing enemies you will start losing a lot of xp due to waiting for enemies to spawn.
When there was less than 4 other players I could maintain a fairly consisten rate of 1.5 to 2 million
xp per hour. Which is double what you might expect from Dolmens.

Skyreach Catacombs

Next I looked at another place in Craglorn called Skyreach Catacombs. This is an instance which
you can reset after every run and you are therefore also guaranteed to be alone. However it is hard
to solo this and even as a group it can be difficult to be efficent. I personally averaged around
1.5 million xp per hour doing this solo but I also tried it grouped with a player with a more
optimized build and managed to do closer to 3 million xp per hour. Depending on your dps and
if you are doing the xp grind together with someone it may affect the xp per hour here. The most optimal
run I tried was to go right, kill all the enemies on the right side. Skip the pink ghosts and the chest in the
middle and then kill all the enemies on the left sight and then use porting out, resetting and repeating the same run. A full run should take less than 2 minutes to complete for you to get close to the 3 million xp per hour mark.

Daily Random Dungeons

Next I looked at daily random dungeons. The idea here is that you can get the buff and use your xp scrolls on several alts and then log on daily just to get the daily xp bonus during the event. Testing this could vary a lot depending on the queue time, group and what dungeon you end up getting. If you are queueing on your own I would estimate around 2 million xp per hour. If you can get a premade group going with a low level player to guarantee both an easier dungeon and instant queue you can manage to push the xp closer to 7 or 8 million xp per hour.

Blackrose Prison

Next I tried Blackrose Prison. During my testing we found that doing round 2 and dying on the last wave and repeating the round over and over again gave us the most experience. I averaged about 4.5 million xp per hour but there was a lot of optimization that could be done here. Using the ressurect synergy to get the round to restart quicker was something that I didn’t do during testing and having higher dps would also help a lot. This grind seems best suited for 2 players and can be fairly hard to pull off if you are new to the game. Soloing blackrose prison only gave me about 2 million xp per hour since it takes much longer to kill things and to reset the round. You will also be spending some gold on repair kits and possibly soul gems if you use this method.

Dragonstar Arena

As a comparison I also tried dragonstar arena as a solo duo and as a group of 4. But no matter what I did it was hard to average higher than 1.3 million xp per hour. This is mainly due to how long the announcer is talking between rounds.

Maelstrom Arena

I also tried Malestrom arena, here I also averaged around 1.2 or 1.3 million xp per hour.

Overland Mob Farm

I saw a lot of videos claiming that overland mobs gave really good areas so I tried this as well. The best areas I could find still gave me around 2 million xp per hour if I was alone. If another player was in the area my xp per hour would drop a lot.

World Bosses

I also spent some time killing world bosses, this was similar to overland mobs giving around 2 million xp per hour in a best case scenario. If the bosses were harder or if there were other groups killing the bosses before you could get to them would reduce the xp per hour a lot.

Master Writs

Then I tried master writs, and this is really hard to test. Here I turn in 4 of them very quickly granting me over 100k xp in about 10 seconds which gives a ridiculous estimate of 47 million xp per hour which sounds great but there is a problem with that estimate. It does not take into account the time you spent crafting the items needed for the writs. Maybe you also spent time doing daily writs or buying the master writs from traders. What if you needed to get some materials or a motif that was missing?

Its very difficult to estimate. I spent an hour running back and forth crafting 2-3 writs per time and running back and turning them in just to see what my rate would be and I land at around 500k xp per hour which isn’t great. However with an addon like writworthy I could have queued up every writ I had, crafted them all at once and then gone to turn them in. I am also a bit new to the game and lack a lot of motifs other players might have. I think an experienced crafter could save up a lot of master writs and get a lot of xp during an xp bonus event but its very hard to give a good estimate as to how much xp per hour you could expect from doing so.

Questing

Finally I tried questing. I actually forgot about this during the xp event and had to try it without the 100% xp buff but I kept everything else the same. I was pleasantly surprised to see that as I was questing for over 30 minutes I was averaging around 1.5 million xp per hour, with the 100% buff this amount would probably be over 2 million xp per hour. This can of course depend on a lot of different factors like mount speed, dps, known wayshires and more. I had the highest mount speed and knew nearby wayshires which
saves a lot of time. I also skipped through some of the dialogue in quests as I was repeating quests I had done previously.

Summary

Below is a table outlining the different xp grinds and how much XP per hour they earn.