Assassin's Creed Valhalla: How to Level up Fast and Earn XP

Assassin’s Creed Valhalla: How to level up fast and earn XP

By Jesse Lennox November 13, 2020

Whether you’re progressing through the main story, exploring the open world, or just have your eye on a new skill you want to unlock, there will come a point in Assassin’s Creed Valhalla where you need to level up to reach your goal. You can earn XP by doing basically anything in the game, from completing quests to killing wildlife, but the amount you get will differ drastically.

The leveling system in Valhalla works a bit differently than Odyssey and Origins, with levels and power levels being tracked separately, but the concept is always the same. Here are the best ways you can level up in a hurry in Assassin’s Creed Valhalla.

The fastest ways to earn XP in Assassin’s Creed Valhalla

The leveling system in Valhalla is broken down into two parts: Your level and your power level. You earn levels by gain XP, as you would expect, and each level grants you two skill points to spend on new skills and abilities through the skill tree, which in turn increases your power level. Simply put, each level you gain increases your power level by two. While you will also need to keep your armor and weapons up to snuff if you want to stay competitive with the higher leveled areas and missions, your power level is what you should be focusing on.

Story quests

As is the case in just about every RPG, the main story missions are jam-packed with XP to incentivize you to keep on the narrative track. In Valhalla, they also want to make sure you are gaining enough, or close to enough, XP just through one story mission to be able to take on the next right after. These missions are longer than any other, with more enemies to kill along the way, easily making them the most efficient form of XP grinding for the majority of the game. And because this story is quite beefy, somewhere around or above 50 hours for some players, you shouldn’t be lacking in them for quite a while.

World events

These blue markers placed on your map appear in all the regions you’ve unlocked and explore during the campaign. These are effectively your side quests, but are still very much worth doing. Not only do they give you a good reward of XP, but also have their own mini-narratives that you’ll likely be intrigued enough to see through just to see how it all wraps up. These events are perfect if you find yourself somewhere around halfway to your next level and you just want to get that one new skill before locking yourself into a more lengthy story mission.

Standing stones are one of the blue marker types you can find, and are visual puzzles that instantly reward you with a skill point. Because there are so few of these, you should absolutely prioritize them whenever they appear. They may be a little tricky to solve at times, but there’s no faster way to earn an immediate skill point than these.

Raids

Let’s face it, you’re a Viking and you came here to raid and murder. Sure, you’re not painted in quite so bad a light, but raiding is still one of the most fun ways to earn XP in the game. Plus, raids are good for way more than just soaking up XP as you slash and burn your way across the countryside, but also reward you with essential materials you need to upgrade your settlement. You will find raids on the map by looking for the pair of crossed red axes, but make sure you take your longboat to them, or call it in when you get there. Raids cannot be started on foot. Between the XP you get from kills, looting all the cargo containers, and payout for finishing the raid itself, this is a perfect way to level up in a hurry.

Contracts

Whenever you’re back at your settlement, give Reda and his pals a visit to pick up some contracts. These are nice and quick missions that shouldn’t tax you too much, and give a fair amount of XP for turning them in. You should also be doing these for the Opals you earn as well, which you need to purchase all the awesome cosmetic items and decorations like tattoos, mounts, and powerful weapons that refresh on daily and weekly timers.

Wealth and artifacts

These are smaller, bite-sized activities littered across your map. They may not seem worth it at first glance, at least compared to how much XP a story or world event will give you, but can add up quickly. As stated, most will appear on your world map naturally, but you can also purchase maps from the Cartographer in your camp to reveal them for you.

Wealth will appear as golden map markers that can be tricky to track down. They’re fairly well hidden, but there are tons of them of various types to discover. Just like the raids, you will also get additional rewards for finding them besides the XP.

Artifacts are the main collectible of sorts in Valhalla. There are a daunting 161 in the game to find scattered around each region. Most have around 10 or more, and spending a little time running around and picking them up can be a nice, relaxing way to tip your XP bar over to the next level.

Creative kills

The last tip to help squeeze out some extra XP to level you up over the course of everything you do in the game is to flex your assassin’s muscles and vary up your killing styles. Stealth kills all give more XP than when you run in, swords and axes swinging. More than that, though, you should also take advantage of every chance you can to kill enemies with the environment. Blowing up an explosive barrel, for instance, is worth almost four times as much as a stealth assassination. These are all tiny increments in the big picture, but over the course of a game as long as this one can mean the difference between quite a few levels.