If you’ve played Destiny 2 in the Shadowkeep/Season of the Undying era, you know how important XP is now. Previously, all you needed XP for was getting Bright Engrams every few levels. Now? XP is how you rank up both the season rank battle pass system for extra loot and materials, and also how you level your Artifact which will give you more power as you hit certain XP thresholds for the season.
While you can earn XP from just running activities and playing content as usual, it’s pretty clear that Bungie has made bounties a huge source of XP in this new era. Usually when you rank up, it’s because you’ve been turning in a bunch of bounties at once and those all add up to big increases.
As such, it’s probably good to know how much XP bounties are giving you, because they don’t actually say on the rewards description.
I must give full credit to this spreadsheet from redditor u/SquishyBruiser who has done a lot of bounty testing so far. I have also tried to bolster his findings a bit by running some weekly bounties and adding that data, which he doesn’t have on this list yet. So when our powers combine, we have a list of bounty XP that’s decently comprehensive, though not every blank is filled in yet.
I am going to list the “base” XP values here just for simplicity’s sake. But keep in mind there are stacking bonuses like ghost XP, season pass XP or fireteam XP that can change these numbers. I turned in a 12,000 XP weekly bounty, for instance, which instead became 16,896 XP with various bonuses all added together. But this is the floor, and it just gives you a general sense of scale.
Eris Daily Bounties – 6000 XP
Eris Repeatable Bounties – 4000 XP
Eris Weekly Bounties – 12000 XP
Lectern Daily Bounties – 6000 XP
Lectern Repeatable Bounties – 4000 XP
Lectern Weekly Bounties – 12000 XP
Ikora Vex Daily Bounties – 6000 XP
Ikora Vex Weekly Bounties – 12000 XP
EDZ, Titan, Io, Nessus, Mercury, Mars Daily Planetary Bounties – 6000 XP
Tangled Shore, Dreaming City Daily Planetary Bounties – 1000 XP
Spider Wanted Bounties – 3000 XP
Petra Challenge Bounty – 2000 XP
Petra Ascendant/War Bounties – 3000 XP
Strike Daily Bounties – 6000 XP
Strike Repeatable Bounties – 4000 XP
Strike Weekly Bounties – 12000 XP
Crucible Daily Bounties – 6000 XP
Crucible Repeatable Bounties – 4000 XP
Crucible Weekly Bounties – 12000 XP
Gambit Daily Bounties – 6000 XP
Gambit Civic Duty Daily Bounties – 1000 XP
Gambit Repeatable Bounties – 4000 XP
Gambit Weekly Bounties – 12000 XP
Gunsmith Daily Bounties – 6000 XP
Gunsmith Weekly Bounties – 12000 XP
Ada-1 Daily Bounties – 2000 XP
Ada-1 Rare Bounties – 6000 XP
Daily Werner Bounties – 1000 XP
Werner Chest Bounties – 3000 XP
Alright I think there are a few missing here but that’s almost all of them.
Some takeways here would be that Bungie is really downplaying Forsaken and Annual Pass Year 2 content, as almost all those bounties give less than both new Shadowkeep content and New Light content. Obviously you want to be doing all your weeklies for the biggest XP gains, but a surprising source of XP can be daily planetary bounties as many of those can be done in mere minutes, and that’s 18,000 XP at baseline per planet.
I have seen some people grinding out repeatable bounties on the moon or in strikes or what not, which sure, is possible, but those bounties A) usually require more work than a normal daily bounty (20 kills vs. 10 kills with something, for instance), and from this chart we can see that they actually give out less XP as well. So while you can use those to grind, it’s not as efficient as just waiting for normal daily bounty resets which will be easier and give out more XP.
Anyway, hope this helps you in your grind planning. Thanks to Squishy Bruiser for the table, and if you have any different values or any bounties we’re missing here, feel free to let me know on Twitter