Gaining Merchant XP Efficiently

A breakdown of affordable and high-speed leveling!

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A very commonly asked question is how to get a lot of merchant XP quickly so I will suggest some methods to level up quickly! I will recommend a cheap method as well as a fast XP method.

How to Gain Merchant XP

This part is simple, you can only gain merchant XP from the following sources:
1. Selling items to customers in your shop (NOT affected by surcharge/discounts)
2. Sales to the king
3. Supplying the ship during the dragon invasion event
4. Overflowing items ONLY if you have the talent Roadside Wholesale (Overflowing without this talent gives 0 XP and overflowing items with this talent only gives you 50% XP)

How Merchant XP from Items work

Each item has their own XP value that is independent of the gold value of the item and you can refer to the full list in Kabam’s Spreadsheet or Kabam’s website.

This XP is unaffected by surcharging/discounting.

How does XP from Enchants Work?

Enchants have their own XP values but is calculated separately from the item. The enchant CANNOT add more XP than the base XP of the item you are enchanting.

If an item has an XP of 100, element has an XP of 80, and spirit has an XP of 80. Would the final result be 200 or 260? The answer is 260. (100 + 80 + 80) [Some people may think that the final amount cannot be more than double of the base XP, which is a valid concern!]

If an item has an XP of 100, element has an XP of 120, and spirit has an XP of 120. Would the final result be 300 or 340? The answer is 300. (100 + 100 + 100)

If an item has an XP of 100, element has an XP of 80, and spirit has an XP of 120. Would the final result be 280 or 300? The answer is 280. (100 + 80 + 100) [The final one is 100 because even though 100 + 80 is 180 and 100 is less than 180, you need to check the base XP of the item which is 100]

This part gets a bit into the formula calculations which have been tested, feel free to skip the math behind it if you’re not interested

Cheap Method

Buy equipment from the market at a small loss, always make sure that your shop is stocked up with items ready to sell and sell them quickly without worrying about discount/surcharging (Feel free to do this if you want). Quantity over quality is the name of the game here.

There are two ways to stock up your shop.
1. Using market requests
2. Purchasing them manually

Personally, I use method 2 but it does get rather tedious from the continuous clicking and some people may not want that. But if you are interested in method 2, continue reading!

Method 1: Market Requests

This method is very straightforward and simple. Use market requests to request for equipment to fill your racks with. Find an item that you’re either requesting for lower than base price or close to it. Make sure that you take taxes into consideration for this!

Whatever tier you request will depend on how much you’re comfortable spending. This could be T1-T3 items with minimal losses if there aren’t any requests for those, T4-T6 items can also be requested for close to base price, T7-T10 items can be requested for below base price during events like lost city of gold.

Method 2: Manual Purchases

Here’s how you want to do this, go to the market and apply rack filters to a specific rack you want to fill up. Sort it by “Gold Cost-” and make sure to filter it to a specific tier. This will ensure that you see the cheapest option available for that tier.

The reason why you want to go through that much trouble to filter it by rack is to ensure that you can find the cheapest option available because the filter doesn’t always work if your query ends up with a lot of results, by filtering it down to the rack and tier it will show the cheapest option available more consistently.

Video demonstration of how you could do this

When you click into an item, you should quickly check the difference between base price and the actual cost of acquiring that item, if you’re not okay with spending that much gold you should go down by a tier or two until you find a tier where you’re comfortable spending that amount of gold for!

Efficient Method

Instead of buying the cheapest item possible for that tier, we prioritize buying premium item lines since they usually have higher base XP than the other items.

You also want to have a food only rack because this will increase the number of sales you can do per hour as well as increase your efficiency/productivity. You can learn more about food shelves in this article!

Another thing you may want to consider is enchanting your equipment with elements/spirits. Something to note is that it may be better to sell these elements/spirits on the market and use that gold to buy higher tier equipment to sell, especially in the case of T14 enchants, but this is only applicable if you want to save gold as well!

These are the items you want to target for each rack type in order of best to worst!

Items to Prioritize

Disclaimer: These are based on T15 baseline equipment numbers when Zephyr is the latest worker to be released (October 2025). These numbers should still be very close for the lower tier items but I hadn’t checked for every tier for every item line.

Vertical Rack: Dual Wields > Quivers/Staves/Axes > Spear > Mace/Swords

Mannequin: Cloak > Helmet > Rogue Hat/Magician Hat
Mannequin: Heavy Armor > Light Armor > Clothes
Mannequin: Heavy Boots/Gauntlet > Shoes/Gloves

Shelves: Aurasongs > Familiars/Idols > Amulets > Spells > Potions > Rings/Herbal Medicine
Shelves: Dessert > Meals

Tables: Wands/Crossbows > Instruments/Guns > Catalysts > Bows > Shields > Daggers

Top 10 Best Lines for XP

Disclaimer: These are based on T15 baseline equipment numbers when Zephyr is the latest worker to be released (October 2025). These numbers should still be very close for the lower tier items but I hadn’t checked for every tier for every item line.

1. Aurasongs (Shelves)
2. Wands/Crossbows (Table)
3. Dual Wields (Vertical Rack)
4. Instrument/Guns (Table)
5. Familiar/Idol (Shelves)
6. Desserts (Shelves)
7. Catalysts (Table)
8. Cloak (Mannequin)
9. Heavy Armor/Quivers/Staves/Axes/Amulets
10. Heavy Armor (Mannequin)

Highest XP Method

Just as a word of warning, this method will be quite costly and requires some preparation. You may think it’s just selling the best items for each rack, that’s half true. You also want to add in a method that I am usually against because it’s usually inefficient, but it’s actually better for this case. That method is called overflowing, but specifically with Roadside wholesale.

Before I get into that, I will first explain the thing you probably already know. Fill out your shop with Aurasongs, wands, and dual wields. You also want to make sure you have a food rack filled with desserts. You can skip out on mannequin since the XP gain from those racks are on the lower end but make sure you have at least 100+ items on display from the other three rack types. You also want to double enchant these items of course. If you can get superior, flawless, epic, or even legendary quality, they’d also increase your XP gains.

Another thing you really want to do is making sure you have the highest tier legendary Aurasong ready to sell to King Reinhold, the XP gain from these is quite substantial! If you have Kaipo, then make it two legendary Aurasongs. You also want to try and bait him with a legendary dessert after his sales to trigger an additional food sale (10% chance)

Time to talk about the overflow method. Usually, overflowing is bad for XP gains because you get 0 XP from them. Getting roadside wholesale pushes this number up to 50% XP from the items being overflown which is still terrible because you get more XP from selling in the shop.

But shop sales are limited. You cannot get more than a certain number of customers every hour. That’s why you will fill your shop with high XP value items to maximize the amount of XP you get from shop sales, while getting additional XP by overflowing equipment bundles from quests with Roadside wholesale. Right before you collect your quests, fill out your inventory so you will overflow everything from quests to get XP there, then continue selling the Aurasongs, wands, and dual wields in your shop for max XP gains. Market selling these items will not give you any XP and only give you gold and if you’re really optimizing this hard for XP, you likely don’t care about gold anyways 😛

Advanced Research

This is probably the most impactful thing you can do to keep levelling up fast once you get into your early 70s but becomes even more prevalent as you progress into your 80s and 90s.

I highly recommend anyone who’s reading this and want to level up at a reasonable pace to at least get 25% or 50% of all the AR nodes. Going from no AR to having half of all lines unlocked up to XP is very impactful and my article on advanced research covers this in more details.

There are 40 equipment lines in total and currently, you can get 36 of those up to T15 which is a total of 360% XP boost for T15 items. Getting half of that (180%) is more than enough for most people and going from no AR to that halfway point is a 180% increase in XP gains while going from the halfway point of 180% up to max AR at 360% is only a 64% increase relative to the halfway point.

Table 1

Table 1 shows a comparison between going from 0 AR to 18 lines of AR to all 36 lines of AR for T15 items in terms of XP gains.

The main thing to note is that with full AR, I am expected to hit level 100 by 20 January 2026 while half AR will take a bit longer at 8 March 2026, but having no AR would push that all the way back to 6 October 2026.

You can see that the difference between 0 and half AR is far bigger than the difference between half and full AR. Again, if you need a guide for advanced research then look no further than my article on it here!

XP Calculation (Math section)

How XP is Calculated

Formula:
Base XP * (1 + Evelyn) * (1 + Guild Boost) * (1 + Advanced Research) * Rarity Multiplier * King Multiplier

Disclaimer: The formula is commutative which means that you can calculate them in any order you want and still get the same results. But I will be referencing this order of operations to keep it consistent. It is also multiplicative.

Based on the many tests that I’ve conducted, XP for this game seems to be calculated multiplicatively. With the calculations that I’ve done, the above formula got me the closest to the actual amount I got in game and is within 0.002% margin of error.

Rarity Multiplier

Example Calculation

Merchant XP: 385
Evelyn: 25%
Guild Boost: 25%
Advanced Research: No, 0 multiplier
Rarity: Normal, 1x multiplier
Sold to King: No, 1x multiplier

Formula
Base XP * (1 + Evelyn) * (1 + Guild Boost) * (1 + Advanced Research) * Rarity Multiplier * King Multiplier

Substitute into Formula
385 * (1 + 0.25) * (1 + 0.25) * (1 + 0) * 1 * 1
= 385 * 1.25 * 1.25 * 1 * 1 * 1
= 481.25 * 1.25 * 1 * 1 * 1
= 601.5625 * 1 * 1 * 1
= 601.5625 * 1 * 1
= 601.5625 * 1
= 601.5625
Let’s say 602 to account for Kabam rounding which nobody (Probably not even Kabam themselves) understands

XP Amounts for the dagger without King
Normal Rarity: 602
Superior Rarity: 752.5
Flawless Rarity: 1,204
Epic Rarity: 1,806
Legendary Rarity: 3,010

XP Amounts for the dagger sold to King

Disclaimer: The reason why you see three numbers is because the XP value you get seems to be affected by chase cards from what I’ve tested. So it’ll be 5x without his card, 6x with his card at level 1, and it should be 7x if you somehow have his card maxed at level 2.

Normal Rarity (Still possible but rare): 3,010/3,612/4,214
Superior Rarity: 3,762.5/4,515/5,267.5
Flawless Rarity: 6,020/7,224/8,428
Epic Rarity: 9,030/10,836/12,642
Legendary Rarity: 15,050/18,060/21,070