So eight levels to earn some credits seems real nice at first, but as the levels are going up it seems to require more time for the same reward?
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Those free to play credits are just too valuable to keep giving away. We are lucky that we can even regularly get them for a few months, if you ask me. We should be grateful.
Edit: This looks to be a top search result via Bing when searching for “how much xp needed to reach level 20”, so I’ll note that everything below the bar has mostly changed since Season 18 (Aug 2025).
Regarding the original comment in this thread, it is now 4 progression levels for the weekly challenge, not 8, and you no longer earn progression levels for Game Modes or Roles, so it’s exclusively through Hero levels.
Additionally, it’s much simpler to calculate Hero level experience. It now takes 1 minute (60 seconds) to earn 100xp, regardless of game mode.
It is still roughly 20 hours to reach level 20 for any given hero, but specific values for each level have not been fully verified. This is what I have gathered, so far:
| Hero Level | XP req to reach next Level |
|---|---|
| 1 | 500 |
| 2 | 1000 |
| 3 | 2000 |
| 4 | 3000 |
| 5 | 3000 |
| 6 | 4000 |
In addition, it looks like levels 16-19 are each 9500xp, but I’m not as certain of those values as I am with the first 6 levels.
Once you reach Hero level 20 on a hero, it’s a flat 10,000xp to gain a level, meaning it takes 100 mins of play time to gain a level after 20, and therefore 400 mins of play time to complete the weekly challenge once all of the heroes you play are level 20.
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Below is the unedited comment, which still remains accurate as how the Progression 1.0 system measured Account levels between Seasons 6-17 (Aug 2023 - Aug 2025).
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There was a post on this way back, tracking how the whole progression system works. I can’t find it now, but here are the key points:
- Roughly 70% of Hero progression levels is earned through the “Time Played” sub-badge, which is 20 mins (1200 seconds) of in-match play time. The hero sub-badges earn the following xp per level:
- Time Played - 5600xp
- Wins - 1200xp
- All others - 200xp
- The maximum xp needed to level up a hero is 60,000xp, and you hit that cap once the hero hits level 20.
- The amount of xp to go from 1 to 20 (478,000) is roughly the same as going from 20 to 28 (480,000)
- It takes roughly 2.5 hours of in game time (7-8 Time Played sub-badges) to gain 60,000xp for a level.
There are some other minor things, like how Role progression levels and Game Mode progression levels don’t ramp up their max xp; their first level already requires 60,000xp. Also, Game Mode “Time Played” sub-badges yield more xp than the other progression levels (6400 instead of 5600).
But generally speaking, as all of your heroes eventually creep past level 20, you’ll need to put in an average of roughly 10 hours of in-match time to gain 4 hero levels and likely a couple role and game mode progression levels to make up the other 4. It will ebb and flow quite a bit, depending on the heroes and game modes played, but I think 8-10 hours per week will be the average that consistently gets the weekly challenge done.
For once, this is something that favors folks who concentrate on only a small handful of heroes. You gain a couple levels through your mains, and then whenever you’re in a pinch to get the weekly in time, you can grab a low level hero for a couple quick levels. It’s a good thing competitive mystery heroes isn’t live, or they’d all be growing more uniformly.
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You’re surprised? This is the same studio who released a diablo patch that slowed exp. Expect nothing but scummy practices.
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