Killing enemies grants experience towards the weapon used for the kill, and all kills grant experience towards your warframe. Missions give bonus experience upon completion equal to ~50% of all normal exp gained through mission (appears to grant slightly above 50% due to rounding up).
Solo Experience
Experience gained by killing enemies is equally distributed between the weapon used to kill the enemy (including Sentinels if it killed the enemy, see section below for more info Sentinel Experience) and your Warframe. If the enemy was killed by an ability, your Warframe will gain all the experience (exceptions are Nyx's Mind Control and Chaos which do not give players any experience and Nekros's Shadows of the Dead which gives the player's Warframe 50% of the kill experience).
Some examples to illustrate how this works:
- Suppose a player kills an enemy that grants 300 experience with a Warframe ability. He will gain 300 Warframe experience.
- Suppose a player kills an enemy that grants 200 experience with his Rifle. He will gain 100 Rifle experience and 100 Warframe experience.
Team Experience
Whenever any member of the team kills an enemy, that member's teammates will still gain full experience from that kill. This experience is divided equally among their Warframe and weapons.
Some examples to illustrate how this works:
- Suppose Player A kills an enemy with his Warframe ability, and the enemy was worth 500 experience.
- His Warframe will receive the full 500 experience, while his weapons receive none.
- His teammates will receive 500 experience each: 125 to their Warframe, 125 to their Primary, 125 to their Secondary and 125 to their Melee.
- Suppose Player A kills an enemy with his Secondary, and the enemy was worth 1000 experience.
- His Warframe and Secondary will receive 500 experience each.
- His teammates, Players B, C and D, will also receive 1000 experience each: 250 to their Warframe, 250 to their Primary, 250 to their Secondary and 250 to their Melee.
Players must be in a certain radius of the kill to receive experience from it (range undetermined for the moment).
Team Bonus End Experience
Bonus experience is gained at the end of a mission completion. It is shown as an additional gold bar on your mission end screen. Quitting a mission revokes your bonus experience. All bonus experience listed below gets a bonus based on number of team mates, solo it appears to be 25%. You gain bonus experience based on mission type, number of additional team members and other attributes:
- Kills: You get a bonus 50% experience from all kills at the end of mission.
- Unspent energy: 1 exp for every 1 unspent energy at the end of the mission.
- Lockdown: 50 exp - normal (25% bonus at end of mission -13 experience).
- Hostage (Mission Type and Secondary objective): 100 exp - normal (25% bonus).
- Number of Team Members: Requires investigation.
- Perfect Run: No deaths? No Detection? Requires investigation.
- Affinity Orbs: Affinity orbs grant you 100 experience to your warframe. It isn't subject to bonus.
- Affinity Booster: This is a store bought booster than doubles ALL affinity gains, including end of match bonus.
- Mastery Rank Test: 50 exp or 100 exp (depends on the test).
Extermination, Assassination, Spy & Sabotage mission types give no bonus experience for completion.
(Still need to check the rest of mission types. There is no penalty (yet) for deaths & revivals in missions. Must check bonus xp for team mate revivals.)
Sentinel Experience
Experience gained by Sentinels functions in a similar way to Warframe and weapons. Sentinels will gain experience from the following sources:
- Precept kills (100% to Sentinel) (needs confirmation)
- Precept casts (100% to Sentinel, sometimes, but not always, indicated by a XXX Power pop-up when a precept is used)
- Sentinel weapon kills (50% to Sentinel weapon, 50% to the Sentinel)
- Ally kills (50% bonus[1] exp to Sentinel and Sentinel's weapon)
Sentinels will not gain experience from the following sources:
- Your Warframe ability kills (100% to your Warframe)
- Your weapon kills (possibly bugged; should give 50% bonus[1] exp to Sentinel and Sentinel's weapon)
[1] this experience is not taken away from what your Warframe and weapons would normally gain from kills, but is simply extra experience.
Enemy Experience
Killing an enemy nets you experience, which is shown on screen as a number underlined in blue. To determine the scaling of enemy experience values, use this formula:
Total_experience = 0.1425 * base_exp * (current level)^0.5 + base_exp
- Base Exp: the base experience value for the enemy.
- Current Level: the level of your target enemy.
As one could already anticipate when seeing the formula, the experience earned when killing high level enemies is quite low in relation to the amount of experience you get for low level kills. For example, killing a level 100 Napalm would grant 1213 exp, which is less than twice the exp you would get from a level 3 Napalm (623). Therefore, "farming" experience is by far easier when killing a lot of low level enemies rather than trying to withstand enormously good ones.
