Gears 5

Note: You do not receive experience for player-built escape maps.

Update 21/08/21
Once upon a time these three classes were exclusive to Escape. Now they’re available in Horde too. I have updated this guide with extra info.

This is pretty straight forward. Play a game of Escape or Horde and you’ll be rewarded class experience. A quick game of Escape on The Hive on beginner difficulty rewards about 300 class experience and takes about 10-12 minutes (with loading screens).

Playing on a higher difficulty rewards more experience. Finishing The Hive on Insane will reward you with about 1.2k class experience and (if you and you’re colleagues are experienced enough) will take about the same amount of time. The same applies to Horde. Finishing 1-50 on Master will give you about 10k class exp and take roughly two hours.

Here’s the kicker. You do not need to finish the Escape or complete a Horde match to be rewarded experience. You will be rewarded for your time and efforts even if you fail repeatedly and then quit in frustration. USE THIS TO SPEED LEVEL YOUR CLASSES. This is the most efficient way to gain experience as you don’t have to deal with constant loading screens. I’ve done some testing on a few different maps with a 15 minute timer, running as far as I can on Inconceivable, making sure to die without finishing the map, and restarting the act. Doing this method on the Surge net me 7,500 exp (with the Hunters bringing in 6,000 exp).

Experience has been adjusted in Escape and you no longer receive as much for just failing repeatedly. Here are the two best leveling methods:
Escape - The Surge - Insane
Run to the end, close the door. Simple. This is the easiest way for all classes of all levels to level up. Host a public match and other people are bound to join too making this even easier
Horde - Overload - Master
This one is a bit harder and requires a decent team but is easily the most efficient way to level (and is how I got my classes to 20). Place the fabricator on one end of the map and all enemies will spawn on the other end. This will take about 90 mins and (with boost) will get you 20k class exp. Even a low level class can perform well with a tri shot.

Class experience for levels is as follows:
Level 1 - 100 exp
Level 2 - 500 exp
Level 3 - 1,000 exp
Level 4 - 1,500 exp
Level 5 - 2,000 exp
Level 6 - 2,500 exp
Level 7 - 3,000 exp
Level 8 - 3,500 exp
Level 9 - 4,000 exp
Level 10 - 6,000 exp
Level 11 - 8,000 exp
Level 12 - 10,000 exp
Level 13 - 12,000 exp
Level 14 - 15,000 exp

You can continue levelling up after this point.
Level 15 - 20,000 exp
Level 16 - 40,000 exp
Level 17 - 60,000 exp
Level 18 - 80,000 exp
Level 19 - 100,000 exp
Max Level is 20

That’s a total of 69,100 experience to get to level 15. That’s 139 runs of The Hive on beginner, which at 12 mins a run will take about 28 hours per class. Based on that, I would highly recommend using the method above, which can get you to level 15 in a matter of hours :)

Good luck, Hivebusters :)

Go to Escape>Custom>Host Private>Select "The Surge" as your Hive and enable the following mutators:

- More Filler Enemies
- More Health
- More Drones
- More Pouncers
- Ironman

If you don't have the following mutators unlocked you can simply start up the hive with ONE mutator to unlock the mutator to the right of it.

Example: Assume you only have the "Starter Modifiers" unlocked which are:

- More Filler Enemies
- More Lethal
- More Health

Only select More Health. Beat the hive with this mutator active and you will unlock the first Advance Modifier "More Scions" do this until you unlock Ironman.


If you're interested in other Escape Guides checkout my playlist here:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLwVcoFJi_zZLFDnTshMI4...