Pay Day 2 Pro Job vs Difficulty for experience

payday-2

In Pay Day 2 do you get more experience for doing a heist on a higher difficulty (say very hard) then doing the same heist as a Pro Job on a lower difficulty (say hard)? Does the number of days a heist is matter in this context?

Best Answer

It depends on the actual job itself.

In most cases, doing a Pro Job on Hard will reward comparable (if not more) XP to doing the non-Pro Job version on Very Hard. This has to do with the base XP of the job (which, in the older versions of the game prior to the addition of Death Wish, was derived from the Pay Grade [white stars] on the contract). The notable exception here is Bank Heist, due to the Gold variant (which is Pro Job Only) having the same base XP as the non-Pro variants and Bank Heist [PRO] not having a significantly higher base XP reward to deal with the difference in Risk Multipliers.

The reason why this is the case is that the final XP is determined by a few multipliers, the main ones relevant to the question at hand being the Risk multiplier and, for multi-day jobs, the day multiplier (which is HIGHER for Pro Jobs due to the no restart limitation). The Risk multipliers are 2x, 5x, 10x, and 13x for Hard, Very Hard, Overkill and Death Wish (respectively). For multiday jobs, the day multipliers are 2x for day 2 and 3x for day 3 on a non-pro job, while pro jobs get 2.5x and 5x, respectively.

A much-more-in-depth explanation of how the XP multipliers work was posted over at reddit.