[DrKvothe]

I've been playing on Red lately, and it's reinforced my perspective on this issue. Exp bonus/penalty is largely irrelevant to your leveling rate.

Grouped: If you're grouped, your exp modifier basically doesn't matter. Collectively, a party full of bad exp modifiers is pretty noticeable, but YOUR choice of iksar vs whatever won't be noticeable. 5 rangers + iksar necro is gonna be essentially the same as 5 rangers + gnome necro.

Solo: If you only attempt very safe content where number of kills is limited by respawn timer only (there's plenty of afk camps like this), yes, your exp bonus will matter. If you're doing something more daring, the time you'll save recovering from a near wipe or that extra kill you're able to get every so often make a difference to largely offset the exp bonus. Either way, if you focus, play well, and work hard at it, you'll level fast. The biggest hindrances to leveling are ADHD, alting, sitting in EC tunnel.

Now let's say that despite all of those things that somewhat offset the 20% exp penalty, it takes a non-iksar 200 hours to get to 60 and an iksar 210 hours to get to 60 (just making up numbers). I would prefer to spend 210 hours on a noticeably stronger character than 200 hours with a noticeably inferior one.