Every character climbs through 8 ranks on the way from Peasant to Wraithking, on a climb counter (not lifetime XP, which never resets) built from actions, heists, jailbreak rescues, quests, missions, and more. Reaching Wraithking at 2,600,000 XP unlocks every city, every action, and every casino tier in the game, and opens the door to Ascension, a prestige system that resets that climb counter for permanent, stacking power. The climb is deliberately steep: each rank asks for more total XP than every rank before it combined, so the later stretches take real, sustained play.
A brand new character's first 10 attempts, counted from their own action log, cannot land them in jail, win or lose, so there is room to learn what an action costs and pays before the game starts holding jail risk against you. From there, the fastest way to climb is simply working through the cheapest, safest actions available in Ashenvale and reinvesting the gold into gear as soon as a rarity tier is affordable.
Rank is not just a number on the profile card, it is the single gate behind almost everything else in the game, though not every system reads it the same way. Cities, actions, and heists all check your CURRENT (live) rank, so they lock again if that rank ever drops. Gear and material rarity, the Black Market, the Reliquary, crafting, and casino purchases instead check the HIGHEST rank you have ever reached, which never drops. For a first climb to the top the two amount to the same thing, which is what the list below (cross-referenced from each system's own rank requirement) shows; see "Ascension and your rank" below for the one time the two actually diverge.
Reaching Rank 8, Wraithking, opens Ascension: a prestige reset that trades your current rank for permanent, stacking power. That reset genuinely sends your live rank back to Rank 1, reborn as a Peasant, so cities, actions, and heists all re-lock and have to be re-climbed exactly like a brand new character's. What does NOT re-lock is everything gated on your highest-ever rank instead: gear and material rarity, the Black Market, the Reliquary, crafting, and every casino you can already buy stay unlocked straight through the reset, even while you are re-climbing the map from Rank 1.
Ascension also makes the climb itself steeper: every rank threshold on this page rises by 50% of its base value per completed Ascension. A once-ascended character needs 3,900,000 XP to reach Wraithking again, not the base 2,600,000 shown above, and every other rank threshold scales by the same factor.
XP toward your climb comes from every action you succeed at, with the riskier, higher-rank deeds paying far more per attempt, a share of every completed heist, a successful jailbreak rescue (see NPC Opponents), and further sources outside this wiki's catalog pages: quests, missions, the Stables, and Bust Party runs all pay it too. There is no separate way to buy rank directly: it is always a byproduct of playing, just from more places than the solo action grind alone.
The curve steepens hard at the top: the jump from Shadowblade to Wraithking alone demands 1,900,000 XP, roughly 2.7x more than every earlier rank-up combined. Reaching Rank 8 is a long-haul goal, not a weekend project, while the earlier ranks are comparatively quick by design so a new character unlocks real content fast.
Everything on this page is character rank, the track that gates cities, actions, heists, gear rarity, casinos, and the Black Market. Shadowrealm also tracks a completely separate jailbreak rank for how many rescues a character has pulled off, with its own crime-themed titles and its own thresholds. The two tracks are not as walled off from each other as they might look, though: a successful jailbreak rescue pays character XP alongside its own jailbreak-rank XP, so grinding rescues does feed your character rank climb too. What stays confined to the jailbreak system is its own title track and its rescue-streak bonus, which boosts jailbreak gold and XP but never character XP.