Its for your physical level. You have two things you level up. Your Class Skill (The real thing most people want to level up) is tied to the weapon at hand and fatigue will not carry over from class to class. Your physical EXP, however, is something you constantly gain on all classes and it defines your attribue and point allotment. Basically Experience Points is physical, Skill Points are classes. Skill does not transfer between classes, Physical does because its your all encompassing level point. This is supposed to be adjusted to have a much bigger cap then class EXP does but it was not changed in closed beta, this they said will be changed.
Also I too would like to see them change the system to something that sounds more 'positive'. They do the WoW approach in beta and say rested = 200 and normal =100% and then just double the amount of EXP you need to get to level (which I might add WoW did) then it literally would be exactly the same. Instead they decided to use wording that punishes people, and although that is beyond stupid, it doesn't change the fact that at the heart of the matter they both do the exact same thing. (Again surmising they get rid of the 0% EXP threshold).
