Gem Experience in Maps (Includes Raw Data & Wall of Text)

A number of times I’ve seen people ask “at what (player) level do my gems hit level 20”?

Most of us players know that gems get 10% of the xp the player receives.
Now (in theory) it should be a simple matter of looking up how much xp a level 20 gem needs and see at what point the player receives 10x that experience (since the gem only gains 10% of the players xp).

e.g.
PoL requires a total of 332,381,363 xp to reach level 20. A player would need 10x that amount (3,323,813,630). And that is around level 96.9 (3,364,828,162 for level 97).

However, where it becomes complicated is the xp penalty. As we reach higher levels we get an xp penalty if we play in lower level zones (the exact formula can be found on the wiki, I just use a calculator like this: http://www.i-volve.net/jol/poe_xpdrop_en.php).

Gems however do not have this penalty applied!

Another factor to consider is death penalty. While the player loses 0-10% xp (depending on difficulty), that penalty doesn’t affect gems.

Last but not least party play also has a fairly complex effect on experience, which I’ll not go into here. More info is (as always) on the wiki: http://pathofexile.gamepedia.com/Experience#Party_Play

The above example (Level 20 PoL at level 96.9) would be for a character that never died and never had an xp penalty applied. Which is not possible (at least at this stage)?

From this we can pretty much answer the initial question “at what (player) level do my gems hit level 20” with “it depends” (my favourite answer to everything).

So… while this question is fairly complex to answer, I had another idea. As I mentioned, gems do not experience the xp penalty (neither from deaths nor from being too far above or below the area level you play in).

From experience I know that the xp you get per map is (relatively) stable. So I wanted to know how many maps one would need to run in order to level a gem to 20.

Initially I wanted to do a lot more maps, but thought I’d share my results already since I’m fairly busy the next few weeks (and might get into the beta haha). So here you go - data from the last couple of days!

I ran all maps (and dailies) solo. Did not use any xp gear. I pretty much fully cleared all areas (<10 monsters remaining), apart from one area which had super annoying mods. I opened all strongboxes and did the master missions that were relevant for xp (Haku, Tora, Elreon, Vorici). Zana missions were recorded separately.

I recorded the xp of 2 gems (a purity of lightning and a 20% Empower in a 6% Haku dagger [so Empower received 130% increased xp]).

I recorded gem start xp (PoL1 & Emp1) and xp after map (PoL2 & Emp2). PoL XP & Emp XP is the experience gained during that map. Emp/PoL is the xp multiplier for Empower.

I also recorded a bunch of other stuff (map drops > 75 for example), but I doubt I've got enough data for it to be useful. Should all be self-explanatory though.

Google spreadsheet with raw data here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/10okw7OmXPwvY3lCe8oRc7KUTsMuNFa4s2F3b4W8BHOY/edit#gid=1430156839

Gem xp was between 467,091 and 1,484,658 per map (1,074,134 – 3,414,356 for the Empower with the 2.3 xp multiplier). Now, the shrine that only gave 467,091 was a very weird one. Hardly any mobs and very small area. Not sure what happened there. So excluding outliers I found that most maps yielded an experience of around 900k – 1,400k, with an average of around 1,100k.

I did record Pack size, magic monsters & rare monster, but at first glance there didn’t seem too much of a relationship to experience.

Interestingly PoL & Empower did not receive the exact same amount of xp (after taking the xp multiplier into account). However I’m sure that was due to some internal rounding error. I did calculate a multiplier of 2.299 for most maps, so close enough.

Interestingly low level maps seemed to yield a very similar amount of xp to high level maps. Taking the average of 1,100k xp per map it would take around 300 maps to level a gem from level 1 to level 20 (and another 300 maps if you do the vendor recipe to get 20% and re-level it).

That being said, most players don’t start leveling their gems in maps, but much earlier. By the time they start mapping their gems may be already at level 16 or even higher, so the required amount of maps that have to be run are obviously lower.
Empower requires a total of 1,666,045,137 xp (about 11x as much as PoL). So to get an Empower to level 3 you’d need to run around 1500 maps. However, with quality and Haku’s weapon mod you can lower that amount significantly (to around 670ish maps with 20% quality and a 6% mod on the weapon).

A bit of self - critique to finish off…
Now, I didn’t record too many map runs, so my results may be a little off (especially for specific map mods like pack size or magic monsters). And I didn't run too many low level maps. I also didn't include strongboxes (mistake on my part – just forgot to record them).

Also… I’m by no means a statistician and the last time I did any maths was in high school (which now lies about 10 years back). So take all my numbers with a pinch of salt!

Last but not least - since English is not my native language please ignore all spelling & grammatical errors ;)

Your gems gain around 1,100,000 xp per map.
Low level maps yield similar xp values to high level maps.
Pack size, Magic & Rare mods didn't seem to have too much of an impact on xp (surprisingly) - however that may be a false negative since my sample size was fairly low!

Taking this into account it would take approximately 300 maps to level a gem from level 1 to 20. Leveling an Empower gem from level 1 to 3 (without quality) would take around 1500 maps.

Depending on what level your gems are when you start maps you can (roughly) calculate the required number of maps you need to run to get your gems to level 20.

As always the wiki... :)
http://pathofexile.gamepedia.com/Experience
http://pathofexile.gamepedia.com/Skills
http://pathofexile.gamepedia.com/Purity_of_Lightning
http://pathofexile.gamepedia.com/Empower