Path of Exile – Importance of Leveling Up Gems

path-of-exile

I've got a cool blue gem which allows me to summon up to 3 zombies from dead enemies' corps. It's now level 4, but I haven't noticed any difference in the spell (no more zombies, the summoning time looks pretty much the same, …)
And when hovering the gem, there are no help or tooltip explaining what upgrade will come with the next level. So what's the point of leveling these gems ?

Best Answer

Levelling up a gem is like levelling up a skill in many other games. It gives you higher damage, more effects, higher requirements, etc.

Burning Arrow Level 1

Burning Arrow Level 2

As you can see, burning arrow gains 3% physical damage, and 1% greater chance to ignite enemies. It also now requires you to be level 2 to use it.

I believe higher levels of Raise Zombie increase zombie health and damage. For other (non-summon) skills, the stats of the new level were shown on the gem at one point during beta, but do not appear to be shown now. The reason minion statistics aren't shown on the skill is because they don't exist on the skill, they exist on the minion.

Mark_GGG on the forums says

(Minion statistical information) isn't hidden, it doesn't exist. Ideally we'd like to make it exist and be visible eventually, but this a) requires implementing entirely new systems for skills to be able to show stats that aren't in the skill, and b) requires those stats having actual values we can read somewhere. We've got a temporary solution for Zombie life numbers, which need updating any time any balance changes modify what those values are, but it's simply not viable to make that a large-scale solution.

You get more zombies from the passive tree.

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