Math Post 2: Math Harder

Let's go back to 11.11% soul gem drop rate, since I can't find ANYWHERE that the drop rate's changed at all.

Ready?  Here we go!

Chance of getting a soul gem after...

1 Kill: 11.1%
2 Kills: 21.1%
3 Kills: 29.9%
4 Kills: 37.8%
5 Kills: 44.7%
6 Kills: 50.9%
7 Kills: 56.4%
8 Kills: 61.3%
9 Kills: 65.6%
10 Kills: 69.5%
11 Kills: 72.9%
12 Kills: 75.9%
13 Kills: 78.6%
14 Kills: 81.0%
15 Kills: 83.1%
16 Kills: 85.0%
17 Kills: 86.7%
18 Kills: 88.2%
19 Kills: 89.5%
20 Kills: 90.7%

So, at 11.11%, you can start cursing your luck after about 6 kills or so.  25% to 75% is a range spanning 3 to 12 kills.  Let's take 3, 6, and 12 to represent Good, Middling, and Bad luck.

http://i.imgur.com/Q8GcjgZ.png

So, if you're a fairly lucky son of a gun, gathering forty gems can take 1 day and 6 hours.  More likely, you'll be 2 to 3 days.  Keep in mind this is 2 to 3 days of solid gameplay: time logged in actively fighting stuff and getting the gems.  Sleeping, eating, living IRL, and doing things that aren't soul gems aren't counted into this.

BUT... is 15 minutes a fair assessment?  I'm going to go wreck the fire demon real quick, I'll be right back.

It took me two minutes from hopping into the furnace to fight until it's dead.  Now, it'll be a sub-zero arctic day in hell that anybody manages to do the Mine Master, or even someone as mundanely easy as Heimdall, in two minutes.  This is the absolute best case scenario I can muster in the soul gems' favor.  In this scenario (My buffs never end, I don't have to stop to heal, there's a revolving carousel of fire demons and I can use exclusively fire demon gems to forge with), getting 40 gems in about 9 hours is actually pretty feasible.  That'd be 2-4 days of playing.

Okay, so that's obviously not realistic.  I'll just dial it back to 10 minutes, give soul gems that edge at least.

http://i.imgur.com/vSt9G6h.png

Well, we're only taking 2/3 as long as we were before, so the exact number reductions aren't surprising.  Getting forty gems within 48 hours of serious gameplay is looking fairly possible.

And this is about as far as I can crunch things.  There is just no way to gather the amount of gems asked for without spending dozens and dozens of hours playing.  Look at those and decide if that's something you want to do.  For me, hell no.