Thursday, November 1, 2007

What's Sockets got to do with it?

I got my first item with sockets last night. A pair of [Expedition Forager Leggings] as a quest reward from a Cenarion Expedition quest in Zangarmarsh.

So my question is, what do I do now?

How does one learn more about sockets? What kinds of gems are available? Do I get them from vendors, or AH, or what? Do I bother putting gems in this particular pair of leggings, or do I keep farming Hellfire Ramparts' first mini-boss to get a slightly better pair?

In any event, I guarantee that if I decide to buy gems for this pair, then the next run through ramparts will drop the leggings and I'll win the roll. Such is my karma.

Oh yeah, and special thanks to Big Bear Butt for the tips on how to make the mouse-over work for the item. And more special thanks to Tina Turner for inspiring the title of the post :-)

4 comments:

Saerath said...

Xornot's Gem Finder is a very good site for looking all the different gems you available & Lassira has a very informative post about hunter specific gems here:
http://www.thehuntersmark.net/?p=170

Also, something I didn't find out until I was already lvl 70, you don't have to match the socket colors when applying Gems. For instance you can out a red gem in a yellow socket, and so on, however if you want to get the socket bonus you have to match gems that fit in that sockets color...hope this helps =D

Anonymous said...

One advice: Uncommon quality gems are 10~40 times LESS expensive than Rare gems and the difference is usually marginal in stats. So, you can have, say, 3 gems with +6 AGI for 1 or 2 g each, versus 3 gems with +8 AGI for 40 to 60 g EACH! That's 6g for + 18 AGI or 180g for 24 AGI.

So, until you have that EPIC piece of gear, stick to Uncommon gems and stay away from Rare ones!

Also, you don't need to match colors, but with so many to choose from (check AH), you can easily find something good *and* take advantage of the socket bonus: they may not look much, but if you add the socket bonus from 5 or 6 different pieces of gemmed gear, then it starts to be a nice plus...

Also, as mentioned above, check Xornot's Gem Finder.

Anonymous said...

Also remember that when you're matching socket colors, that some gems match two different sockets -- so you can put an orange gem in either a red socket or a yellow socket.

You can't take gems out of sockets, but you can put new gems in over the top of existing ones.

When you're counting up gems for meta sockets (those are endgame), the orange, purple, and green gems count twice. An orange gem counts as one red AND one yellow, for instance.

Here's a site that links to useful searches on wowhead: http://nedruid.wordpress.com/buffing-up/gems/

Amava said...

Very cool, guys. Thanks a ton for the info. I checked out Xornot's site and came up with a list for some nice looking uncommon gems that I think are appropriate. I'll post that in a main thread instead of the response here.