Revision as of 15:16, 22 April 2008

Introduction

Socketed Items can be complicated, mainly in the number of sockets and how to add sockets to existing items. There are two Cube recipes to add them, as well as the socket quest in Act Five. Also items can generate with a wide variety of sockets, and how many depends on the monster that drops them, the item type, and much more.

You can never add a socket to an item that already has one or more sockets, with any recipe or the socketing quest reward. The only partial exception is the 3 chipped gems + 1 sword recipe, which will create a magical sword with new properties and 3 sockets. This doesn't add sockets to the existing sword though, since it is rolling new mods on the weapon, so is essentially random.

Rare/Set/Unique/Crafted Items: The Socketing quest adds 1 and only 1 Socket to any of these types. Rares may spawn with 1 socket from a prefix, and some sets and uniques have 2 or 3 sockets inherently, and can't have more added. You will never get more than 1 socket added using the socketing quest on any of these items. Rare items can also have a socket added by a Horadric Cube Recipe. This requires 1 Stone of Jordan + 3 Perfect Skulls + One Rare Item. It's basically the same as putting that Rare item in the socketing quest reward. It can't be used on an item with a socket already.

Magical Items: Magical items can have 1-4 sockets, depending on the prefixes and the item type, and you can never add more to those. For magical items without sockets, using them in the socket quest reward will add 1 or 2 sockets, with a 50% chance at it. It's entirely luck if you get 1 or 2 on them, so cross your fingers.

Chippies: There is a recipe just for swords. 3 chipped gems + 1 sword = magical sword of the same type, with 3 sockets. This should be done by a high level character, lvl 70+ is sufficient to get Cruel as a prefix, which is what 99.9% of the people doing this quest most want. This can yield the highest damage sword possible in the game, when you factor in the added sockets.

How to Find Chippies

To find socketed items you want to kill a lot of normal monsters (not bosses), while wearing as little Magic Find % as possible. Boss runs are exactly wrong for socketed items, since bosses always drop at least magical items, never normal or socketed. Therefore you want to do levels that have tons of monsters, and not a lot of bosses. The Bloody Foothills or the Halls of Valor/Anguish/Vaught or the levels of the WorldStone Keep are good for these since they have no random bosses or champions, which take longer to kill and never drop socketed items. The best place however is probably the Secret Cow Level, since there are such enormous numbers of targets. There are random cow bosses and champions, but with hundreds of normal cows around, it's more than worth it.

The key is to not have any Magic Find, since the more of that you have the more likely items dropped will be magical or better (Rare, Set, Unique). Zero MF is best for finding socketed items, but if you can't avoid a small % bonus, it won't make much of a difference. The best characters for this are probably Sorcs for the Bloody Highlands and Javazons for the Cow level, where each can kill at a tremendous pace.

You want to be in as big a multi-player game as possible, so more items will drop, though this can be taken too far. If you don't have a power character and it's taking you much longer to kill in an 8-player, you could drop down to a 3-5 player and still have lots of items dropping, while killing so much faster that you actually got more items than you would taking twice as long in an 8 player game.

Normal Items: Normal items can have from 1-6 sockets. How many on a given item is random for most item types (circlets can only have 1 socket), but the maximum is limited by the mlvl of the monster that drops the item, and the item type. Check our Armor and Weapons pages for info on how many sockets are possible on given item types. In terms of how many max, this is determined by the mlvl of the monster that drops the item. This max applies to sockets on socketed items they drop, and also on how many sockets you'll get if you socket quest a normal item they drop.

* Druid and Barbarian class helms can have 3 sockets right from the start.
** Paladin shield can have 4 sockets at any time. Only three elite shields (Kite, Tower, Gothic) can have 4 sockets for other characters.

You need to check the items pages for sockets possible in items, since these are just the maximum possible, and most items can't have the maximum. They are always limited by the inventory spaces an item takes up.

The number of sockets from the socket quest is not affected by the difficulty level, only by the qlvl of the item, which is based on the mlvl of the monster that drops it. Your Clvl and the difficulty level of the quest reward has nothing to do with the number of sockets you get. You can use the Normal quest reward on a Crystal Sword and get 6 sockets, or the Hell quest reward and get 3, depending on the qlvl of the swords used.

There are rumors of the quest reward varying the number of sockets further but these rumors are completely unfounded. Its likely that minions on a borderline area level dropped a white item that was thought to have a lower qlvl. The number of sockets from a quest reward is always the maximum possible based on the qlvl and item type (assuming its a white item).

If you need a number of sockets that Lazurk won't provide (most likely 5), then it's you'll have to try and find that item with the number of sockets you want, for a specific RuneWord, generally. Trade for it if you have to, or ask in games, most people don't save socketed items, so you might ask as soon as you join, say you'll make 100k for a 5-socket Ogre Maul, for example, or trade more if someone drives a hard bargain. If they aren't keeping it, they'll only get 35k at most for the sale, so shouldn't be too greedy.

Sockets by Number