wow Socket Changes in the Shadowlands

[Stan 5,020]

In this week's Shadowlands Dev Update, Game Director Ion Hazzikostas revealed changes to sockets coming in the Shadowlands Beta in an upcoming build.

Sockets are necessary to support Jewelcrafting as a player profession, so they decided to keep them as a random property on gear.

Ve' nari, who's the only friendly NPC vendor in the Maw, will sell a consumable that works like Gouged Eye of N'Zoth. You will be able to buy it with Stygia, a currency looted from enemies within the Maw. You drop half of your Stygia when you die and do not return to your corpse in the Maw.

Only Helms, Rings, Necks, Bracers, and Belts can have a socket randomly generated or added by Ve' nari.

(Source)

While we eliminated Warforging and Titanforging in Shadowlands, with the goal of increasing clarity and player agency over rewards, the question of how to handle sockets was not quite as clear-cut. A certain critical mass of sockets across all player gear is essential to support Jewelcrafting as a player profession, and in recent expansions the chance for any endgame item to upgrade to a socketed version gave players of all playstyles the opportunity to interact with the Jewelcrafting tradeskill. At the same time, sockets unquestionably constitute power, and can be every bit as impactful as Warforging.

Trying to balance these considerations, the approach we've settled on for Shadowlands is to keep sockets as a random item property, but to allow players to add sockets to their items via a consumable sold by Ve' nari in the Maw (similar to Gouged Eyes in the recent Visions of N'Zoth update). This way all players can take advantage of gems and seeing a socketed item drop offers a short-term efficiency advantage, but in the long run competitive players can still make steady progress towards a best-in-slot gear setup without relying on an additional layer of randomness. Finally, in order to limit the total impact of gems, and the power gap between players with full sockets and those without, in Shadowlands only Helms, Rings, Necks, Bracers, and Belts can have a socket randomly generated or added by Ve' nari. These changes should all be active by next week's Beta update.

[GBeast 33]

there was nothing wrong with always having colored sockets with socket bonuses on gear that we had for literally years. removing it was senseless

[Migol 425]

Hmm, he seemed to imply a "either random or created", but didn't clearly state that you cannot have two sockets on an item like now (one random and one you add)...

[GBeast 33]

40 minutes ago, Migol said:

Hmm, he seemed to imply a "either random or created", but didn't clearly state that you cannot have two sockets on an item like now (one random and one you add)...

 "This way all players can take advantage of gems and seeing a socketed item drop offers a short-term efficiency advantage, but in the long run competitive players can still make steady progress towards a best-in-slot gear setup without relying on an additional layer of randomness

IMO this is a pretty telltale sign that it's only 1 socket per item