2fps

Getting right to the point, we’re talking about sockets on your gear and why you should be ignoring the socket bonus.

This may be one of the hardest habits you’ll ever have to break in WoW.

I can be pretty compulsive with some of my habits and it took me a long time to get over this one in particular. I know there are a lot of other people out there (even Pike!) who struggle with this too. So let’s take a deep breath and say it together:

I don’t have to match the colour of the sockets on my gear.

I generally shouldn’t match the colour of the sockets on my gear.

Ok. Good.

What is the point of putting gems in your gear that match the socket colours?

To get the socket bonus!

Right. The other big reason is to make the socket bonus text appear in a regular white font, not the faded grey that drives us mad. That reason is the one we just have to learn to live with unfortunately.

Generally speaking, the socket bonus is terrible and you don’t want to go out of your way to get it. This is almost universally true. There are very few exceptions to this. Let’s look at an example.

Here we have the T8 Shadow Priest robe. Lovely idn’t it? We have here a blue socket and a yellow socket and the socket bonus is 6 critical strike rating.

Judging by what we know about caster dps generally and Shadow Priests in particular we know we generally want as much spellpower as we can get. We love our Runed Scarlets but darn, no red sockets here so we can’t use them right? So very much wrong.

Let’s take a look at the current stat weights for Shadow Priests as posted by Mearis on the Elitist Jerks forums. Stat weights are a handy list of the relative worth of all of the dps stats we can have on our gear.








If we wanted to get the socket bonus we’d have to use a Purified Twilight Opal and a Potent Monarch Topaz (assuming hitcapped). That would net us 18 spell power, .30% spell crit and 8 spirit.

Or we could socket two Runed Scarlet Rubies and get a fat 38 spellpower.

It comes down to whether or not we want to trade 20 spellpower for a third of a percent of crit. This is not a difficult decision to make.

So do you never want the socket bonus?

There are times when you may want the bonus. For caster dps this is almost always when the socket bonus is spellpower. That doesn’t mean you should match sockets every time the bonus is spellpower however. A spellpower socket bonus is just an opportunity for you to see if that piece of gear is a good place to put one of your two blue gems that you need to activate your meta.

Activating your meta gem is almost the only reason for using non-red gems as dps of any kind. At the end of the day you’ll almost always be better off socketing pure red gems be they Bold, Delicate or Runed depending on who you are.