Sockets

[Tater]

Last night, I got my first piece of armor with sockets from a quest. I've seen these on other characters around towns etc. The armor piece isn't currently as good as my regular legs that I'm wearing but it wasn't that far off. They would be better adding some extras.

What goes in the sockets? Where do I get them? What do they cost? Are there options? Can I put them in myself?

The sockets were colored, what does that mean? I forget the exact colors though, maybe 1 blue, 1 red and 1 yellow?

[Khab]

you can find gems to put into the sockets but they are extremely expensive. I think you may be able to get them from vendors as well but I'm not sure if the quality is the same as what you'll see on the auction house. As with certain enchants I would wait until you're close to 70 have have epic gear that you think you're going to keep for a while before investing too much gold.

http://www.wowwiki.com/Gems

[Felix Niebuhr]

You can find vendors selling green gems cheaply to put into your levelling gear, as Horde I know there is a vendor in Thrallmar inn. Theres prolly one too in Honor Hold for allies. You can get some better green gems cheaply by buying them on the Auction House, these are made by ppl with the Jewel Crafting profession.

Gems have a color that corresponds to the socket, if you match all the sockets then you get the socket bonus from the gear too. It's not always a good idea, depending on the socket colors and how good the bonus is. Orange, green and purple gems can match two socket colors so there's abit of freedom of choice there. As an example an orange gem will help complete the socket bonus if you put it in either a red or yellow socket. Or to put it another way; if you have a blue socket you have the choice of a blue, green or purple gem to complete the bonus. If you do not care for the bonus all gems (except the metagems which are irrelevant at this point) can be put in any sockets.


Edit: You open the socket UI by shiftclicking the item btw, I remember that one took me a while to figure out.

[Baboon]

Don't buy gems from vendors. They are white quality, and cost about the same as green quality gems at the auction house from people who are leveling Jewelcrafting. Go check the gem tab in the Auction House.

Those gems are often 1-3G, so no biggie there.

[TPMdm]

There are vendors who sell cheap versions of gems. The player created ones tend to have better stats.

There are 4 types of gem slots red, yellow, blue, and meta (IIRC meta are only on some head pieces). You can put whatever the hell you want in any of the slots but if you match colors you get the listed "socket bonus". Depending upon class and spec you can find a gem to match your needs. The socket bonus is frequently not worth bothering about, it's nice if you can get it but for example many affliction warlocks put nothing but "+spell hit" gems in the sockets regardless of the color of the socket (at least when they start raiding).

There are also non-primary colored gems, they are green, orange and purple. Those gems act as both colors when socketed for the purposes of the socket bonus. So, in your pants' blue socket you could put either a blue, a green, or a purple and still be eligible for the socket bonus (you could always just put a yellow in it too).

Meta gems look at all the gems you currently have socketed in your gear. They have slightly more complex gem requirements:
requires more blue gems than red
requires 3 red gems and 1 yellow
etc.

The multicolored gems are really nice to meet the meta gem requirements. You could have 3 orange gems socketed and for the purposes of the meta gem that is "3 red gems and 1 yellow"

[elsegundo]

you can also get gems from daily pvp objectives at honor hold. do it daily to get 3 marks of honor hold and you'll get enough to buy the gems from the person that gave you the daily quests. i think the quest is called Hellfire Fortifications. but easier than that, though will cost you gold, is to go to the AH. make those jewelcrafters some money.