Sockets: every way to open one

A socket is a hole in a piece of gear that takes a gem. Weapons can carry two, everything else one. There are four ways to get one on Aurenfall.

1. The Weapon Smith (Bird Island) and BlacksmithLee (the Market)

The sure route, and the same price at both:

• First socket: 12 DragonBalls, guaranteed.
• Second socket: a ToughDrill, 25% a try. Every failed try hands you a StarDrill, and 7 StarDrills open the socket for certain -- so the second socket costs at most seven ToughDrills, and usually fewer.

BlacksmithLee sockets everything except weapons; the Weapon Smith does weapons.

2. Met spam: the Artisan's hammer

Every Meteor you spend on a weapon in the upgrade window (Artisan Wind in Twin City) also rolls for a socket -- whether the level-up itself lands or fails.

• No socket yet: 1 in 200 Meteors opens the first.
• One socket already: 1 in 1,000 opens the second.
• Armour, helmets, rings and the rest never roll: met spam is for weapons.

When it happens the whole server hears about it. Two hundred Meteors is about what twelve DragonBalls cost at the mall, so the gamble is not a discount on the Weapon Smith -- it is a second currency for the same thing, and it comes with the level-ups you were buying anyway.

3. Gear that falls already socketed

The 10%-a-kill gear drop can come with a socket in it: a weapon about 3% of the time (two sockets 0.4%), anything else ten times rarer. Both scale with the monster's level -- a Pheasant will not do it, an endgame monster might.

4. The Outfitter and the promotion rites

The Newbie Help packages hand out a weapon with an open socket at every tier, and the level-40 Archer promotion pays a ScarletBow with both sockets open.

Putting a gem in

Open sockets take gems at Artisan Cloud in Phoenix Castle (the embed window). Removing a gem destroys it; the socket stays. What each gem does is in the PvP balance guide.

Where to find them