Sockets: every way to open one

In short: Every way to open a socket -- the smiths, met spam at the Artisan, socketed drops, the Newbie Help weapon -- and the Gem Cutter who fuses fifteen gems into 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 piece of gear in the upgrade window (Artisan Wind in Twin City) also rolls for a socket -- whether the level-up itself lands or fails.

Everything else rolls at half the weapon odds -- a weapon is what the forge is really for.

When it happens the whole server hears about it. This is now the cheap road to a socket: a weapon's first one costs about fifty Meteors on average, roughly a quarter of what the Weapon Smith's twelve DragonBalls come to -- so you go to him for certainty and to the forge for the price. And the rolls come free with the level-ups you were buying anyway.

Two things it will not do: Lucky Time does not touch these odds (it lifts the level and quality rolls only), and an ordinary DragonBall never opens a socket -- only the Meteor side of the window does. The gold ones are another matter:

3. The gold: SuperMeteor and SuperDragonBall

The rarest things in the game are the two golden reagents -- a SuperMeteor and a SuperDragonBall, gold versions of the familiar icons. They fall from any monster on their own roll (on Bird Island about once in 60,000 kills for the Meteor and once in 120,000 for the DragonBall; see drop rates), and the whole realm is told when one falls.

They do exactly one thing, in the Artisan Wind window, and they never fail:

No roll, no change to the item's level or quality, any piece of equipment. If the socket you are asking for is already open, or you ask for the second without the first, the window refuses and you keep the reagent. The realm hears of the socket the way it hears of a lucky met-spam one.

4. 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.

5. 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.

Cutting gems: fifteen into one

The Gem Cutter on the Market turns 15 identical gems into 1 of the next quality:

Every kind works -- Phoenix, Dragon, Fury, Rainbow, Kylin, Violet, Moon, Tortoise -- and a super gem cannot be cut any finer. He only lists the kinds you are carrying fifteen of, so if his menu is empty, dig or draw a few more. Normal gems come out of the mine and the lottery; the mall sells refined and super ones for CPs -- this is the road for everyone who would rather earn them.

Where to find them