A fool and his money....Follow

So I just bought a Belt of Deep Shadow (I think I got a good deal) and was curious about the group opinions on socketing it.

I'm leaning towards a pair of +8 hit because my hit rating is still a little low, but figured I'd get a second (or 30th) opinion on the matter.

I should say that my focus is entirely raiding. If you are curious about my armory, the link in the sig should work at this point.

You need the +16 hit go with that...btw I thought this thread would be about duel wielding felsteel longblade with mongoose

A quick note on gem bonuses, and when they're worth getting.

For all intents and purposes, you can consider +8 Hit and +16 AP fairly equal. As such, you should generally put them in their respective colors. This means any socket bonus that does not require a blue gem is easily attainable. You'll need two blue gems for your meta as well, so you can fill out two blue slots with lesser DPS gems guilt free as well.

What about the third blue slot and beyond? Well, here's how I decide. We've already assumed that +16 AP and +8 hit are equal, so they'll be our baseline. So, by using a hybrid gem in a blue slot for the bonus, you're effectively cutting out 8 AP or 4 hit. So, let's say you have an item with a red and blue slot, with a +8 AP socket bonus. Putting in two 16 AP gems will give you 32 AP, but putting in a 16 AP gem and a +8 AP/6 Stam gem will give you 32 AP as well as 6 additional stamina. Thus, a hybrid gem is beneficial.

What if we had that same piece of gear but with two blue slots (like the BoDS), and the same +8 AP bonus. Putting in two 16 AP gems is still 32 AP, but putting in two hybrid gems gives us only 24 AP. For PvE, 8 AP is not worth the 12 stamina, so you can ignore the socket bonus completely.

So, what about the Belt of Deep Shadow itself? By using two hybrid gems you're trading effectively one gem's worth of stats for 3 agility, which is less than half a gem in return. Unless you need the blue gems for your meta, slap in the best Red or Yellow gem you can get and forget it even has a socket bonus.

From a pure dps point of view, +8agi is better then +16atk, even more when you take into account BoK.

I wouldn't socket it with +hit to be honest. You're going to get plenty of +hit as is while doing karazhan and you're going to be stuck resocketing if you do so.

I have to say that I'm totally boggled by your thought process however. You just dropped 2k on an epic belt... but you're too cheap to buy blue gems and put mongoose on your weapons. For crying outloud, you've got vendor gems in some of your epics :(! Socketing and enchanting yourself properly would probably have been cheaper and most likely have been a bigger upgrade then getting that belt...


Edited, Nov 6th 2007 7:36pm by Tyrandor

I'm pretty sure your guild's JC can give you 3 gems for that dagger...