Wolcen: Lords of Mayhem - Sockets and Gems

The latest from Wolcen: Lords of Mayhem covers the work in progress on Sockets and Gems.

Work In Progress: Sockets and Gems

Hi everyone!

While work on update 0.5.0.4 is progressing at a rapid pace, many of its features are still being worked on or finalized. Today, I'd like to present a highly requested feature (and staple of the Hack and Slash genre): Socketable items and gems.

Because Wolcen is a classless game, items can roll with many kind of affixes on them, reducing the probability of getting an item that is appropriate for any given playstyle. While loot hunting can be exhilarating, especially after getting the item of your dream, it can also be frustrating if getting there takes too much time.

Entering Gems:

A Gem grants an affix to an item it is socketed into. Which affix depends on the socket type. There are three socket types: Offensive, Defensive and Support.

Items of a given type will often roll the same socket type: weapons will roll offensive sockets, armors pieces will roll defensive sockets and accessories will roll support sockets. This will not always be the case though, and you may sometimes get an armor piece with an offensive or support socket!
Gems are divided into types and tiers. The first iteration of this system will ship with 14 gem types, each divided into 5 tiers. A gem's tier will define how powerful its affixes are. As the game's level cap will be increased, we will add more gem tiers.

Some types of affixes will not randomly roll on items anymore, and will only be available by adding a gem to an item. This will lower the randomness in getting desired affixes, and will provide more control over build orientation. Some affixes will stay as random rolls but will also be available through gems, allowing players to double-down on affix-stacking. New affixes will also be added to the game.
Put a Fire gem in an offensive socket, and your weapon will inflict fire damage!

In addition to the 14 regular gem types, we are also adding unique soul gems: unique items will have one or more of their affixes pre-socketed as unique gems. You will be able to unsocket this unique gem and put it in a unique socket, granting that unique power to a different item. Soul Gems can only be socketed into dedicated sockets. Those will be quite rare on non-unique items, but unique items will always come with a unique socket.

You can put as many gems in an item as it has sockets, and their effect will stack!

Removing gems socketed into an item requires the services of the Jeweler, a new NPC. He will do it for a fee, of course :)

That's all for today! Next week, we'll cover another feature of update 0.5.0.4.