Gemming for socket bonuses or not?

[Xeonic]

Hello

I am a person who's pretty much obsessed by making socket bonuses, I don't gem 23 spell power if it's not a red socket. I know this is a problem, and im trying to change. :P

What I'm mainly asking is: What is a good socket bonus for a balance druid, and what is not? For example, I would say that 5 or 7 spellpower socket bonuses are quite powerful while 5 crit rating is not. Is this a viable assumption? How do you gem?

[exochaft]

I'm not going to go into immense detail since this is starting to depart from my realm of expertise (feral ftw), but here's generally how it works.

Stats (SP, crit, haste, etc) will have varying weight on your dps depending on your current gear. Generally you could just gem straight up SP the entire time since it's pretty much the best for your DPS per point. However, sometimes the socket bonuses will give you better DPS than straight up SP gemming. Again, it's going to be dependent on your current gear (there's addons to help ya out with it, I recall, I personally don't use them), but you can just go to the boomkin sticky and do some math. Figure out how much DPS gemming straight SP would be vs your DPS color matching your sockets with the socket bonus. Not 100% accurate since the DPS points per stat table is derived from some base stats that may not match yours, but this should be good enough for most pieces of gear.

[Torael]

It's rare that a yellow socket is truly worth geming unless you have to get some hit. One of the only exceptions to the rule is the tier 9 helm since it's actually 9 spell power as a socket bonus. Which means you lose 2 spell power and can gain either 10 haste or 10 crit. Most would prolly do spell/crit since haste at that point is not needed. But if it was say a 5-7 spell power bonus it would be less wanted. Generally it's just geming 2 purified gems for your meta and even ignoring blues. Since even at 7 spell power it's losing spell power for no reason to go 10 spirit for a 7 spell bonus.

If that helps at all. Lastly what that means is to actually gem a yellow is even more loss to spell power. If you went 10 int you'd gain just a little over 1.2 damage which is not worth it. Also generally 11 spell power can be alot better than .22 crit. Debatable but spell power always takes the lead. Also would require that the slots in question are spell power bonus and a red+yellow to even try that one. Red+Blue as well to even bother there. A yellow & blue socket combo in a slot is completely ignored. The loss to spell power is so great it's not worth it.

[Deleted]

Untrue Torael. Yellow slots can be quire lucreative to follow, especially at higher levels.

Now, first of all, we all have to get two blue gems, so we try to match them into blue sockets, naturally. If you have two different items with blue sockets in them, its an acceptable way to get rid of the blue gem requirement.

My T8 gloves has a blue socket, and a +5 SP socket bonus. The gem adds 12 SP and 10 spirit. From the spirit i get another 3 SP, and that brings the total benefit from the blue gem up to 20. 3 off isn't too bad, when it activates our meta. Note however, that i also have a shoulder piece with two blue slots in them. Unfortunately, socket bonuses doesn't double, so the benefit from that, with epic blue gems, is 9 less than if i were to socket with red gems. (as of writing this, it occurs to me that maybe i should gem my pants with sp/crit and sp/spi and put red gems in the blue slots in my shoulder. Ill have to calculate a bit on that). But i am sidetracking here.

Now, you would want to keep your amount of blue gems down, but yellow sockets are quite interesting. If we follow EJ's stat rating, each stat has the following value:

Spellpower: 1.4
Haste rating: 0.9 [1.5 if not soft-capped]
Crit rating: 1.1

So lets calculate them:

Spellpower gem: 1.4 * 23 = 32,2 rating
SP / haste before 400: 1.4 * 12 + 1.5 * 10 = 31,8 rating
SP / haste after 400: 1.4 * 12 + 0,9 * 10 = 25,8 rating
SP / crit: 1.4 * 12 + 1.1 * 10 = 27,8 rating

This means that you can often get a bonus from gemming according to the sockets color. Imagine if i have a yellow socket, and we are wondering if we should gem it with a yellow gem, or just gem for pure spellpower. Gemming for SP will be worth 32,2 rating, but we lose our socket bonus (lets say that its +7 SP). Gemming for SP/crit is only 27,8 rating, but it gives us the socket bonus, bringing the rating up to (1.4 * 7) 37,6 rating, at which point the yellow gem actually yields more than a pure spellpower gem does.

I used this, for example, to reach the last bit of haste when i was a little under 400 at some point, but i would generally suggest to only use the SP/crit gems and not SP/haste, if you want to consider using a yellow gem. Just be mindfull of which socket bonuses you are pursuing. That +10 spirit bonus is probably not worth it :P