Diablo 2: You Can’t Reroll and Imbue Socketed Items & Here’s Why

Items and mechanics connected to them are one of the core mechanics in Diablo 2 and, frankly, every game in the Diablo Franchise. Each item dropped has special properties that allow for that certain item to be further customized and enhanced. This is where imbuing and socketing come in, and the general rules might be a bit confusing for new players and veteran players returning to the game after a long break. Due to that, we’ve decided to put together this guide to answer all your questions regarding item upgrade systems. Now, let’s see can you reroll and imbue socketed items in Diablo II?

Sockets expand the abilities of your items

Sockets are in their base form placeholders for other “socketable” items. Sockets are holes on your items where other items might be inserted, such as runes, gems, and jewels. Sockets are represented by gray circles in the user interface, and the number of circles directly corresponds to the number of items you can socket into that specific item.

Sockets can greatly improve the quality of your items (depending on what you decide to socket, of course) and are a great way to diversify and improve your item in the areas you feel that it’s lacking. And even though the socket system works great and it’s highly useful, there are some rules attached to it.

A single item in Diablo 2 cannot have more than six sockets. The number of sockets that your item will drop depends on the difficulty of the boss that dropped the item. For example, at Normal difficulty, the highest number of sockets that your item can have is 3. This number goes up to a maximum of 5 sockets at Nightmare difficulty and reaches the maximum number of 6 at Hell difficulty. The number of sockets is also related to the number of inventory blocks that the item occupies, as the number of sockets cannot surpass it under any circumstances.

This means that every type of item in Diablo 2 has a different maximum number of sockets unrelated to the difficulty at which it was dropped. For example, weapons that take up the most inventory space can have up to 6 sockets, armors and shields can have up to 4 sockets, and helms can have up to 3 sockets and no more.

Can you add more sockets to items in Diablo 2?

You can’t add more sockets to an item. As you can see, the maximum number of sockets that you can have is strictly defined by both the space that the items occupy in the inventory and by the difficulty on which a specific item dropped.

If you are, however, unsatisfied with your initial choice of items that you’ve decided to socket, you can always extract the gems, jewels, and runes and replace them with new socketable items. This is done via Horadric Cube, and the process can be repeated as many times as you like. Keep in mind that extracting old socketed items to replace them with new ones will result in the loss of your items. Extracted jewels, runes, and gems cannot be salvaged, at least not in Diablo 2.

Can you imbue socketed items in Diablo 2?

Imbuin is a process of turning your common (white) item into a rare one. Imbuing will add different bonuses depending on your level and the level of the item that you wish to imbue. Generally, it is not possible to imbue socketed items in Diablo 2. This is because socketed items are already considered to be magical and have a set of bonuses due to previous upgrades.

You also cannot re-imbue already imbued items. Imbuing is available once per difficulty only, which means that you can imbue three items per character, one on each difficulty. Imbuing a certain item is definitely not something that you wish to do without rethinking the item in question several times. Since imbuing is extremely limited, it’s best to put it off at late levels. The higher the quality of your items, the better bonuses, and stats it will get after imbuing is complete.

How do you imbue items?

Imbuing is not something that you absolutely need to do, but the service becomes available relatively early in the game; during Act I. tools of the Trade, the quest that makes imbuing available, is easy to miss due to being non-essential. Because of this, you should be careful when you explore Monastery Barracks since it’s easy to miss the local smith Charsi that gives you both the quest and the opportunity to imbue your items. You will need to recover Charsi’s Horadric Malus, her “tool of the trade.” If you manage to defeat the mini-boss and retrieve her hammer for her, she will give you a chance to imbue a single item.

Don’t feel pressured to imbue the item right then and there. You can always return to Charsi with the right after, even at max level, and she will imbue it. This is probably the best course of action since imbuing weak items will result in slightly stronger items but not by much.

And that’s it. As you can see, the number of sockets on an item cannot be rerolled, and socketed items cannot be imbued. There are plenty of mechanics that allow you to further improve your items, but those two are definitely off-limits for socketed items.

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