There was a time when finding the right socketed base item in Diablo II felt like seeing an angel descend from the heavens. It was the difference between a dream runeword realized and another session of grinding concluded with doing the confused Travolta face. Scouring the wilds for a perfect vessel, hoarding runes, then placing them one by one into the item — and the utter shame when you put the runes in the wrong order and had to grind all over again. I already disturbed the purists letting you retrieve runes from items. Now they'll hate me even more, for the sanctity of the eternal grind has been fouled yet again.

This post is about our friends and vendors — however, not the cookie-peddling ‘legitimate interest’ ones you have to opt-out from when visiting just about any website nowadays. I mean the NPCs.
But also about the sacred art of itemization. We’ll get to the socketed items, socketables and the Cube in a minute.

The Dangerous Precedent of Deckard Cain

That guy over there, Deckard Cain, he a friend of yours? Just a kindly Horadric elder offering to identify your items — and you mean to tell me he does that for free?
It started innocently enough. But that single act of generosity planted a dangerous idea in the minds of Sanctuary's working class: maybe essential magical services shouldn't cost anything.

In the upcoming version of the mod, imbuing, socketing, and personalizing are completely free and unlimited. What’s more, imbuing services are no longer offered by just a single NPC, as while they may not be in the possession of strange Horadric hammers, people like Drognan and Hratli are renowned enchanters. This free service situation is only temporary (and not a bug, it’s a feature!), but for now, you’re welcome to imbue to your heart’s content.
Eventually, these services will cost a special non-gold currency that’s not done yet. All you need to benefit from this limited-time opportunity is any normal non-socketed item to imbue.
How do you even get hold of one, though...?

What Are You Buying?

Town merchants now feature four specialized tabs in their trade interface:
Common, Superior, Epic, and Magic.

• Common Items are almost the same as always. With one difference. Well, maybe two.
  First, they’re socketed, so you can’t just buy one, imbue it at the same vendor and sell it at a profit. Second, they bear their maker’s name and may not be personalized.
• Superior Items have slightly better stats, as you know, and likewise are only sold socketed. They’re also green now. Not the set piece gear kind of green, but darker, more boring green.
  Also, in the future, they’ll probably be made more expensive, or further differentiated from common items in some other way. I'm not entirely sure yet.
  Note that the superior items sold by vendors are technically different items from what you find in the wild.
  While they are visually the same, superior item drops will not be affected by changes I make to vendor's items. So you can still grind for self-found superiors if you enjoy an ironman playstyle.
• Epic Items are a bold new addition to non-magic offerings — socketed, costly, and visually distinct due to being dyed in various hues to match or contrast with your favourite Unique armor or weapons.
  Their names are just as bold: magenta in colour and prefixed with words like ‘precious’ or ‘magnificent’. They are only purchasable from vendors or (perhaps in the future) craftable.
  They also, inexplicably, have worse defense and damage values, with their durability at 50 for some arbitrary reason.
  It’s almost as if the vendors repurposed the cracked junk that you used to find all over the place and are now overcharging you for it, but that’s totally not what happened, I swear 
  Epics spawn with at least 2 sockets and a 1-point bonus to a random skill tab. Or maybe other stuff, I don’t know. They’re still very experimental, nothing’s set in stone yet.
  But I’m excited they are now a thing that exists.
• Magic Items are what the vendors used to offer normally.
  The regular magic stuff that you only ever look at early in the game and has like +1 to light radius, or when you’re eventually looking for that elusive wand with Lower Resist charges.
  Any worthless junk you brought from some stinky demon lair and sold will also end up on this page. Same with tomes, keys, ammunition, potions and all that sort of supplies.

One side note is that there currently is no way to get an Exceptional or Elite variant of the Common, Superior or Epic items you buy from vendors. This will be addressed in the future.

Also, for no explicable reason, cracked and low quality items are never found in the world. Good riddance!
(There are a few conspiracy theories about why and how it happened, but I wouldn’t know. Don’t ask.)

The Other Quivering Problem

What drops when you kill a skeleton archer? Usually, disappointment.

To address the long-standing issue of obscene amounts of quiver clutter, I’ve introduced four new low-level runes:
Aud, Nou, Weh, and Nie — derived from Diablo Immortal’s runic language, but with different effects. And without unwieldy touchscreens.
These new runes now drop in place of arrows or bolts in every corner of the world, although not nearly as often as quivers used to.

Currently, they serve as a teaser of future content. New runewords and Cube recipes using these and other new glyphs are in development.
In the meantime, they're more like collectible curiosities — little promises of future possibilities.

As for new runewords, there are 15 added in this upcoming version of the mod, loosely adapted from Diablo II: Resurrected.
Some of their effects had no equivalent in the classic engine, so their power may differ from what you may know from Resurrected — but perhaps you’ll find them useful anyway.

More runewords are planned — and they’ll be bolstered by further fresh injections of rune lore.

You may have noticed something curious about the low level runes: El and Eld, Tir and Nef, Ith and Eth.
They have the same level requirements and seem to be parallel counterparts to one another.
My plan for the future is to expand on that idea when introducing new runes.

Of course, existing runes and their functionality will remain intact.

Horadric Cube Upgrades

New Cube recipes are now in effect, shamelessly adapted from Resurrected, that you can use to upgrade Set items to their Exceptional and Elite versions.

The old “low-quality to normal” recipe has been repurposed — now it rerolls Epic items instead. This gives you one more lever to pull when hunting for the perfect stats and the perfect style.
(And it's not because Epic items are related to the low quality stuff in any way!)

Also, your cube may be able to upgrade gems and skulls beyond Perfect now.
Royal and Grand tiers are something I'm experimenting with, although they won't drop anywhere in the world for now.

The Future of Itemization

We’ve grown up. Some of you, unlike my currently unemployed self, have actual jobs. And we often can’t afford to spend weeks hunting polearms that might get the right number of sockets.
Hence my proposal to allow buying runeword vessels in stores — with in-game currency, not microtransactions.

I believe that powerful loot should be earned, but not always exclusively through a repetitive grind. That customization should be a reward, but not necessarily for swiping your credit card.

With this update, I honour the old sacred ways of Diablo II's itemization while presenting future possibilities that may or may not make the game slightly more interesting.

There is more exciting stuff to come, like cyan-coloured Mythic items which will challenge not just your patience for grinding but also your thinking and knowledge of lore.
That, however, is a story for another time and another update.

Diablo II is worth refining, step by step, just like Blizzard North devs believed back in the day. And sometimes the smallest of enhancements make a world of difference.

Thanks for walking this path with me.

I’ll see you in town.

@Mike

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Coming Up Next:

Diablo 2 Enhanced T6 Alpha releases June 26.