The Diablo III team took several community-submitted questions about itemization in the game and have posted the answers on the official forums. Questions ranged from the quality of drops in Inferno level to whether or not the ability to add sockets to items will make it to the game.

 

Giving players more control and customization of their item stats is something we talk about a lot in our office. There have been a lot of ideas thrown around here and some great suggestions from the community, but we have not finalized any systems yet. To give you an idea of what direction we're heading toward, though, here are just a few ideas that we're considering right now: The ability to change a portion of a particular stat on an item to another stat of your choice The ability to augment an existing item with a stat bonus of your choice The ability to create an item with one or several fixed affixes—similar to the Rare recipes introduced in 1.0.7 We've also discussed adding other types of "socketables" with a wide variety of possible affixes that you can put in your socketed items instead of gems