You forgot D : There will be a way to grant items a socket, whether the item is crafted or not, a la Gouged Eye of N'zoth(EDIT : To be clear, I'm not saying that will be a thing, I'm saying it's a possibility just like options A, B and C)
Several things appear to be "removed" in this build, including the latest shop mount, as per your preamble for this build. I'd wait for official word on this.
Well, given the pool it was in, you'd always have used it and never any of the other options. So this is probably for the better.
Adding sockets? What do you want to do, make yourself weak or something?
I am hoping they updated JC then as the blue quality gem receipes required this setting to make the gems
good
they removed not only that but all the other reagents, except the specific status. We had fun for some time...
Okay, so what else is gone what is staying? Should I be panicing, calling for heads?
I hope sockets don't end up being RNG. On any item.
I hope that they stick with the A option. Crafted gear is already weak compared to the drop ones, without the socket it would be even worse.
a sad day
I disagree with the part of the article that says a socket is always 'flat out better'. Especially when the comparison was made to that reagent that lets you keep a food buff when you die in arenas and BGs? I dunno about anyone else, but having that on my gear would have me start using food in BGs when I normally don't use it at all, and food buffs have typically been stronger than a single gem. I'm sure someone will come along to say 'but you can still use a food buff while also just having a socket on the item instead', but I'm not someone who throws away gold like that on consumables. If I can preserve a buff through death though, that's definitely enough to get me to start using it!
Elethium Setting still shows as a crafting reagent for the Jewelcrafting gem clusters (at least on wowhead). They might just have not gotten around to removing it from those crafts as well yet, or perhaps the data-mining is wrong or incomplete atm.
For people asking about the validity of the data mining, we asked a dev to verify and he said that the spell was in SkillLineAbility.db2 (which usually defines skills/profession relationship), but it was removed in the latest build.