BTW, in response to above poster claiming you can get a 4soc war scepter by taking one from norm cows to Larzuk and that items found in norm are capped at 4 soc with q or cube regardless of ilvl, I'm not replicating that. I've taken War Scepter and Double Axe from norm cows to Larzuk and gotten 5os as chart says I should. Even went so far as to take an ilvl43 Crystal Sword from Throne to him to see if it'll get 6, and it does. I've cubed a low level Double Axe I shopped from Fara and pulled in 4os as well. For reference, I'm doing this on single player 1.13c with Plugy, as I'm not playing realm any longer. I don't believe that there's any difference in the coding on sockets between sp and bnet. If I'm wrong, I'm fine with that, but I'd like a link for reference.
I'm convinced that all the published charts regarding ilvl and sockets are correct, and that the only difficulty related caps on how many sockets appear in an item are how many will spawn, with 3 for norm and 4 for nm. So, I still maintain that if you want a 5os holy shock scepter, norm cows is fine if you take it to Larzuk.
As far as 4os scepters go, one of the thing about runewords is the difficulty in finding a suitable base. The ilvl26-40 possibilities won't apply to most/all exceptional/elite bases. For cube/larz purposes isn't a scepter with a listed cap of 4os at any level. If you were after a 4os war scepter, the best place to find one would be NM cows, since there's a 4os spawn limit in nm. Same goes for trying to get an exceptional eth base for something like Oath.
This post was edited by Khboer on Jul 24 2017 03:20pm