As we mentioned in our plan for Patch 0.2.1 last week, we'll be adding a plethora of new crafting socketables in the endgame.
The socketables system is one of the many crafting systems available in Path of Exile 2. The idea is for them to help you out during your campaign progression to fill out any missing attributes or resists that you might be lacking. After you've progressed into the Endgame and fill out those stats in your gear, they can be swapped out for different stats like damage or defence so that you can min/max your character.
However, one of the issues that we currently have with the socketable crafting system is that by the time you get to the endgame there isn't really anything new or exciting to find to replace your old runes.
In 0.2.1 we are adding 22 new Runes. All of these new Runes will be world drops only, which means you won't be able to upgrade any existing Runes to get them. Here are a few examples that speak for themselves:
This is 1 of the 14 new Soul Cores, Tacati's Soul Core of Affliction. Soul Cores can be found in Endgame Ultimatum encounters in the Trial of Chaos.
Lastly, here's 1 of the 7 new Talismans, the Talisman of Thruldana. These new Talismans can be dropped from Azmerian Spirit-possessed enemies.
As you can see from the crafting socketables we've shown above, the power ceiling from socketables is being raised. As these are also intended to be valuable chase drops, you shouldn't expect to find these trivially. These are rare, and they are intended to be mid to long term character upgrades that you can do incrementally as you play deeper and deeper into the Endgame.
We've got a lot more coming in Patch 0.2.1, which we're still working on. Later this week, we'll also show off some of the new Unique Items that will also be released in the update. Despite our attempts to have 0.2.1 ready for deployment this week, we do need a little bit of extra time so we have shifted it to the following week.