Shards of Domination Overview - Shard Effects, Domination Sockets, Set Bonuses

By Squishei Last Updated: 2022/08/02 Changelog Patch: 10.2.6

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Sanctum of DominationSanctum of DominationChanges in Season 4How Shards of Domination Works in Patch 9.1Sanctum of DominationSanctum of DominationSanctum of DominationSanctum of DominationHelms, Shoulders, ChestsSanctum of DominationSoulfire ChiselStygiaBonesmith HeirmirreusableRunic DominionLeg

Blood: Chest, Legs (Cloth, Mail)

Frost: Shoulder, Legs (Leather, Plate)

Unholy: Helms

Domination SocketsHelms, Shoulders, ChestsSanctum of DominationSanctum of Domination

Cloth: Bracers & Belt

Leather: Gloves & Boots

Mail: Belt & Boots

Plate: Bracers & Gloves

our compilationDomination Sockets Outside of RaidStygia

Cloth Belt - Cincture of Enveloping Death

Leather Hands - Gloves of Advancing Death

Mail Belt - Chain of Encircling Death

Plate - Gauntlets of Death's Guardian

Shard of Domination Effects

Rank

Name

Ominous

Desolate

Foreboding

Portentous

Blood Shards of Domination

Shard of Bek (Blood Shard) Shard of Bek: Your damage is increased by 1.5% when you have 50% or more health than your target.
Ranks: 1.5%, 1.88%, 2.25%, 2.63%, 3%
Shard of Jas (Blood Shard) Shard of Jas: Incoming healing you receive is increased by 0.7%. Your maximum health is increased by 300.
Ranks: 0.7%, 0.9%, 1.1%, 1.3%, 1.5%
Ranks: 300, 375, 450, 525, 600
Shard of Rev (Blood Shard) Shard of Rev: Your Leech is increased by 30.
Ranks: 30, 37, 45, 52, 60

Frost Shards of Domination

Unholy Shards of Domination

Shard of Dyz (Unholy Shard) Shard of Dyz: Damaging a target increases your damage done to that target by 0.25% for 4 sec, stacking up to 3 times.
Ranks: 0.25%, 0.31%, 0.37%, 0.44%, 0.5%
Shard of Zed (Unholy Shard) Shard of Zed: Your helpful spells and abilities have a chance to grant your target an Unholy Aura, draining 166 health from nearby enemies every 2 sec for 10 sec.
Ranks: 166, 208, 250, 292, 334
Shard of Oth (Unholy Shard) Shard of Oth: Your Speed is increased by 30.
Ranks: 30, 37, 45, 52, 60

Acquiring Shards of DominationShard of RevMor'gethUpgrading Shards of DominationStygian EmbersStygian EmberStygian Ember

Drops from raid bosses, though the exact amounts are currently unknown are will be updated when we know more.

The Korthia Weekly quest Shaping Fate drops 10 Stygian Ember.

Upgrade Costs for Shards of DominationStygian EmberSanctum of DominationStygian Emberno skipping ranks

Rank

Name

Upgrade Cost

Normal

Ominous

Desolate

Foreboding

Portentous

Rune Word Set BonusMaw, Torghast and the Sanctum of Domination raid

To activate the Unholy set bonus, a Helm from the raid must be equipped.

To activate the Frost sets bonus, Shoulders or Legs (Leather, Plate) from the raid must be equipped.

To activate the Blood set bonus, a Chest or Legs (Cloth, Mail) from the raid must be equipped.

Blood Shards of Domination Set Bonus

Blood Link - While inside the Maw or Torghast, damaging an enemy establishes a Blood Link. Blood Link pulses every 3 sec, dealing 540 / 810 / 1080 / 1450 / 1620 Shadow damage and healing you for 100% of damage dealt. If your Blood Link would overheal you, it instead heals a nearby ally. Limit 1.

Frost Shards of Domination Set Bonus

Winds of Winter - While inside the Maw or Torghast, each time you deal a critical strike, the Winds accumulate 6 / 9 / 12 / 15 / 18% of that effect, up to a cap of 180 / 270 / 360 / 450 / 540 per critical strike. Every 20 sec, the Winds unleash, dealing Frost damage equal to the total accumulation and and surrounding you in the Winds for 20 sec, absorbing 100% of damage dealt by the Winds.

Unholy Shards of Domination Set Bonus

Chaos Bane - While inside the Maw or Torghast, your spells and abilities have a chance to drain a Soul Fragment from your target, granting you 10 / 15 / 20 / 25 / 30 Primary stat for 30 sec and stacking up to 15 times. When you reach 15 stacks, unleash Chaos Bane, dealing 1500 / 2250 / 3000 / 3750 / 4500 Shadow damage split between nearby enemies and granting you 300 / 450 / 600 / 750 / 900 Primary stat for 15 sec.

How to Unsocket a Shard of DominationSoulfire Chisel

Soulfire Chisel is acquired from Bonesmith Heirmir in Korthia.

Soulfire Chisel costs 2,500 Stygia to purchase.

Soulfire Chisel can be reused as many times as you want and wherever you want.

Comments

Comment by Coltreign

Please note that Shard of Tel states "Your critical hits" and not "Your critical heals". This should eliminate some potential confusion for any classes looking at the frost shards without the ability to cast healing spells.

Comment by adyaa

Do u must have each socket of different frost shard? Or can u actually stack up for example 3 shards of cor?

Comment by Wuxian

To me it seems weird that they would again introduce more systems that further complicate gear.
We've had several systems over the years that I don't all remember by heart, but what sticks
out are the tertiary stats, random sockets, x-forged, reforging stats, adding sockets via npcs,
the whole Enchanting debacle.

I thought the WoW dev team had "learned" that convoluting the gear process is bad.
That's supposedly the reason why you get less items now through m+ dungeons (except at the very high end).

Now it looks like they want to incentivize players to raid, when in my mind that's just not an option
for some people (due to scheduling or expendable free time). I know me and my friends who regularly run m+
wouldn't be able to run an organized raid like we used to when we were in school.

I guess we'll see how this system ends up, but I'm just not confident that it will be fun.

Comment by Qoko

Correct me if I'm wrong, but from a practical standpoint this likely means you want to:

Get all five Shard gear pieces asap.
Equip shards for your role, socketing Unholy in the helm, Frost in the shoulder and Blood in the chest.
Equip the remaining shards of the type which bonus benefits your role the most in the offset pieces.
Upgrade your set (raid) or role (M+) shards evenly.
Upgrade role (raid) or off-role (M+, if you use them) shards evenly.

EDIT 11/8: in the raid, sets are considerably stronger than separate shards, and I've corrected the above to reflect this. The above equip priority assumes you don't have higher item level or better stat budgeted items in the helm, shoulder and chest slot; in that case, equipping role shards in the offset pieces might be better, so the main stat pieces can be swapped out easily for non-raid content. Again, it's not required, it just saves swapping Shards constantly.

For the shard upgrading, if we keep shards indefinitely, we need 900 Ember, 100/shard. With the weekly rewarding 10, you can slowly get there by not raiding but it will take close to two years. If you do raid (which makes these useful, so it makes sense), you get, per boss, 1 on LFR, 2 on normal, 3 on hc and 4 on Mythic. This is cumulative, so it's max 40 from bosses. The named mobs in the instance also drop them, so don't skip them!

Equip example leather dps assuming Chaos Bane is best overall:

If you want to swap to the Frost bonus, put Tel and Kyr in the last two pieces.
If you want to swap to the Blood bonus, put Jas and Rev in the last two pieces.
If you want to swap to another role but keep the Unholy bonus, swap the respective Blood and Frost shards in the chest and shoulder piece.
If you want to swap to another role and bonus, you'll have to redo most of it.

Comment by AlexandrSoft

So spellID said that it is 'while inside the Maw or Torghast', here it said that 'and in SoD' - where is truth? I check a few logs from ptr and can't find any buffs by it's name.

upd: find out on few logs by spell=355752 (Runic Dominion) and not by actual procs name/id.

Comment by elfomal

How do those works on M+ and PVP modes?

Will any of em affect by any way it?

Or its just some raid / maw based extra buff?

Comment by Arni32167

I really hope pvp gear will still be better in PvP, so I can just ignore this shards system entirely. TOO MANY SYSTEMS ffs.

Comment by Ringthayne

I think this is an experimental way to bring back "Set Bonuses" without doing exactly set bonuses. It adds power to raid gear in a few slots. Gives raiders excitement about new power they can attain. And, is easier to balance compared to set bonuses, among the classes, since all the classes can access the same bonuses. Easier to balance than all the hundreds of azerite powers as well.

In my opinion, there are already plenty of incentives to do decently hard M+, which is not too challenging (guaranteed maximum ilevel gear each week from only an hour or two time investment and coordination with 4 others). Or likewise rated PvP.

Giving a bit more incentive to do raiding is a good thing as it is really the only significant 'new' endgame content in 9.1 (minor affix changes in M+ and minor PvP tweaks, I don't really consider new content).

Comment by Grogal

To activate the Unholy set bonus, a Helm from the raid must be equipped.
To activate the Frost sets bonus, Shoulders from the raid must be equipped.
To activate the Blood set bonus, a Chest from the raid must be equipped.

What bull$%^& is this? Who the hell designed this?
So if i'm unlucky and get 4 items but NOT the slot item needed for the bonus then I'm screwed?
Why make everything so damn difficult? Why not just any 3 gear items? Why must there be one specific to get the bonus?
Makes zero sense.

Comment by Keatran

Stygian Embers also have a drop chance on killing none bosses in SoD, so you could use a raid group to farm these from trash packs in the raid so BoE Farming groups or groups for specifically farming Embers will be a good call.

This is from experience in the Normal raid yesterday

Comment by Altheis

Week 1, have cleared up to KT on my mage and got one shard, for healers. Hoping the drop rates on these get a little better than gear pieces and they become appropriate to role/loot spec

Comment by Nisch93

Can you have 2 sockets on an item? As in 1 domination socket and 1 regular socket?
Or do the armortypes apart from leather lose out on 1-2 potential sockets?

Comment by Ubelogin

uprading Oth from Desolate(45 speed) to Foreboding appears to also be at 45.... ? Am i trippin or are others seeing this also?

Comment by Oblivious

More faff. /sigh

Comment by TheRedRogue

As an additional Domination gear source-

The Archivist's Codex reputation at Tier 6 will offer you the option to purchase a 239 piece of Domination gear. It will be the same armor slot as the one sold by Death's Advance at Honored, but I didn't see it mentioned in the guide and figured it'd be a good bit of info for people to know about. ^^

Comment by Brelshar

Any system that requires you to use a source like Wowhead to know exactly what and how much you need to do where and when is a *bad* system.

Comment by Ryoame

As of July 21st, the 3P-Bonus from the Blood-Set seems to be bugged.

During the whole Eye of the Jailer-mythic encounter (fight duration 7m42s) i didn't get a single procc from the setbonus.

Only our Hunter had a consistent buff-uptime, which is also shown in the logs: Only 1 stack of blood link was active at any time.

If this is working as intended, the Bloodshard-3Piece is useless except for one person in the raid.

Edit: Somehow the debuff won't get applied by some of your spells.
As a Frostmage: Frostbolt, Flurry, Icelance, Blizzard, Frozen Orb and Mirrors of Torment (so basically all of my major spells) won't apply the Blood Link debuff, only Cone of Cold, Frostnova, Fireblast and Arcane Explosion will apply the debuff.

Comment by Knomulo

Every tank guide tells us to get Blood Link set asap. Are they blind? 1.6k healing / dmg every 3 seconds is trash. For a Brewmaster monk, Winds of Winter is gonna net more healing through Celestial Fortune. Plus there is an absorb shield at the end. Heck, even Chaos bane is better than Blood Link for tanking imo. A stacking primary stat buff is surely to be more precious for most classes. Am i missing something?

Comment by Asaliah

Can Korthia gear have domination socket ? I can only do LFR and the iLvl sucks there.

Comment by snace

If you wish to upgrade a shard that is currently in a socket, you must use a Soulfire Chisel to extract the shard first.

Comment by wingram

I've visited Bonesmith Heirmir and upgraded all of my Shards to Ominous but I can't see any option to upgrade to higher levels like Desolate or Foreboding. This is happening on all of my toons which range from Renown levels 44 to 60.

Is there something required to unlock the higher levels or is this a bug?

Comment by rubenco5

to activate the bonus i need to have 3 different pieces of domination gear? or is there a way to 3 socket a single piece of gear?

Comment by Vanderz

You skipped a pretty important step: how do you actually socket shard?

Right clicking on the shard in my inventory does nothing.

Comment by eco23

Ok, so whenever I want to upgrade any of my shards (socketed) I need to first farm 2500 Stygia for each to extract it on top of the upgrade cost? Am I missing something or is this that stupid?

Comment by Dangerbook

Note that it is easy to hunt for a misplaced shard and overlook that it has been socketed in a piece of gear that got replaced and is just sitting in inventory. Apparently when I got the mythic wrist I threw it right on, kept playing mythic without realizing I had left the shard in the normal piece, and when I hunted for shard in inventory it pulled up the other shards and highlighted the armor too (but that was not enough of a clue). It took way too much time to crank the focus off narrow and see there was a little shard mark on the piece of gear and put it on again to extract the shard.

Comment by alpanhell

This is just a terrible system (another terrible system). I ran Sanctum for the first time and I ended up with 6 gems and zero gear to put them in (was a complete run). Because these dopey game designers made drop rates for gear so bad and took away the bonus rolls all you end up with a bag full of useless gems.

Comment by alpanhell

Comment by Sarthorius

We're still in SL (current) and these are 'new' and IMO they won't even be sought out in future expansions for Timewalking purposes. I mean, those 3 'main slots' (Head, Shoulder and Chest) are already 'locked' by the BfA Azerite Armor for instance, WAY Better to get, keep, and use on those content. Would bother doing SoD for collectibles and achievements only, and be done with it. All other slots we can use gear with more slots or better stats.

Comment by Affliction1985

unless I missed something (this is confusing! so possible on my part...) there is no official "list" of all the armor that is possible to come with the socket already? I checked with the quartermaster in Korthia and understand I can buy one piece there- as a warlock the Cloth Belt - Cincture of Enveloping Death is the only item available. Ok, but what about all the other pieces? If it's "possible" to get a drop from a raid- they're saying any and all Helms/Shoulders/Chest pieces- but which ones? Are they ALL soul bound? Do any of these ever sell at auction? I'm sorry but it just seems very vague. I also saw a comment from someone that says you can buy a piece after you reach Tier 6 with the Archivist Codex, assuming this is the same piece I noted above but again would be nice to have the names of ALL THE ARMOR possible to obtain that comes with the socket.

Shards of Domination Overview - Shard Effects, Domination Sockets, Set Bonuses

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