Up until now, jewel sockets have clearly not been passive skills. Intuitive Leap/thread of hope cannot allocate them, and no wording indicates they are.
However, the new cluster jewels describe them otherwise. For example, Voices says 'Adds 3 Jewel Socket Passive Skills' and the rare jewel says '1 added passive skill is a jewel socket'. Does this imply that they are now considered passive skills and intuitive leap/thread of hope will be able to allocate them?
External link →Jewel sockets are and always have been passive skills. At the time we first added them to the tree, they were specifically Notable passive skills, although I believe that's no longer the case.
They are allocated on the passive tree and have passive skill popups when you hover them, showing you what stats they grant (which will be no stats unless a jewel is socketed into them). They're passive skills. They've never not been passive skills.
Intuitive Leap does not affect them because a fundamental property of jewel sockets is that they cannot be modified by any jewel except the one in that specific socket.
Unfortunately, those jewels specifically won't let you allocate jewel sockets for a reason, to avoid issues with passive tree disconnection.
So if anything they'll just get reworded to "can allocate non-Jewel passives..." instead.
The reason is more fundamental than that. No jewel can affect any socket other than the one it's in. That's just fundamental to how jewels and sockets work. That doesn't and never has meant that the sockets aren't passive skills.
Is letting you allocate it really something that affects the socket though? I guess it could be considered doing so, but it doesn't actually modify the socket itself the way, say, conquering or other jewels do to other nodes. Unless "You can allocate this node as if it were connected to your tree (but not connect to other nodes from it)" is a secret modifier to the node that lets you allocate it?
Yes, that fundamentally works by changing the affected passive to have an extra stat that makes it be allowed to allocate without being connected.
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