Boots sockets suddenly stopped working today

This sounds insane but today while in Act 7 chamber of sins I went back to the bridge encampment to empty inventory. I had picked up a better pair of boots so I dropped them in the boots slot saw that they had a lot more armour & everything worked but I would have to change socket colour and fusing so I replaced them in slot with current ones then jumped into portal back in the game.
I discovered none of the skill gems on the boots worked anymore. I have Bladefall, War banner plus support gems culling strike and chance to flee in the boots.
When I hit Bladefall button the game animation shows my characters arm go up but no blades drop when I try War Banner nothing at all happens. I have rebooted several times, no change, fixed up the 'new' boots same thing nothing works.
I keep thinking "C'mon bloke you're doin something wrong but I cannot see what. Has anyone come across this odd bug?
I noticed that bladefall once had a bug where blades dropped off screen but I have checked this is not that.

This has still not resolved. I have tried all the recommendations in the bug section: deleted my cache, deleted config files, run packCheck.exe and there has been no change.
I have tried other skill gems in the boots and they don't work either.
This is my second character in this league so I tried that character out and it's boots work fine.
As far as I can see it must be something with my character on the server end because when I deleted caches & cfg files they should have recompiled from the server.
The fact that it is only sockets in the Boots slot if I move the skill gems elsewhere they work fine reinforces that there is no problem with the gems requirements. There is no problem taking the boot out of the boots slot and putting them back.
Frankly I cannot see what else I can do to prove the problem isn't with my rig or network connection.

Has anyone seen anything like this before in PoE it has me stumped right at the moment when my build was coming good. The animated blades were finally starting to defeat all enemies and I was about ready to ditch Sunder which I had been using as a backup to get out of trouble whilst Bladefall and Animate Weapons had upgraded sufficiently.

If you have a suggestion please let me know.

Are you sure your character meets the stat requirements for the boots as well as the gems socketed in them?

If not, the gearslot will be colored in red, the items stats such as res or life etc will not apply and the skillgems in that gearslot wont work.


It sounds like you did have the stats needed to equip the boots, then you probably changed other items or your tree afterwards and now you are lacking str or dex or whatever, resulting in what you are describing.