Diablo 4 introduces a new way of upgrading your items. If you have gone to the local blacksmith already, you have learned how to upgrade your items already.
However, you can upgrade your items in the game in various ways. These methods are practically mandatory if you want to max out your build.
These upgrades can all be combined to create the perfect item for your build.
In short, this guide will walk you through all these methods, such as upgrades, aspects, enchants, and gems.
Four Ways of Upgrading Your Items
Raw Upgrades
When you go to the local blacksmith in a town, you’ll be able to salvage, repair, or upgrade your items.
The blacksmith allows you to upgrade armor and weapons. Each item can be upgraded multiple times, depending on the item’s item level. The higher the item level, the more upgrades are available.
Each upgrade costs material. It’ll be skins, veiled crystals, and coiling wards (if legendary) for armor. For weapons, it’ll be ores, veiled crystals, and baleful fragments (if legendary). Jewelry is the same as weapons but requires abstruse sigils instead of baleful fragments if legendary.
When you upgrade your items, the stats on the items improve. If your item rolled critical strike chance, it’ll improve on the roll significantly after each upgrade.
However, some stats do not improve when you upgrade the item, such as +1 evade charges, +1 rank to “skill,” and other more deterministic rolls.
Ancestral Trick
There are certain item-level breakpoints that give items a significant power boost. For example, you’ll notice that items below item level 725 are significantly weaker than items above item level 725.
The stat rolls are quite different, even if they are both ancestral items.
The trick is to have an item that is close to item level 725 and use the upgrade to reach the 725 breakpoint.
Each upgrade gives you +5, so you could have items around 710-724 and upgrade them. The tricky part is that even if all the rolls get to a higher tier, they also get rerolled.
For example, if you have gloves with 3% – 7% attack speed at 720 item level and it rolled at 7%, upgrading it past item level 725 can alter the max roll. It can be rerolled to 4% attack speed but enter a higher stat tier roll at (4%-11% attack speed).
To help determine these stats, I suggest turning on advanced tooltips in the settings to see.
Enchants
Enchants are quite random, but it does help you get a chance on improving your gear even more.
Enchanting removes a specific stat on an item and re-rolling it into a different stat. The random stat will be completely random, but you cannot roll the same stats your item already has.
If you have a stat on a good item that you don’t need, you can easily enchant it and get that chance to replace it with a more useful stat.
These enchants are applicable to legendary items too. Once you have enchanted an item, it will no longer be tradable, and it will be marked as “Account Bound.”
When you are min-maxing your builds, you are searching for the perfect item for each gear slot. With the knowledge of enchanting, you can pick up items that rolled perfectly except for a single stat.
You can enchant those items to get more chances in finding your perfect item.
Aspects
Aspects are technically unique modifiers that are extracted from legendary items. If you have an item that rolled a good aspect but is on a bad base item, you can just extract the modifier and use it on a more useful item.
Let’s say you have an aspect called “of the expectant.” The offensive version does “Attacking enemies with a Basic Skill increases the damage of your next Core Skill cast by [5 – 10]%, up to 30%.”
By extracting this aspect from an item, you will gain the aspect as an item placed in your aspects tab.
Place the item you want to upgrade with your extracted aspect and upgrade the item. Imprinting the aspect can cost a lot of gold, so make sure you don’t do this often when you are leveling up and finishing the campaign.
Gem Sockets
Another way of upgrading your item is by placing gems into them. You might be thinking that you need to have items that already have empty sockets to place gems.
If you go to the local jeweler, you can upgrade, extract, and add sockets to your items.
Like the first method mentioned here, you can also upgrade your jewelry normally.
Go to the add sockets tab and place the item on which you want to put empty sockets. Click upgrade, and it should cost you a chunk of gold and a Scattered Prism.
Once you have an empty socket on your item, you can freely place the gems to greatly improve your character’s stats.
Learning all these upgrade types will eventually help you come up with your own build.
