Forgotten Souls is a crucial material for upgrading and enchanting items in Diablo 4. Some of you might already know where to get them too.
However, most players would probably feel like they aren’t getting enough for the amount of time they are putting in into farming them.
We’ll talk about the details of how Forgotten Souls actually drop and what to focus on when farming them.
Salvaging Rare/Legendary/Unique Items
Once you start farming many items, you’ll see more items that don’t really improve your build. You can either sell these items or salvage them.
When you salvage rare and above items, they have a chance to give you some Forgotten Souls. This will make the overall gearing progression a lot easier since you won’t be punished for upgrading your items early in the game.
Helltide Events
Helltide events aren’t always available. However, the duration of Helltide events lasts for a whole hour and it usually comes out again after another hour.
These Helltide events have exclusive loot, such as Fiendish Rose, Aberrant Cinders, and Forgotten Souls.
This is where everyone farms their Forgotten Souls.
Some of you might have farmed this already and went around for the whole one hour grinding and only got a few Forgotten Souls.
This is because you should be target farming where these Forgotten Souls drop.
Forgotten Souls drop from elites and chests around the Helltide event. If you are just running around killing monsters, collecting Aberrant Cinders, and dying, you won’t be getting much Forgotten Souls.
You want to target farm elites and chests. These drop most of your Forgotten Souls. Elites are very hard to find, especially if the world is riddled with players.
However, monsters come in packs. To be extremely efficient, you should jump from pack to pack and collect all the Aberrant Cinders. Open all the ’75’ chests around the Helltide area.
These chests are mainly, helms, handguards, legguards, chest armor, rings, and boots. Opening these will give you some Forgotten Souls. It is worth noting that while the drop rate of Forgotten Souls is high when opening chests, you don’t necessarily get one all the time.
You do get a lot of legendaries and a decent chance to get some good uniques when opening chests. If you have a unique item in mind, you can keep opening that type of item piece to increase your chances of finding one.
This is why we are going for quantity over quality because amulets and light weaponry costs 125 cinders while heavy weaponry (2H) costs 150 cinders.
There are also two unique ways that give you practically guaranteed Forgotten Souls drops. One method is by finding and killing Kixxarth, the Helltide Assassin. The other involves finding the chest of mysteries for 175 Aberrant Cinders.
Kixxarth, the Helltide Assassin gives you amazing loot, including Forgotten Souls and Fiend Roses. However, if you are alone, it’ll be a pain to eliminate. This is because it is practically a world boss in the Helltide area.
I would still say it is worth soloing if no one is around just because Forgotten Souls are really hard to farm.
The next method is finding the chest of mysteries. It is basically like all the other chests, but it contains random loot. It costs 175 Aberrant Cinders to open while the others cost much less.
The tricky thing about the chest of mysteries is that the icon doesn’t show up on the map until you are near one. It is hard to find, but if you are literally going around farming monsters for Aberrant Cinders, you should find one.
The chest of mysteries drops 2-3x more loot than the normal chest. This includes the materials it drops. You’ll get an average of 4 Forgotten Souls and 4 Fiend Roses just for opening one.
How to Use Forgotten Souls Efficiently
Forgotten Souls are used to upgrade your items. These upgrades are significant power spikes to your gear especially if you hit all the right stats with good rolls. Upgrades are basically mandatory for all pieces… up to a certain extent.
This is because you need to be wise with your spending. Forgotten Souls are really hard to farm and upgrading to max takes a lot of materials. If you constantly find upgrades, you’ll find yourself lacking some Forgotten Souls in the future. So what should you be doing?
Here is a helpful endgame trick you can use. Let’s take an ancestral item with 5 available upgrade tiers as an example.
When you upgrade an item to tier 4, it’ll require a Forgotten Soul already. Upgrading it to max will require multiple Forgotten Souls. If you don’t have the perfect stats and it is only a slight upgrade to your gear, just go up to tier 4.
For certain items, like amulets with ‘+1 to a skill,’ when you upgrade it to max, it gets another +1. For other item slots it could go to as high as +4. These additional skill levels matter, especially for certain builds, like the Sorcerer Arc Lash that benefits well with + skill levels to defensives (to reduce CDs) or devouring flame/Glass Cannon (for more damage).
Sometimes it is worth spending those Forgotten Souls for these upgrades.
Let’s now go to enchanting. Enchanting an item rerolls a specific stat of an item into a different one. You can do this as many times as you want, but each roll requires a Forgotten Soul. This is where most of the materials are spent in the endgame.
In short, you want a ton of Forgotten Souls in the bag for these situations even if you are being thrifty with the usage.