In Diablo 4, besides upgrading characters and Paragon Board, another crucial way to enhance a character's overall capabilities is by continuously acquiring better gear and upgrading it.
To ensure your gear always has room to improve throughout the season, Diablo 4 introduced several gear upgrade mechanisms, primarily Tempering and Masterworking.
However, these two mechanisms have long been criticized for their excessive randomness, meaning that even consuming a large amount of upgrade materials may not yield the desired gear benefits.
To address this, Diablo 4 plans to radically change these two mechanisms starting with Season 11 and add a new Sanctification mechanism, further raising the room for gear upgrades.
We will now introduce these changes based on their performance in 2.5.0 PTR and analyze whether this overhaul is necessary.
What Is Masterworking?
This is an endgame crafting mechanic in Diablo 4. You need to farm gold and available materials beforehand and then craft them at the blacksmith to upgrade your gear's affixes by 8-12 levels.
It's generally not recommended to Masterworking items below level 750, as they are easily replaceable, and Masterworking them wastes materials.
Furthermore, Diablo 4 items between 750 and 800 can have their affixes upgraded by eight levels, and those above 800 can be upgraded by 12 levels. Therefore, the rarer and higher the level of your gear, the greater the value increase after Masterworking it.
However, this valuable mechanic has a tricky aspect: every four levels, only one random affix receives a 25% upgrade. This means that if you're unlucky, you might end up with useless affixes applied in three such upgrades.
While you can reset Masterworking by salvaging the gear, you only get a portion of the crafting materials back, not including gold, which is undoubtedly a waste of your resources.
What Changes Will Season 11 Bring?
To avoid potential waste from random upgrades, starting with Season 11, Masterworking will no longer boost gear affix effects, but will directly increase the gear's base stats.
Based on this, each Masterworking will randomly increase the gear's stats by 2-5 levels, up to a maximum of 20 levels. After that, you can perform one last Masterworking to obtain the ultimate affix bonus.
This ultimate bonus will upgrade a random non-high-level affix on the gear to Greater Affix. This upgrade result is changeable and will not affect the gear's existing Masterworking bonuses.
What Is Tempering?
This mechanism is more widely applicable than Masterworking. You can add relevant affixes to your gear by finding Tempering Manuals during your exploration. Furthermore, Tempering only requires materials, not gold.
The randomness of this mechanism lies in the fact that the affixes included in each Tempering Manual appear randomly. You might perform multiple Tempering runs but still fail to obtain your desired affix.
If you don't intend to waste time and materials gambling and think that obtaining an affix is enough to "make do," you're mistaken, because a meaningless affix will actually lower the value of your gear.
Changes In Season 11
After the update, when Tempering your gear in Season 11, you can directly specify the affixes you want each time using the recipe in Tempering Manual, eliminating the frustration of randomness!
However, to balance this, a gear can now only have one Tempering affix instead of the previous maximum of three. But honestly, getting the best one faster is always better than endless gambling, isn't it?
What Is Sanctification?
This system, added in Season 11, allows your gear to continue to improve after Tempering and Masterworking! Once sanctification is complete, the gear is permanently "finished" and cannot be modified further.
The benefits of sanctification are random; they might include gaining a Sanctification affix or new powers, or even making your gear's durability never deplete. Regardless, they are well worth the investment.
How Are These Changes Reviewed?
While the performance and experience on PTR may not fully represent Season 11, it's sufficient to evaluate these new mechanics.
With the reduced randomness of the benefits from Tempering and Masterworking, you'll notice a subtle decrease in the amount of materials dropped, such as Obducite.
This is understandable, as the reduced or eliminated randomness means a lower chance of needing to reset Tempering and Masterworking results, while the materials required to complete the upgrade haven't increased.
Therefore, from this perspective, these changes allow the updated Tempering and Masterworking mechanics to function better, preventing imbalances.
Furthermore, Season 11 will allow you to craft some Tempering materials yourself. For example, Veiled Crystals and Forgotten Souls.
As for Sanctification system, because its buffs are random and the gear cannot be changed after completion, player opinions are mixed. After all, if you randomly get a useless Sanctification affix, you can't even reset it.
However, before 2.5.0 PTR ended, according to the player community and other statistics, the percentage of unlucky players was not large; most people could obtain the desired buffs through Sanctification.
Therefore, after Season 11 goes live, if these gear upgrade mechanisms in PTR don't undergo significant changes, you will be able to upgrade your gear and even your entire build more efficiently, resulting in a better season experience.
Season 11 is expected to officially launch on Tuesday, December 9th. At that time, you will be able to personally verify whether these new mechanisms will bring positive effects! Let's look forward to it!
