When Diablo 4 Season 4 was newly released, its Masterworking item system was also upgraded. With Masterworking item upgrade system, this pretty much has replaced the old blacksmith upgrades.
But do it in a much more comprehensive way and it is only even accessible if you are able to defeat level 100 enemies in the first place. That said, there is a fair bit of complexity around this system and while it may seem simple on the surface.
There are a lot of ways that you can either waste your materials or your time around this. If you don’t know the specifics of what’s going on with Masterworking.
So today we’re just going to go over all the important things to know about it, how best to get the materials for it, how best to spend them when it is reasonable to aim for what thresholds of Masterworking.
All those kinds of things, starting at the top, then a quick summary. Masterworking has 12 upgrade levels to it, upgrades 4, 8 and 12 are all a 25% increase to one Affix at random. All other upgrades are just a 5% increase to every single Affix.
These get progressively more and more expensive both for Diablo 4 items required and for the gold cost of the upgrades as you get further into the Journey of an item.
When To Reset?
And the first question as a result of this is when should you upgrade, when should you hold an item where it is and when should you press that evert tempting reset button.
To put it simply, if an item has no Greater Affixes on it that is relevant to you, I wouldn’t recommend putting it past 4 out of 12. It’s just not really worth that level of investment when Greater Affixes items are relatively common.
If an item has one Greater Affix that is relevant to you, 8 out of 12 is totally reasonable to go for.
Because the likelihood of the item being replaced anytime soon becomes far lower, the better that the initial item is. Anything with more than one relevant Greater Affix or things like a Unique that is build defining and required to keep around or things like Uber Uniques.
Of course, for obvious reasons, anything that you know is staying in your build for a pretty long time unless you get ridiculously lucky on a new drop.
Those are the things that are worth hunting the whole way up to 12 out of 12 through this system. Because those last few upgrades do get ridiculously both expensive as far as Diablo 4 gold and the time required to farm the materials as well.
How To Reset?
On that note, let’s start talking about resetting items. The only random part of Masterworking are those 4th, 8th and 12th upgrades. The major upgrades, as I like to call them. But these can also be pretty build defining depending on where they go. There are a number of genuinely meta builds right now. That currently relies on hitting your Masterworking major upgrades on one specific Affix.
And if you get it wrong, it sort of hurts the build in a major way, and in those builds setting is worth it because it is simply required to make them function.
Aside from those specific items in those Niche Cases, generally speaking, I would avoid resetting an item unless it is again something that you know is pretty much perfect for you. And you are not going to be replacing for a fairly long time.
Because resetting itself costs 5 million gold at least right now. And there’s absolutely no guarantee that you will hit Affix that you want on the second or third or fourth time that you try it. It could take a lot of rules. So be prepared for that if you reset an item, you’re really really committing to quite a lot of investment.And that is just a hell of a lot of resources required.
So you should probably save that process for items that are really quite valuable to you in a longer term sense. Again, outside of situations of one or two items or slots where your Masterworking can make or break your bill like things that require a very exact amount of cooldown reduction or a skill rank things like that.
On top of that, I would never reset a Diablo 4 Unique item unless you are already in possession of the materials and gold that you need to get it back up to the same rank you already had it. Even if the major upgrade 25% went wrong, you are still losing 15% to all Affixes on the item. If you reset even as low as 4 out of 12, so always make sure that you can get back.
Aside from that, you don’t want to wait longer than you need to. And more specifically, you don’t want to spend if you know you’re going to reset. If you know an item needs very particular Masterworks to be right for you, and it rolls wrong on the upgrade four. Don’t wait until 8 out of 12. Just reset that at 4 before you waste even more materials investing in a bad upgrade path to begin with.
When Decide To Reset, What Do We Need?
With that, then let’s talk about the actual materials that you need for this. And how to best get them for each stage of your Masterworking process. The activity that drops the required materials for this, is Pit of Artificers. Tier 1 to 30 of this activity drop Obducite Tier 1 Masterworking material. And this applies to upgrade 1to 4 on items.
Tier 31 to 60 of Pits drops Ingolith. This is Tier 2 Masterworking material, and this applies to upgrades 5 to 8. And then Tier 61 and above drops Netherite. Tier 3 material that applies to upgrades 9 to 12.
Something that I have to surprise a lot of people still don’t actually know is that you can trade these materials down at any Alchemists to a lower grade version of Pit drop material.
And even those who do know often still ask, is it worth it to do that or should I just Farm lower Tier Pits that drop the material I want, anyway? And the answer is if your goal is Masterworking material specifically, you should at all times be doing the highest Tier Pit that you can comfortably run without dying.
The simple reason is that the material trade down value is actually really quite good. It’s a very fair ratio. Actually, they severely dropped the gold cost of doing this too.
So it is basically a negligible cost. And by far, that makes it the best way to farm Tier 1 and Tier 2 materials. As you know, farming Tier 3 materials and then trading those down. So always do that if you are able to do so.
A couple more important points of note as far as Pit Tiers.
Pay Attention To These Pit Tiers
Tier 61 is the start of Netherite dropping. But the amount that you get continues to escalate each Tier that you climb past that. For most average bills, the cap out point you’ll reach probably for comfortable clears.
If you have good stats and Affixes to back it up, seems to be around Tier 80 without needing to worry too much about dying. Though again this is considering builds with pretty much perfect Affixes, even if not Greater Affixes or High Masterworking by Denny means.
Any build capable of doing 100 plus is considered being in a pretty ridiculous Tier of builds, and this is where you get an achievement for completing it as well.
But very few builds are at a point of comfortably farming 100s at a rate that it’s worth doing so more than an 80s if you’re just after materials. Because the health just scales exponentially on the enemies as you climb in Pit Tiers.
So if you just want materials, 80 is probably the highest you really want to be able to clear comfortably.
So summing everything up basically, Masterworking is a genuinely strong process starting in Season 4 if you manage to hit every single major upgrade on the same Affixes. You can actually make it be around 120% of its base value, which is a sort of nuts, and if you do that to an already Greater Affixes on an item that can reach some absolutely potential.
But there are a lot of ways that you can waste your Masterworking materials on your way to accomplishing these types of things.
First, avoid upgrading past 4 out of 12 on items without Greater Affixes of note and avoid going past 8 out of 12 on anything that you can see yourself replacing within the next 10 hours or so of gameplay. Otherwise, you’ll find yourself just running out of resources extremely quickly.
When it comes to resetting your Masterwork upgrades, you should only do it either on items where one specific Masterwork Affixes is a necessity for your build. Or on items that again, you cannot see yourself replacing within the next 10 or so hours of gameplay. When it comes to resetting, never do it unless you have the materials and gold to get the item up to the same upgrade level it was before.
Or you will just be weaker in the meantime and never upgrade past 4 to 12 on an item.
If you know for a fact, you are going to reset it, anyway. For materials, just always do the highest Pit Tier, that you can comfortably and safely complete and then trade down your materials at Alchemist if you need to.
And that’s pretty much it for today then, just a quick and concise but comprehensive guide to Masterworking in Season 4, at least as it currently stands before the upcoming patch 1.4 one. As this new mechanic is just extremely important and somewhat deceptively deep if you don’t read up on it properly.
So I wanted to try to make it as accessible as possible, as it’s just an incredible amount of power that you can gain from the system. If you respect it and put some time and effort into it as well.
