Besides Tempering, Masterworking is the second new crafting system announced by Blizzard during their Season 4 Campfire Chat livestream. Both systems will replace the current «Gear Upgrade» crafting system and look to solve some of the issues around late-game item acquisition and customization in Diablo 4.
Season 4 PTR Campfire Chat Summary
- Masterworking is a crafting system meant for upgrading your late-game items.
- Unlike Tempering, Masterworking will also work with Unique items.
- Much like the old Gear Upgrade system, Masterworking will increase existing affix values on an item.
- The Masterworking system will feature a total of 12 Upgrade Ranks.
- Upgrade Ranks 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 9, 10, and 11 will improve all affix values by about 5%.
- Every fourth rank, so Upgrade Ranks 4, 8, and 12, will greatly improve one random affix by about 25%.
- As shown in the example down below, Upgrade Rank 2 and 3 improve all three affixes by about 5%. Upgrade Rank 4 then increases the Maximum Life affix by about 20%.
- Tempered Affixes can also be improved through the Masterworking system — the example shown during the livestream did not reflect that.
- Masterworking is not a finite system, meaning that you will be able to try to «hit the right affixes» over and over again without having a «bricked» item after 12 upgrades.
- The example down below shows a fully-upgraded Legendary item. The blue affix, Intelligence, has been greatly improved once. The yellow affix, +% Damage, has been greatly improved twice. In case of the yellow affix, the two «big hits» combined with the other 9 Upgrade Ranks improves the affix value by almost 100%!
- Masterworking materials can primarily be found in the Pit, a new end-game dungeon challenge coming in Diablo 4 Season 4.
- It appears that players will only be rewarded with Masterworking materials at the end of a Pit run if they beat the boss within the time limit, thus completing the Mastery objective of the dungeon.
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