Diablo 4 offers many ways to strengthen your hero with its blacksmith and jeweler. They repair your items and can even upgrade them. Depending on the refinement, your gear becomes noticeably stronger, but when is such an investment worthwhile and what should you consider? We will show you.
How can I upgrade items? To upgrade items in Diablo 4, you need to visit the blacksmith for weapons and armor and the jeweler for jewelry. Both offer services for gold and materials to enhance your items once you have reached the necessary level.
What is the benefit of upgrading items? Each upgrade to your items increases the item power by 5 points. Additionally, the base values, such as armor or damage per second, are also increased on your items.
However, not every upgrade is worthwhile, as Diablo 4 has hidden levels for its items, known as breakpoints.
If you exceed one of these breakpoints when upgrading, your items are significantly strengthened with their perks.
Items have breakpoints that noticeably enhance your armor
What are breakpoints? These breakpoints are levels during upgrading that you can exceed when you reach a certain value of your item power. Since these levels are not directly visible, data miners have uncovered them. The following values should be considered:
- Level 1
- Value 1 to 149
- Level 2
- Value 150 to 339
- Level 3
- Value 340 to 459
- Level 4
- Value 460 to 624
- Level 5
- Value 625 to 724
- Level 6
- Value 725+
- Additionally, there are 2 important settings for gear
If you have gloves with an item value of 146 and level them up once at the blacksmith, the item will be upgraded to level 2, as 5 points are added to your item value for each upgrade. So you will have a glove with an item value of 151, but that’s not all.
What should I consider with breakpoints? If you exceed a level when upgrading, not only your base values but also the bonuses of the respective gear are adjusted, as they must correspond to the respective level.
However, these adjustments do not always yield positive results, as the YouTuber wudijo has noted, these changes are a matter of luck. Either you get good rolls, or the values are comparatively worse than before your upgrade.
So, keep in mind that when you upgrade items, they should be positioned close to the level thresholds; otherwise, you won’t benefit from the noticeable boost in your stats.
Don’t know which world tier you should play first? Then we have a tip for you:
When is it worth upgrading items? That depends on the items and their level. YouTuber wudijo himself advises against upgrading items until level 30, as you can manage well with unupgraded gear until then.
Later, when you are close to the endgame and have found good items suited to your build, upgrades might make sense. Upgrades are expensive, so save your materials and gold for worthwhile upgrades.
Another tip: break down the items from the start and sell them later. Items yield more gold toward the end of the game, but crafting materials are always the same.
Here we show you how you can quickly reach level 100 in Diablo 4: Diablo 4: Quick level up – Guide to level 100
