Season 4 has introduced some new features in Diablo 4. One of them is the crafting systems Hardening and Completion. These are actually great, but if you upgrade items in the wrong order, you are literally throwing away Gold.
These are the systems:
- In Season 4, you can harden and complete items. Hardening adds new affixes to an item, while Completion enhances them.
- Hardening and Completion are part of the item overhaul for Season 4 and are meant to make it easier to obtain better items. With the new crafting system, you can essentially create your own God Rolls.
- However, there is still the occultist who can enchant your items and add legendary effects. And this is where you need to be extremely careful.
Here you can find an overview of all the changes and content for Season 4.
This is the mistake: If you find a strong item, the first impulse may be to rush to the occultist and re-roll one of the stats that you don’t like – or imprint a legendary affix so that the item fits into your build.
This is often a mistake, because: Both cost an enormous amount of Gold and Gold is already a very scarce resource in Season 4. With some bad luck, an item can already cost you several million here:
- The re-rolling of affixes has increasing costs that are limited. However, they rise rapidly up to this limit.
- Per item and roll, this can cost you several million later on.
- Imprinting a legendary affix on an item has fixed costs – but even here you generally pay between 100,000 and 400,000 Gold, depending on the item type and level.
If you then harden an item afterwards, you face a problem because the function is limited. You cannot harden an item arbitrarily often, but only as often as potential exists. This specifically means: If you roll the same unneeded affix 5 times in the worst case, the item is nearly useless, even though you have already invested several million.
Worse does not mean unusable
On Reddit, the user TryBeingCool gives the advice: If you find a good item, harden it first. After that, you can enchant it, because that can be done as often as you like. At least then you have something in hand where the investment is worthwhile.
If you don’t get the desired affixes, you can save the Gold instead. For the simple tip, TryBeingCool received thanks from hundreds of players.
An item that is not perfect does not have to be useless, as other users point out. Just because it doesn’t have 5 perfect stats, it can still be an upgrade. You should just carefully consider how much you want to invest:
This is a very useful hint, but I would like to add that I see many posts here where people label such items as unusable due to hardening. It is not unusable because you can still use it just like before hardening; it just has a useless stat.
Bingtastic007 on Reddit
In the community, it is often argued that everything that is not perfect should go straight into the trash. However, this only applies if you want to squeeze the last few percentages out of your character and optimize every little detail: “Use the item if it’s good, and farm a new one for hardening.”
Enchanting and Completion are only really necessary and advisable when you have reached the absolute endgame and are trying to conquer the pit. Before that, you should be able to get through the content well enough with Hardening and Imprinting. If you still need help with which stats, affixes, and builds are worth it, check out our tier list: Diablo 4 Season 4 Tier List: The best builds for all classes in the endgame
