In Diablo 4, you need both gold and crafting materials in the endgame. For this, you must either have items deconstructed by the blacksmith or sold at the vendor. MeinMMO explains when you should visit which NPC in the game.
The most important points at a glance:
- You should deconstruct items during the campaign.
- What you find in the endgame goes to the vendor.
- Legendaries follow different rules.
Why should I deconstruct items in the campaign? While you are not yet in the endgame, you should always bring items to the blacksmith for deconstruction. Normal, magical, and rare items provide the same materials at all levels.
Since you will later need a lot of resources for crafting and re-rolling, you should save these materials. As a guideline, you can bring everything to the blacksmith until level 40 or 50. The longer you can manage without more gold, the better.
That’s why selling later is worth it: Items you get from higher world tiers and from endgame content are worth more gold than earlier ones. For selling a complete inventory on Torment, you can receive around one million gold.
Accordingly, it is worth selling as late as possible. You should also be frugal at the beginning:
- Re-rolling properties is expensive. Only do that when you are sure you will keep an item for a long time.
- Crafting will consume more resources later. As soon as you have to spend legendary materials, you should wait until you are confident with your build.
- Respecialization costs little gold at first and becomes more expensive over time. If you want to be frugal, it’s better to try things out earlier than later. You can find our tier list with the best builds here.
When should I keep items? At certain points, you will want to keep items for a longer time. You can roughly discern based on the item level whether you will keep an item for a longer time:
- Up to and including world tier 3, you should keep items starting from around level 620. They won’t make a significant jump in quality from there. Until then, it’s best to equip upgrades suggested by the game.
- From world tier 4 onwards, you should aim for items with a level of at least 700. Here it is also worth paying attention to the right stats.
Consider the special breakpoints of items where they make a jump and become better.
Legendaries: Bring to the Blacksmith, Vendor, or Occultist?
Legendary items follow different rules. You should never bring them to the vendor, but always either deconstruct them or have the occultist extract them. Because in Diablo 4, you can easily transfer legendary aspects to other items.
However, you also desperately need the materials you can only get by deconstructing legendaries. Otherwise, you cannot transfer aspects. Therefore, you should keep some key points in mind:
- Legendaries that you find below about level 35 rarely grant “legendary” materials or none at all. You can always extract these aspects.
- Items with powers from the codex can generally be brought to the blacksmith for deconstruction. You can look up where you get a codex power in the collection.
- Legendary powers that are perfectly or nearly perfectly rolled should be kept—regardless of whether you need them. How to identify the perfect rolls can be recognized through 2 settings in the game.
Keep in mind that you can only apply extracted aspects once. You can apply as many aspects as you want to an item, overwriting the old one each time. You can also write aspects on other legendary items.
An exception are unique items (“Uniques”). You cannot enchant these; you can only sell them directly or bring them to the blacksmith. However, be absolutely sure that you do not need them beforehand, as uniques are very rare:
“Uniques” in Diablo 4: These are the particularly strong items and here’s how to get them
