Legendary items in Diablo 4 are important not only because of their rarity but primarily because of their aspects. These aspects can be extracted to be used in better items. We explain why it is worth upgrading gear before extracting the aspects here.
What is the benefit of upgrading legendary items? At the blacksmith, you can upgrade any item regardless of its rarity tier in 5 levels. Various stats of the item are improved in the process.
As Reddit user Khamael_X explains in a post, the aspects are also improved. By upgrading an item, the item power of an item increases by 5. Every 10 item power also increases the value of the item’s aspects.
You can find more info on upgrading and item power here:
Diablo 4: 6 numbers you should remember now to become stronger while leveling
Does this apply to all items and aspects? The upgrading only refers to aspects that have an absolute value. Aspects that have percentage values do not improve with the upgrading of the item.
Moreover, the upgrading only works for aspects that are in their original item. If you upgrade an item that contains a custom aspect from you, the value of the aspect does not change. Whether this is a bug, a display error, or intentional in the game, we cannot say.
As Reddit user Deftly_Flowing explains in the comments, even aspects from the codex are worth it at very high levels. From level 80 onwards, the aspects from the codex are said to have better values than many found ones.
But this too only applies to aspects with absolute values and not percentage values. The values from the codex scale with the player’s level, making them stronger at very high levels.
However, this does not mean that it is impossible to drop aspects that are in the codex with high values. The absolute values of the codex aspects are constant at high levels, while the aspects in dropped items scale with the item power.
Do you want more tips and guides in Diablo 4? Then check our overview:
Diablo 4 Guides: All tips, tricks, and builds in the overview
