Diablo 4 Players Are Tempering Their Gear Wrong and Wasting Its Potential

The reworked gear upgrading mechanics in Diablo 4 Season 11 have created a new way for players to approach their endgame build setup. With a less RNG-dependent Temper and Masterworking system, and the powerful affixes that Sanctification can add to a piece of gear, crafting the perfect loadout for Diablo 4 has never been easier. As players get accustomed to this new gear upgrading system, they will want to avoid making one mistake that could result in worse overall upgrades.

Heading into Diablo 4 Season 11, there was some trepidation over how these mechanical changes would mesh. The initial PTR version of Masterworking felt unsatisfying, and Sanctification had the potential to brick an item with a subpar affix. However, the final versions of these features, available at the start of Season 11, have been adjusted to address these critiques accordingly and now have the potential to enhance some of Diablo 4‘s best weapons and armor, provided players understand how the new system works.

Diablo 4 Season 11 Should Be Tempering Greater Affixes on All Their Ancestral Gear

While Tempering is no longer randomized, and players can freely imprint the Tempered affix of their choice, Diablo 4 now limits players to one Tempered affix per item. As a result, players will want to ensure they have Tempered the best possible affix to their gear before Sanctifying it and making it unalterable. When upgrading an Ancestral item, the optimal Temper is a Greater Affix, denoted by a star next to the affix and granting a much more powerful version of the player’s chosen affix.

Greater Affixes can only be Tempered onto Ancestral items, which have a minimum level of 800.

Greater Affixes Are Surprisingly Common Temper Results

Despite being the most desirable Temper result when upgrading gear at Diablo 4‘s Blacksmith, Greater Affixes aren’t all that uncommon. Typically, players only need to re-roll around 5 to 10 times before they hit a Greater Affix Temper on their gear. This makes stopping too soon and creating a suboptimal piece of gear the biggest mistake that players can make when Tempering in Diablo 4 Season 11.

The biggest barrier to Tempering is the material cost to upgrade an item, which includes:

Armor: Rawhide, Coiling Ward, Veiled Crystal, Forgotten Soul
Weapon: Iron Chunk, Baleful Fragment, Veiled Crystal, Forgotten Soul
Jewelry: Iron Chunk, Abstruse Sigil, Veiled Crystal, Forgotten Soul

These materials are fairly easy to find, and players participating in Diablo 4‘s regular activities will likely have an abundance of them. However, to restore Temper charges on an item, players will need a Scroll of Restoration, which works slightly differently in Season 11, but ultimately makes re-rolling a Tempered affix easier than before.

Scrolls of Restoration Are Plentiful in Diablo 4 Season 11

Unlike previous Diablo 4 seasons, where a Scroll of Restoration restored all Temper charges, the item now lets players re-roll the single Tempered affix infinitely until they get their desired value. This means that players can potentially keep re-rolling for a Greater Affix as long as they have a Scroll of Restoration available, with no limit to how many times an item can have its charge restored. To make this even better, Scrolls of Restoration are easily farmable this season, so players can stock up if they are worried about spending their supply re-rolling for a Greater Affix.

Items from an Infernal Hordes clear in Diablo 4 — Diablo 4 Spiritborn Infernal Hordes clear items

The easiest source of Scrolls of Restoration is the reward chests available after clearing the Infernal Hordes. Players can already spend the Burning Aether they’ve earned to open these chests for other crafting materials like Obducite for Masterworking, so gaining Scrolls of Restoration for Tempering is a welcome bonus. Players with the Vessel of Hatred DLC can also earn Scrolls of Restoration from the Dark Citadel co-op dungeon.