Diablo 4’s worst endgame grind just became a lot less painful in Season 14, thanks to a batch of impactful changes to gems and conversion recipes.
In Diablo’s latest expansion, Lord of Hatred, Blizzard introduced two new tiers of gems to its ARPG: Horadric and Flawless Horadric Gems. These gems are far more powerful than their lower-tier counterparts, but there is a catch–they can’t be found as drops. Instead, they can only be crafted using the Horadric Cube’s Amalgamation recipe. The recipe turns five Grand Gems into one Horadric Gem, and five Horadric Gems into one Flawless Horadric Gem.
Season 13 saw players running one particular dungeon, Seer’s Reach, for hours on end, as it was one of the best sources of acquiring gems that could then be converted into Grand Gems. Those Grand Gems could then be converted once more into Horadric, and eventually Flawless Horadric, gems.
If running the same dungeon over and over for hours on end just to convert gems sounds like a lot of monotonous work, that’s because it was. It took hours upon hours of mindless grinding to even get a full gear set’s worth of Horadric Gems, and that’s without even going the extra mile to then eventually turn around and convert those into the even more powerful Flawless versions.
Thankfully, as detailed in the game’s official patch notes for update 3.1.0, the now-live Season 14 has made the gem grind far more manageable. For starters, players will find significantly more gem fragments in Torment X and above, making the hunt for Grand Gems less of a pain point and requiring less time spent farming Seer’s Reach.
The other big change is to gem-conversion recipes at the Jeweler. Blizzard has reduced the types of gems needed to use a conversion recipe from three to two. Those gem conversion recipes additionally don’t have as much overlap as before, which should make it easier to convert unwanted gem fragments into ones that are needed for a given build.
Those changes alone should make Diablo 4’s endgame less of a chore, even as Blizzard has lengthened the grind in other areas. In Season 14, Mythic items have undergone a major change to have more random affixes, making the quest to obtain a perfect item a much longer process. While some of that randomness has since been walked back with the season’s launch, it still remains to be seen how what Blizzard calls “Mythic Uniques 3.0” will land with the community.
In an interview with GameSpot ahead of Season 14’s release, Blizzard seemed aware its changes to Mythic items have been controversial, but sees it as a necessary step for Diablo 4’s long-term health.
