After you’ve enchanted and tempered your gear and forged truly endgame equipment, there’s one last series of upgrades you can perform to infuse your kit with even greater power - masterworking. This page will break down how masterworking improves gear, how to farm the materials required to masterwork, and which items you should masterwork in Diablo IV: Vessel of Hatred.

Page Breakdown¶

Masterworking Stat Boosts¶

Enchanting gear allows you to swap out unwanted affixes for new ones, while tempering allows you to add new affixes. Between the two of these methods you can shape legendary gear to suit your build better - something you’ll need to do in order to gain enough power to advance through the various Torment difficulties. Your gear can be further improved by masterworking, a process which further strengthens gear by improving their stats. To masterwork an item, visit any blacksmith, navigate to the “Masterworking” tab, and select any item - unlike enchanting and tempering, you can even masterwork uniques! The only real restriction when it comes to masterworking is that an item must be fully tempered, meaning you must have added two affixes via tempering. This requirement excludes uniques, which cannot be tempered.

Every item can be masterworked twelve times, and there are two types of upgrades - most of the time every stat will be increased by 5% when you masterwork an item, but at masterwork tiers 4, 8 and 12 one random stat will instead be increased by +25%.Any affix that can be enchanted or tempered will be boosted by masterworking, excluding only an item’s base stats (Damage, Armor, Resistances, etc.), legendary aspects, and unique properties. So for example, masterworking a helm will not boost its base Armor stat, but if an item has +[Armor} or +[Total Armor]% affixes, those will be boosted, and the same applies for damage and resistances.

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(1 of 3) Masterworking an item will increase all its stats,

Masterworking Stat Boosts By Rank¶

Since the stats that are boosted every 4th level are random, there’s inherent risk when masterworking items. There are no rerolls, not take-backsies, once something is masterworked, that’s your new stats. The only way to “fix” things is to find a new item and start over. Ideally you won’t masterwork anything extensively if it has junk stats, but in reality, some stats are going to be more desirable than others, just like with Ancestral gear boosts - having +[Life] on an item might be fine, but you’re rarely going to want that to be the affix that gets boosted by masterworking. This is especially unfortunate considering how expensive masterworking items gets at higher tiers - masterworking everything to rank four isn’t going to hurt much, but missing on that rank twelve upgrade hurts. There are no solutions here, only warnings - RNG giveth, and RNG taketh away.

Considering the cost of masterworking something fully, you should only extensively masterwork items that have true endgame potential - at the very least something ancestral with three good stats (post enchanting) and two worthwhile affixes added via tempering. Even then, preferential treatment should be made - rings and amulets loaded with useful defensive and offensive stats should be prioritized over a unique you’re wearing mostly for its unique property.

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(1 of 2) Each item can be masterworked twelve times, and higher ranks are quite expensive.

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Each item can be masterworked twelve times, and higher ranks are quite expensive. (left), Luck won’t be always on your side, either, and randomly boosting a mediocre stat can be an expensive letdown. (right)

Farming Obducite¶

Much has been made of the expenses involved with masterworking, and many of the costs are standard enough - each time you rank up an item via masterworking expect to spend Rawhide, Veiled Crystals, a legendary material (Abstruse Sigils, Baleful Fragments or Coiling Wards, depending on the base item type), Forgotten Souls and gold. These costs can be somewhat hefty over the course of a dozen upgrades, but it’s Forgotten Souls that might end up stalling your progress - grind enough Helltides and Kurast Undercity runs, however, and you’ll be fine.

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(1 of 4) The limiting material required to masterwork gear is Obducite.

The real limiting factor is the Obducite required, a material that’s not used in any other application, and the final upgrade can cost you over 2,000 Obducite. Over the course of maxing out one item, you should expect to spend thousands of Obducite. You can only acquire Obducite from a few sources, most commonly Nightmare Dungeons, although this is a rather slow way of accumulating Obducite. Faster are doing Kurast Undercity runs while using Tributes of Refinement, which will cause the reward chest at the end to yield “Masterworking Materials” - in other words, Obducite. A Nightmare Dungeon run might get you 100~ Obducite, while a run of Kurast Undercity with a Tribute of Refinement should get you several hundred Obducite. The only problem is that Tributes of Refinement are themselves random drops which can be sourced from World Bosses and Kurast Undercity runs, but it’s RNG, so you may be stuck doing dozens of Nightmare Dungeon runs for a single upgrade.